SKL Community Spotlight

Greetings, soldier! 

Welcome to our first round of Community Spotlight! Today we had a 1on1 with Qaztar, the Outfit Leader of Sokaar’s Legion, an outfit in PlanetSide 2 who is no stranger to charity fundraisers! Sokaar’s Legion is leading the charge with $6k+ in donations to Extra Life!

Hi Qaztar! Sokaar’s Legion has a big presence in the PlanetSide 2 community! For those who may be new to the scene, can you give us a little rundown on who is Sokaar’s Legion, and what are they about?

Sure! SoKaar’s Legion is a large Emerald Vanu Sovereignty outfit, and has been one of the most active in the game for the last few years. Our outfit primarily focuses on our public platoons, which are geared for directing new players to good fights. We also have an instructional Academy which teaches leadership, piloting, armor, construction, and more. Our Discord is designed for helping new players learn the ropes of Planetside 2 (oftentimes a daunting task alone), and is chock-full of guides, fancy bots for API stats, and other helpful resources.

SKL is a sort of jack-of-all-trades of an outfit. We have lots of casual players, but many competitive ones as well. We welcome in many new players, but we also have a core of grizzled veterans. The experienced leaders train new members who are interested in giving squad and platoon leadership a go, mentoring them through the process by answering questions and giving feedback. Our members run events, make content on YouTube, and even occasionally participate competitively on Jaeger.

Ultimately though, our biggest selling point is our activity, which as an outfit is unmatched even on other servers. If you’re looking for a lively community of friendly people to run and make friends with, SKL is a good place to be. 

How did Sokaar’s Legion begin and rise up to the powerhouse that it is today? What are some of the milestones the outfit has reached up to this point?

SKL was founded in 2014 by SoKaar, and was dedicated solely to the running of in-game public platoons for all players. This continued until around 2020, when the release of the Escalation update and the resulting influx of players prompted SoKaar to overhaul the outfit structure - a true leadership core was established, and teaching Planetside 2 to new players became an additional primary goal. A few months later, SoKaar went on an indefinite leave of absence, and the leadership team took over the management of the outfit. A number of overhauls have occurred since then, possibly the biggest recently with the reorganization of our ranks and roles and the combination of our many instructional academies into one singular Academy.

We’ve hosted countless public platoons, dozens of community events, and have had the privilege of running with streamers and developers alike. Our leaders have hosted numerous get-togethers such as Discord Halloween parties and music nights, and our competitive team made a great run this last Outfit Wars, reaching 5th place at the Playoffs.

Only a few of the original leadership group still remain, but many incredibly talented and dedicated people have stepped up in these last two years. It’s been incredible to see the outfit develop from what was largely a “zerg-fit” into the impressive organization it is today - a process that would’ve been impossible without the wealth of work put in by my fellow leaders, and an ever-present attitude of learning from mistakes and growing together.

What can new recruits to Sokaar’s Legion expect to experience upon joining?

New recruits are encouraged to hop into our Discord, where they’re presented with a wide buffet of options. They can read up on upcoming events in our Orbital Strike News newsletter, a weekly bulletin put out by a few of our hardworking organizers. They can check out our instructional Academy, asking questions and receiving mentorship and training from veterans in many of the gameplay styles available in Planetside 2. They can hop in-game and join one of our public platoons, or even try out squad and platoon leading themselves! Or, if they feel like it, they can just chill in a hangout channel and chat about whatever topics come to mind. Our goal is to provide new players with lots of options, but not to force them into anything, allowing them to develop their interest at their own pace.

With reaching the $6k threshold in Rogue Planet Games’ Extra Life fundraising event, can you walk us through the highlights in organizing and running the activities around this mega achievement?

Without question, SKL’s Extra Life fundraisers have been some of the most mind-blowing events I’ve had the privilege of experiencing. In our first year of fundraising in 2020, we set what we thought were lofty goals - $100, $500, maybe even $1000. We were ecstatic when we managed to raise more than $3000. In 2021, however, we were absolutely floored by the generosity of our community - we managed to raise over $9000, completely blowing away our expectations and RPGs overall Extra Life goal!

