I was reading Nocifer Deathblade's post in a different thread about officers and i was curious to learn more. I myself am an officer in Dark Angels and there are 2 other officers. We all play the same role in the legion, helping lowbies with questions, recruiting, fighting and protecting, all kinds of stuff. What ive done myself for the legion is recruit, create a facebook group for our legion, and come up with ideas to make the legion run more smoothly... anyway back on topic...

Nocifer said that the officers in his legion have different, specific, roles that they play. I would like to know what are some different roles for officers, how many officers you should have per member (a ratio 5:1 or something) and info on what the role is. This would help me help the leader out, and help my legion become more organized and on track for better success.

It all depends on what legion administration like to have. No one has same set-up. I'm merely just stating what some roles that officers usually do. There are lot of roles even some overlapping roles. It is entirely up to leadership and admin's feel of the roles. For example, if a leader tend to play "24/7" and have plenty of time to do alot of roles then the need of officers are generally low.. If leader is part-time and unable to do many things then the need of officers are greater. Bottomline, no two humans are the same, right? Same thing, no two leaders + set officers are the same.. Two different humans are viable so are two different approaches of two leaders+set of officers are also viable. Nothing wrong about it.. Your leader and you as officer usually see the real need of a certain officer to fill up the weakest area that you both lack in to strengthen your team as a whole.

For example, my weakest point is human resource area to listen in to all whining, ranting etc that I have virtually no interest in.. How to solve that as leader? Simple.. Hire an officer to handle that specific matter then our team gets stronger as a result. That's one example.. For example, a leader SUCKS at tactics and strategy (Definitely not me. ), how to strengthen his team? He can easily hire a tactician officer to address all aspect of wars and develop war plans and present to leader for approval to set things in motion.. Sometimes, leader simply fully entrust full authority related to war to that officer and never worry about it. It works either way..

As for ratio of officer vs member is entirely depends on current leader and officers' time availability and depends on members' need of guidance.. As for me, I only need 1 officer at all for the Dysonians simply cuz it's alot easier to manage 50 players and they all are very mature who hardly need my guidance. They never ever needed me to babysit.. That makes the need of human resource non-existant. I made 4 officers instead simply cuz of previous organization that I wanted to carry over especially for loyalty of members toward those 4. It's smart to preserve the loyalty so kept 4.. If your legion find lot of help from members including babysitting that really takes up lot of leader and/or officer time then hiring more officers would make more sense to reduce workload per officer... Bloated administration can be bad that leads to lot of authority clashes that also lead to confusing roles due to many officers. There will be some niche groups within officers that will start to back-stab to each other, etc. Few officers per legion will not lead to that internal authority clash at all. Many officers usually would..

As for yourself as role, you certainly are doing what officer role is supposed to.. Recruit new players and also create new FB group and maintain it. That's one of fine example of officership.

Ok, thank you, ill have to see what i can do. For my legion, im sad to say that we honestly dont have a leader, he plays, but he doesnt lead, he doesn't talk or communicate, he hasnt even join our group, so ive kind of taken over the leadership role of the legion, so i cant assign myself officers. I asked the leader to make somebody an officer awhile ago and he still hasnt.

Wow, a legion without a head isn't good in the long run at all. It will suck. It's best to address that problem atm. Do try to get yourself to become a leader asap if possible if majority of members recognize you as real, capable leader. If leader is totally incapable of making any changes then try to convince that leader to let you to become a leader along with him (he still plays like you said).. If he refuses flatly then it might be good time to create your own legion. If he is actually MIA for too long then can contact developer to swap position cuz he stopped playing for long time.. Sadly, more than often, a player who started a legion with leader title attached is just a merely for show: cool title at best and that legion is doomed to fail.. Those type of players just liked leader title and they will simply play like a member would do without any management roles involved. It's sad but true. Looks like your legion has that type of so-called leader. ;(

There are some legions with several leaders (Bureacracy type) and it can work but that also comes with some risk of leadership conflict and division if something fails to work together fully. Single leader also comes with a risk too cuz if that leader is MIA, incommunicative or something like you are experiencing now then that'll be a problem that will paralyze your legion incapable of doing some management changes..

Word of advice for starting up the Legion on recruiting officers is to start small at first. At first, just assign yourself as leader and recruit members.. If you feel the need of 1 officer to cover certain area that you couldn't do then inform members of an officer opening with that specific role and you are interested in COMMUNICATIVE officer who would communicate with you on regular basis covering any important issues.. Once that officer is hired, over time, if you and/or that officer still feel the need of more officers then hire more.. Hire one officer at a time and decide if still need more then hire more to the point that you all feel comfortable with the function of the legion then no reason to hire more officers.. Unless a member came forth to offer you awesome offer to improve legion..

My favorite method when I ran largest Star Trek Online fleet (800 members strong) as a leader.. My method usually is when I started a fleet immediately upon launch as just one leader.. I recruited lot of members. Often, whenever a member came forth to me asking me question, "Hey! I have some nice ideas for your fleet how to make it a better one. Here is my list of ideas.. (gave me ideas). Like my ideas? Can you add those for you to implement??" I often replied back to them, "Nice ideas! Why don't you do it??" . That person answered, "What? I can do that?? Hell yes!" then I replied, "Then congratulations, you are now officer so you can execute YOUR ideas to help us as a whole!" That really instill true incentive and motivation into officers to be able to do things they really want for the group.. It works every time. That really made my fleet to become one of most powerful one in STO til I decided to retire STO last May simply cuz it was starting to take up so much of my time. WAY too many players preferred to talk to me DIRECTLY rather than many officers I hired to handle them. I get over 100+ emails on daily basis. I work full time in real life and am father of two kids and I want time to do things in real life so I simply can't run a fleet that HUGE no matter if I have many officers. People rather to talk to me directly instead no matter what. ;( If I have awesome officers that display strong leadership then that might not be a problem for me and members would talk to them instead of me and have those officers to relay very important info to me only. That'll cut down lot of email flow to me.. I'm better off running smaller, higher quality groups cuz it fits my time schedule BETTER..

Well, I might be able to offer you some advice from the other end of the spectrum. I've been playing this game for roughly three months now, and when the new Legion system came into place I saw an opportunity to build something. I formed Stormfront before the patch was done whirring on Dan's servers, and started looking for people to join. The first man I signed up actually came to me randomly, and to date he's our biggest gunship in the squadron. I've gotten some friends involved, and a few random pickups along the way. We're not a horribly high-powered group yet, but these are the steps I've been taking so far.

After forming our own message board, I've been populating the threads there with some basic tips, mission lines that should be explored, and ways we can communicate. Now that we have a small handful of people that are 40+, we're starting to look for sharable NPC's we can raid. We help build structures on each other's planets, retaliate if one of us gets attacked, and if I think someone's about to bite off more than we can chew (wanting to retaliate against a squad that I feel could make our systems hard to hang on to for example) I'll let them know. For me, leadership is a new position. I've played several games before, but I've always been content to let whatever officers there were to handle things.

There isn't a whole lot of need for secondary leadership when there aren't a whole lot of rules to enforce. The only rule my group has is to honor non-agression pacts. The members can only be more helpful without any rules limiting their actions, and most of them also know how to deal with their own problems, since most have actually had their own problems and dealt with them in the past. Rule enforcement and coordination of in-game actions are the only things that really require any leadership. Recruiting might also be a leadership role.

Bureaucracy isn't really something to aim for. It destroys initiative, though it may actually spur active participation.