Some thoughts from DRuG's experience with overseas members..
- Overseas people covering a wide range of timezones means a massive worldwide raise in profile for the crew, the name becomes recognized by many more clans than it otherwise would, only existing in the Australian timezone or whatever.
- When one member signs up from a timezone, I find an overall increase in members from that area - they begin to operate as a 'cell', helping the crew obtain skilled members they otherwise wouldn't be around to get to know, initially.
- Having people that communicate in other languages may be a hassle in teamspeak, but it also introduces the crew's presence in areas that otherwise would go completely ignored.. for example, after signing up CZ3, a very talented modder from Israel, we, shortly after, had an influx of talented european modders, all speaking mostly Hebrew and major fans of CZ3 - his reputation became part of ours - a good thing if you choose your people carefully.
- Other geographical regions becoming saturated with members also introduces a niche for new servers, hosted in that region, run by local members - again, raising the profile of the clan & it's approachability for non english people - I consider this a fantastic thing - DRuG have quite the reputation in Korea, I'm told, where gamers are like rockstars.
There's also the aspect of age - DRuG's major releases have almost all been developed by very young (or in my case) very old members - if anything, as a result, I am more inclined to recruit a young person, so long as they aren't inclined to act immature. In the case of [DRuG]SniperX, the developer of our Big Monkey trainer for Vice City, he was not only 14, but while working together on Teamspeak, has been about the only member that (rightfully) brought me into line when I was waffling and he was trying to work with peepz on a project - he told me to shut the fuck up, and he was right... so being age-ist? No way.. sometimes it's the age difference that gives these people the determination to perform equal or better than their new 'peers'.