This year, we once again tempered our expectations - we initially set a maximum goal of $3000. And, once again, we underestimated the generosity of our members, especially individuals like Taternader, Rustydawns, and LordCipriani, who’ve each contributed more than $1000. As of writing this, we’ve accumulated just over $6000.

One particularly enjoyable activity has been shouting out the donors - we have a channel dedicated to announcing each donation as it comes in, paying thanks to each individual’s generosity personally. Reading the reactions of my fellow leaders to $100+ donations always gets me laughing. 

We racked our brains this year to try and develop interesting milestones for the community to strive for. Both my favorite and least favorite has to have been the 5 hour charity livestream, where my mind was continually blown on camera as we raised an additional $1256. I feel both excitement and dread for the upcoming 12 hour stream, the milestone reward for reaching $6000 - most of all, though, I feel an immense amount of pride for the outfit and its members, as well as for my fellow leaders who’ve done a great job of organizing and managing the fundraiser year after year. 

What are some of the challenges you encounter when organizing and running activities for the entire outfit?

There are many challenges to organizing an outfit of our size, but I think a commonly under-represented one is communication. Over the years we’ve struggled with how best to inform our members about upcoming events or active platoons and the like. It’s a balancing act; on one hand, you’ve got to get the message out to hundreds of individual players, many of whom may not even be in the Discord. On the other hand, you don’t want to spam your members with information they don’t want or need - that’ll just incentivize them to mute the Discord server, likely resulting in them missing out on the announcements they might actually want to see.

We’ve altered and refined our approach over the years, finally settling on a system with different ping roles for different types of announcements as well as one weekly @everyone ping for our Orbital Strike News bulletin. We also list the daily OSN events in the in-game MOTD board along with our Discord link to try and get the word out to the wider SKL community that may not follow the Discord.

Another tricky thing for a community of our size is moderation. With as many players as we have, and with our recruitment being open to all, we get all kinds of folks joining up - most of them are fantastic, but some of them aren’t as such. Our moderators rely heavily on our Discord ticket reports, a system which has allowed us to react to, keep track of, and log situations as they come up.

However, the hardest obstacle for any online community, SKL included, is burn out. Good members and especially good leaders are hard to come by, and they often put in a huge amount of effort initially only to lose motivation to continue onward after a while. SKL has benefitted massively by having a constant refreshing flux of new members and leaders - without it, the struggle to maintain our activity would’ve been nearly impossible to overcome. Remembering to take breaks and slow down a little is another important lesson our leadership core has learned over the years, which does a lot to ward off that constant entropy.

What are some future goals for the outfit that the community can look forward to seeing?

SKL is certainly not going anywhere - we’re invested in Planetside 2 for the long run. In the immediate future, the community can look forward to us fulfilling our Extra Life milestone rewards: the 12 hour charity stream, podcast episodes with Lanzer and Deeg, a Planetside Minecraft server, a community games night, and a massive joint event with fellow Emerald outfits cross-faction are all currently in the works.

Our long term goals are more simple; ultimately we just want to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. Helping new players, leading good platoons, improving over time, and just generally having fun with Planetside 2. We’re extremely excited about the upcoming anniversary update and the massive changes that’ll make to the way we play - more stuff to learn and to teach!

Thank you for taking some time to chat with us Qaztar! It’s been awesome having you! If you can give some tips to any new outfits out there looking to grow, what would they be?

I think anyone could tell you that the most important thing to outfit growth is in-game activity. You could have the slickest Discord and the coolest name, but players will ultimately always gravitate towards the outfits that are actively running visible operations. Getting out there and helping the new folks, participating in community events, and just generally making a positive name for yourself and your outfit is the way to go. I’d also warn against mass-recruiting - it’s far better to slowly pick up a core of active players than to mass-invite a bunch of new players and have nobody to really support them! Take your time, build up a strong foundation, and pace yourself - you’ll get there in the end.

Thanks so much for the interview!

This was an honor to get to know more about Sokaar’s Legion today! Thank you to all its members, event hosts and content creators who have made Sokaar’s Legion the outfit it is today. Engage with the outfit on Twitter and Discord!

Stay tuned for more Community Spotlights, soldiers!

- Mithril, PlanetSide 2 CM