Greetings everyone and welcome to my #34th report as Grand Master of the Dark Brotherhood. It has been a busy week with a lot of change, updates, and activity. Here is the latest and greatest from around the Brotherhood.

Administrative Changes

1) WhatsApp: It is awesome, but not mandatory. Keep that in mind.

2) Policies regarding adding Houses to Clans and Clan Titles:

• All Clans have a Consul, Proconsul, and Rollmaster. If a Consul will not be filling one of these slots, he or she should explain why to the MAA/DGM/GM.

• Clans may select a Clan name (or use an existing one) to award to members at their discretion; see the Wiki for additional information on Clan Titles under the Titles article.

• New Clan Names for a unit (that is, an entirely new name) must be approved by the MAA/DGM/GM. This does NOT refer to members being given the name, but entirely new names.

• Any House added to a Clan will have at least a Quaestor. The Clan in question may choose not to utilize the Aedile position, and especially for small Clans, this is encouraged.

• Clans may have up to three Battleteams, plus an additional one per House. Battleteams may be aligned to the House level, or to the Clan level.

• Clan Titles and slots in the Round Robin Join Rotation are based on Clan status and are never decreased by probationary status of a Clan in regards to House number, below.

• Clans may apply for houses to the GM, DGM, and MAA if they feel the activity is sufficient, and if membership totals are such that the additional leadership slot from the Quaestor position will be useful.

• House applications must include the name of the House, potential leadership of the House (at least the Quaestor), and how the House will improve membership experience in the Clan.

• Clans with thirty five members or more are heavily encouraged to have one house. No Clan below thirty members may add a house. Clans with a house will enter a probationary period of six months if the Clan drops below 25 members. If a Clan has below 25 members at the end of a 6 month probationary period, the House will be dissolved.

• Clans with fifty or more members are heavily encouraged to have two houses. No Clan below forty members may add a second house. Clans with two houses will enter a probationary period of six months if the Clan drops below 35 members. If a Clan has below 35 members at the end of this 6 month probationary period, one House will be dissolved of the Clan leadership's choosing.

• In addition to raw membership numbers, the Grand Master and Deputy Grand Master will assess an application for an additional House, as well as Clans on probation status, based on leadership potential and participation metrics. For leadership potential, the goal of any new House should not be to draw leaders from any other unit; to that end, the Clan must demonstrate, in its House application, it has sufficient leadership pool to operate another House. The Grand Master will also use participation-based metrics to assess whether to accept applications for a House, and will also use these metrics when evaluating whether or not to dissolve a House from a Clan on probationary status. These metrics will include, but are not limited to, number of unit-level competitions members are participating in, Vendetta participation, activity outside of competitions (e.g. Clusters of Fire and Ice), and Brotherhood-wide competition participation outside of Vendettas.

Appointments

1) Raiju Kang has been appointed as the Consul of Clan Tarentum. Raiju sent an excellent application and we look forward to seeing Tarenum's future success. Additionally, Korras aka Darth Aeternus has been appointed as the next Proconsul of Tarentum. Good luck to both of you.

2) Congratulations (again) to A'lora on his appointment as the Consul of Odan Urr.

3) Congratulations (again) to Jac on his nomination and confirmation as our Justicar. Jac is already sifting through case data and we should be hearing from him soon.

Featured Projects

1) We are busily working with the Consuls and leadership of the new Clans to determine their Housing decisions. A lot of good ideas and activity are coming from the discussions and we should see the new Houses popping up over the next few days.

2) James covered the introduction of Trophies in his report, but I wanted to add a few comments. The Trophy system will mimic those systems all of us have come to know and love (Xbox, PS, ect). We will announce some of the trophy requirements while others will be kept secret secret squirrel. More to come on this in the future.

3) I just finished speaking with the Fist concerning the return of gaming nights. Val will cover this in an upcoming report, but here is the guidelines I have asked him to work with. The creation of 2 x weekly gaming night competitions in DB gaming. One night focusing on Tier 1 games only and a second night focusing on all of our PVP gaming. These nights will be dueling focused and the person with the best PVP score from that night will be awarded a PoB. Additionally, I have asked that the FIST and SCL work together to set up the lovable dbb0t to run the competition events, set up matches, ect. This might take a little work, but for those of us who can remember the EH, we had a bot that handled all match making, score taking, and result tracking. Finally, I have also asked the Fist to work with the new JST to update the ROC to include a rule for a troll free #dbgaming environment. We don't need people acting like fools or losing their mind in our gaming channel (or intimidating other players). More to follow!

Conclusion

Alright, short and sweet report. It has been a busy week and I wanted to highlight some of the announced changes. Additionally, I'd like to close with a few points concerning the things I care about and want to focus our leaders on.

1) I care about new member retention.

2) I care about our existing members enjoying the club so much that they recruit their real life friends. Recruited members have an enormous statistical advantage to stay in the club and progress in comparison to random joins.

3) I care about our existing members participating and contributing to the club in a meaningful way.

4) I do care about the environment within our club. If there is bullying, or harassment, I am going to get involved. Jac is going to get involved. We have seen a trend over the past few weeks where members have submitted transfer requests or contacted Mav/I directly about bullying within the club. This is not okay.

So, back to my original report from last week. We want a club that creates fun and companionship for our members and we want leaders who support those goals. I think most of us can get behind that simple message.

Have a great week everyone and thanks for your time.

Grand Master Pravus