What's what where and how
Welcome to Squad Five - Natural Selection 2 needs you. Introduction
Unknown Worlds is a very small outfit, with limited resources. There will be no big NS2 advertising campaign. There will be no PAX/Gamescon hyper mega-booth. There will be no 'fly all the press to Hawaii' launch party. All we are, and all we have, is you. We're in this together. Without you, we wouldn't be here. And without your help now, NS2 will never be the huge success we all know it can be.
Squad Five is a replacement for the old E-Team. It is intended to provide the infrastructure you, the NS2 community, need to spread the NS2 word any way you want. Squad Five is built on the same theory as the Spark Engine. With Spark, we knew that you could all make amazing content much faster than we could. For example, Psyk0man's Summit, Player's Overmind Mod, or the rapid evolution of Skycam under Huze and Dgelneshi. So we gave you the tools, and let you do what you wanted.
We also know that you can create NS2 promotions, content, and fun much faster than we can. You've got the crazy ideas, the skills, and the people. Compared to what you can do, we may as well be a fly yelling at a Deadmau5 concert. Because you are the concert. So we are going to give you the tools, and let you do what you want.
Thinking
Anyone can 'do something' to promote NS2. Many of you do it all the time. Hell, two years ago I said to my brother: 'Imma make NS2 videos 'n put 'em on the 'Tube.' He looked at me strangely (understandable). You get the picture.
Squad Five is going to bring a bit more organisation to the table. There are two objectives that more organisation will help us achieve:
1. Recognise and reward outstanding effort by community members
2. Increase the resources available to community members
We are asking that inside Squad 5, you put all your efforts into Projects.
What are those...
Projects are anything that could lead to little pieces of win for NS2. For example:
- Creating new graphics for an NS2 livestream
- Making an thorough informative first post on a forum
- Organising a tournament
- Creating a new, very high quality map
- Filming great frag videos
I'll bet there are alot of you that have all sorts of crazy ideas for how to promote NS2. In Squad Five, we want to give you the meeting place and tools to put those ideas into projects, and make them happen.
How does it work?
You've thought about something awesome, and decided you want to make it happen. What now? First, make a post in this forum. For the first few threads, one of us here at UWE will come into the thread and invite you to a 37 Signals Basecamp Project - This becomes your personal space where you can store everything / collaborate / create awesomeness.
After we've created one for you, you can create your own projects in Basecamp, and invite other community members to those projects. We here at UWE will no longer need to invite new people, and effectively, you guys have complete 'admin' control over what projects are launched and who can get access to them.
What are the rewards?
Out eternal gratitude, the ability to shape the NS2 'marketing' campaign, and the lovely icons you saw on the blog post. These will appear on the forums and in game. Each week, we will post a list on the blog congratulating those that have earned Squad 5 status. Icon awards will be subjective. We may retroactively award them for outstanding effort on a project before the launch of Squad 5.
If you make a sustained, positive, and reasonable effort to support the promotion of NS2 and / or the vibrancy of its community, and document the effort in the squad five system, you will be awarded the blue icon. Silver and Gold are 'big deals' and we will be awarding them extremely sparingly.
Remember - if you don't create a forum post we won't award the icons no matter how awesome your contribution is.
Retroactive awards (Such as for outstanding mods, maps, music etc) will start next week. We will miss people, thats inevitable, but we will do our best to retroactively award fairly. The reason we are creating this system is so that we can make sure to recognise outstanding work in the future, so bear with us.
What are the rules?
- Being a jerk on Basecamp will be treated the same way as being a jerk on the forums. Any action we are forced to take, such as deleting you from basecamp, will flow through to the forums.
- When you receive a Basecamp invite, you must use your forum name and forum avatar. Every Basecamp account must tie to a forum name and forum avatar - if they don't we'll delete them.
- Don't spam or abuse Basecamp. If you treat it like a sewage plant, we will have to pull the plug on the whole show.
- Create a forum thread prefixed [Project] for any project you start. Any Basecamp project without an accompanying forum thread will be deleted. We will assume threads without [Project] are just discussions, and won't look inside them to see if people need Basecamp invites.
- Have fun!
Questions? :)