I am enormously proud and excited to introduce to all of you your new crew website! This blog post will explain a bit more about how the website came about, what you can currently find here, how you might be using it to your advantage, and what plans you can expect in the near future.

The most important thing however is the crew party to celebrate these events. So please head over to the doodle so that we can settle on a time that works for most of us. The aim of the party is in the first place to have fun together, but we will also take crew pictures to spice up the website!

So, why a website, and what events have led to us here?

In the beginning, Ethical Retinue’s ambition was simply to get together a group of like-minded people who seek to have a friendly and respectful experience with other players on GTA Online. Ethical Retinue has grown to a decent size, now counting 27 Ethical souls, about half of which are still regularly active in the game.

Although we are not a large crew by any means – Ethical Retinue started in May 2015 and most crews of that age outnumber us significantly – we have grown into a tight and wonderful family, where everyone pretty much knows everyone. The fact that a fairly large bunch of complete strangers can come to know each other in this way in such short time scale is something we should all take pride in, and I thank each and every one of you from the bottom of my heart for making this happen. It is something that we all made happen jointly.

For this wonderful achievement to remain sustainable however, one has to be realistic: people will move on to other things. Therefore, the only way for Ethical Retinue to remain sustainable is to keep sharing this experience with other players, and invite them to join our community.

Some efforts in that direction were made. However, we have come to realize that the Social Club website is too limited in its ability to truly bring everyone together. Just to give a few examples: it is quite difficult to keep abreast of the crew wall as there is no way to subscribe to it, posts have a ridiculously short maximum length, there is no easy way to run polls, and so on. Whilst perhaps Social Club was good enough at the beginning, it has outgrown its usefulness.

In the last few weeks, deep forces among us conspired and brainstormed on how we might provide the means for sustainability and perhaps even growth. We came to the conclusion that we needed a proper website, along with some other initiatives.

So, what’s the new stuff?

• We now have a proper description of who we are and what we stand for.
• The old crew manifest was getting rather long. It has been split up into separate pages for rules and dress code. Concerning the other sections, read on.
• We are opening up the crew hierarchy, with a clear description of what is expected at each level.
• In the coming weeks, your leadership will be inviting established crew members to help with recruitment. In return you will get Lieutenant rank and a 15% extra cut on your next heist with a Commissioner or Leader for each recruited member.
• Our goal is certainly not to grow as fast and as quickly as possible: we only want to recruit the best of the best in terms of Ethical attitude. To help with that, we now have recruitment guidelines.
• We now have instructions on how to join, and a list of thinks to do when you join.
• We are strongly encouraging everyone to join the crew discord channel (it’s very easy – just click the link!) for easier and more interactive in-game voice chat. It makes such a huge difference if you can simply talk to each other without effort during the game.
• We have a forum where you can introduce yourself and give feedback. We could easily use the forum for many more things, so go over there and discuss it in the feedback section! 🙂
• We have a crew blog.
• Your eternally thankful Leader will be regularly twitching his gameplay to help promoting the Ethical message.

So, what will the future bring?

It is certainly not expected that these actions will lead to any sudden change in the crew. My personal hope is that it will help us to focus us more on our core mission. That will naturally lead to even more enjoyable and Ethical experiences on GTA Online, such as:

• Easier organization of crew events and crew discussions.
• More engagement with the outside world. People can discover us more easily, subscribe and interact with the crew blog, watch our forums, follow us live on discord and twitch. Ethical players will soon queue in line to join us. 😛
• Slow but steady high quality growth, and more active Ethical players! If we could double the number of active players in the crew in the year ahead, then I would be extremely pleased.

I hope that you are as excited about these changes as I am! If you have any comments of any sorts, by all means, leave a comment below. You can of course also simply PM me over Social Club.

Finally I want to express special thanks to Nopitch and SnackitWH for their invaluable support and feedback over the last few weeks.

Now go and enjoy the new website!! And don’t forget to complete that crew party doodle. 😉