Setting up a new team
From TM Wiki
You want to create a new team? You have enough energy to invest in a great project? Here are some guidelines in order to help you setting up the team you want to create.
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Some things to make you get down back on Earth
There are some elementary things you need to know overall:
- There is no "official team" in TrackMania. You can create, dissolve, make everything you want with your team, nobody from the officials will take care of that.
- Players are not forced to join a team. Even if you get a great amount of joining requests, do not create your own team just to be able to say others "I am part of a team".
- Leading a team requires much time and efforts, even if it can seem you quite easy. Many things are really easy, but there are much of them and some of them can be a bit more harder.
Basises of your team
First of all, you should think to give an identity to your little-sized community. Set a name and a tag (prefix made of an acronym of your team's name), taking care that they are different of those that are still used. You can also define a visual identity, with colours, pictures, themas (speed records, low performances, or any amazing thing like pigs or kangaroos). And, for sure, which TM versions you'll play! You must think about it the earlier you can, not expecting someone else do it instead of yourself.
Create meeting points
A message board
Having a board is very important for your team's life as it will become the central meeting and organization point of your team. You can choose a free hoster with a ready-to-use board as well as a self hosted board on your own webspace, this is not important, but take care to have some important fora on your board like "News", "Recruting", "Competition", aso. It should be exhaustive in order to give each member the place he needs to talk about everything he wants. Then, improve and customize your board by creating themes, hierarchies...
A website
You can also improve your team life creating a full website. You don't need to make somthing hugely gorgeous: including basical pages like "News", "Who are we?" and "Forum" will be enough for a first try, easily realizable in simple HTML, ever if you use a WYSIWYG software (NVU, Dreamweaver, etc.) or even a pre-made website where you only need to write what will be shown at your visitors (like Freewebs, but rather for your beginning days). If you feel like a great PHP-coder, you can add some more harder-to-make interactive topics like "Downloads", "Recruiting" or "Defy us". But if you do not feel able to make that, you can although add ready-to-use forms like a guestbook or a shootbox, that you'll find on free webmaster ressources sites all over the web; but it is not warmly recommended to use a pre-made solution like PHPNuke or VWAR as it can be quite simply hacked.
Make your team stay alive
You are now ready to recruit players that meet the team's guidelines: good or bad, serious or amazing, competiting or playing-for-fun trackmaniacs... Will they be forced to play each day on your own server? to take part of leagues? to prove you that they are a really great player?... you will have to think about the behaviour you expect from your members and to announce it while recruiting on official boards, on your recruiting server... until you have reached the maximal amount of players you decided (not necessarily at the beginning of your team's life, though). And do not forget to ask your members to display the team's tag in their nickname.
A well-known team
If you want to make your team the most "official" it can be, go to Nadeo's website and, after logging in on one of the game's pages with the login and password you chose to play on the Internet, fill in the dedicated "Team Ranking" form with your team's name and the password of your choice, chosen with care. Then tell your members to fill this form the same way you did, after giving them secretly the password you entered. Now he sum of your players' ladder ranks will be displayed on this page when you log in on them, and your team's name will be shown in the ingame profile of your players. That's all folks.
Make your team stay active
To make the members participate to your team you can send them periodically a newsletter, organize matches against other teams, create internal tournaments, set up a dedicated server... You can so make a really great amount of great actions to let your team known be the others and make your members proud to be part of it. If you have not the abilities for all this, you still can deleguate some tasks to one of your members that is able to make it... but you need to stay the leader and if you do nothing for your community people in it will begin to dislike you...
Conclusion
Here is globally some information to help you in your quest. And remember not to create a team just to be able to say "I did it". You will have to manage it a bit each day for a long time. Let's go now!
