Clan Spotlight: HARM

We interviewed with the following players to learn more about HARM:

Zemke - Commander of HARM and HARM Nation (HARM / 2HARM)
DocSkaets - Commander of 2HARM
Dagelt - Deputy Commander, veteran tanker in charge of recruiting
WithoutPantz - Deputy Commander, veteran tanker in charge of recruiting

How did HARM Nation form in the beginning? When and how did your Clans start?

Zemke - HARM has a direct lineage to a Clan called TOTH (which stands for Tough Old TreadHeads). That Clan was formed from a bunch of friends from the 334th fighter squadron. We were all playing “IL-2” and we were really good at that game. “IL-2” held a huge tournament and we won that like three years in a row. After a while, we were getting bored of that and we’d been playing since 2004. One day, one of our friends sent a link to me through e-mail about this World of Tanks game, and he was like “you gotta check this out…it’s FREE!” (Laughs)

We started playing it and it caught hold, so we all jumped over here. From there, one of our guys formed the Clan TOTH. Well anyway, a little over a year ago we dissolved the Clan. At that point, we almost joined another Clan. They had some good tankers but they just weren’t very organized and how they did things didn’t really suit us so I decided “Well, we’ll just form our own Clan” and that was how we formed HARM. That was July 30th, so we’ve been in existence just over a year.

What made you choose the name HARM?

Zemke - Well, we struggled with all kinds of different names. I wish CAMN were here…I think we just came up with HARM because it was simple. It was very direct and not very fancy. We didn’t want to be “cutesy” and we didn’t want to be strictly military-ish so we just kind of came up with HARM and it just stuck. Everybody liked it and we kept it and used it. At one point, one of our new guys asked me, “What does HARM stand for?” and I go, “Well…it stands for...Heavy...Armored…RegiMent!” He goes…”Wow! I didn’t know that’s what it stood for!”…which it really doesn’t. (Laughter)

What is your recruitment process generally like?

Zemke - I will let Pantz answer that, but I’ll caveat it with this. The first thing that we try to do is find good people. In other words, we’ve had people with big egos come into the Clan before and they don’t last long. Frankly, I don’t really care how good they are at tanks. If they have a prima donna attitude, they are just not going to make it in HARM, no matter what. However, if they’re a down-to-earth person, “good people”, and generally not…well, crazy… (Chuckles) At that point, they would have to meet our basic requirements to get into HARM. I’ll let Pantz kinda talk about that because he’s sort of the chief of personnel, is what I like to call him.

WithoutPantz - When we look for personnel, we try not to send out blind invites, what a lot of Clans were doing with the recruiting portal and stuff like that. The people that we want to get, we send a personalized letter to that person and we ask them to come into our TS, so that we can talk to them. From there, we go over stats and how they play, but it’s more about seeing what kind of personality that person has. We want to see if they’d fit with the people in here.

When they do come in, we tell them that they’re more than welcome to play with us for a while before they actually join the Clan. This allows them to see if it’s something that they want to be a part of. It isn’t a rushed process. I mean we do have people that join HARM right away, but there are a lot of guys that we’ve got recently that have been sitting on the fence for a week or two and they’ve been looking at other Clans and stuff. When they come and play with us, they usually like what they see.

How have you gone about earning the respect of larger Clans, and what do you think other Clans can do to start earning it for themselves?

Zemke - I think you have to be able to “carry your own water”, to some extent. In other words, you have to show that you deserve to be there. We won occupied lands that weren’t of particular value to bigger Clans. They were fairly low in Gold yields. A lot of those bigger Clans will jump on the high money-pot territories, so they don’t mind if you sit there. If you’re sitting there, what the larger Clans want are people who will not be a threat to them, or will not be a problem. So, you assure them that, “Hey, we’re not going to be a problem. We’re going to cooperate. If you need something, we understand the deal that (like [-G-]) you guys are far more powerful than us and we’re not going to rock the boat.” I’ve had several long conversations with Nemesis about this. He said, one of the things that he respected about us was our tenacity. We may have been mapped, but we came right back. We might get beat and get pushed down to one territory, but we fight our way back. He goes, “A lot of Clans don’t do that. They give up and try somewhere else.” I would say the biggest thing to earn respect is to keep your word and don’t give up. Be tenacious. Just fight. You gotta fight and want to win.

It seems that both HARM and 2HARM have gone pretty deeply into Strongholds. What is your Clan’s attitude towards that? How are you approaching playing Strongholds and what are you trying to get out of it?

Zemke - Well, it’s a new mode of play and we were really excited when it came out. Our goal was to get to level 4 on the structures that we selected and Docskaets kind of has their own program going on Strongholds too. I got guys every night playing Strongholds. They really love the format and they love the quickness of the battles. They love how easy it is to get a tier VIII, or even a tier X skirmish battle going in Strongholds. We love doing company battles, but tier X battles are almost impossible to get and tier VIIIs are pretty rare. Usually it’s just tier VIs and that kinda gets old after a while. We really like the ability to form a tier X, fifteen-man team and go in there and build that teamwork that you’re going to use in Clan Wars.

Dagelt - Yeah, it’s great training for Clan Wars.

Zemke - Our winrate may not be the greatest, but it’s good training.

WithoutPantz - It also allows us to bring up other callers. The callers that we don’t normally use in Clan Wars are people that just get into the Clan and want to get into calling. We can test them through the Stronghold Skirmishes.

Is training new callers in skirmishes your biggest focus in Strongholds or is it just something fun to do that you like to play?

Zemke - For a couple of nights we’ve had some structured, “Hey, we’re going to do Strongholds and we’re going to form as many teams as we can”, but by and large it’s been mostly guys just doing it for fun because it IS fun. That’s what’s really great about it. It’s so much fun that we don’t have to tell them to play. They just do it on their own.

WithoutPantz - It allows you to bring a lot of different tank sets even when you’re doing a tier VI skirmish. Before, you couldn’t run some lights in a tier VI tank company battle where you can in Strongholds. You can use tanks like the Type 64, the new Chinese light, where you couldn’t use that before.

Is there anything else that you want add in?

Zemke - I really want to give a lot of credit to DocSkaets. He’s really put in a lot of work and built our second Clan up to the point where they’ve come, in the last two or three months, a long long way. And so, Doc, if you want to say anything. I open the floor to you before we end this.

Docskaets - Well, I guess I would say it’s HARM Nation's influence that made 2HARM what it is now. We focus on attendance training, discipline, the types of thing that we want to send to HARM. They do that themselves as an aggressive group.

Zemke - Oh, put in the interview too, that HARM is looking…just imagine what we could do if we had a few more purple players!

Associated Clans

Tank Company Details

What: Absolute Tank Companies
Who: [HARM] and WGA employees
When: August 27, 16:00 PDT (19:00 EDT) to approx. 18:00 PDT (21:00 EDT)
Where: NA East server

If you face off against our Spotlight Tank Company, you'll have a chance to win Gold prizes!

If you are streaming on your own Twitch.tv channel and you send a link to your stream with the time at which you face us, your entire team will double their winnings! This link must be sent in a PM on the forums to Hypnotik by 09:00 PDT (12:00 EDT) the following Friday morning.

If you have any questions you'd like us to ask [HARM] while on the stream, please leave them in the comments thread for this article or you may also ask them in the Twitch chat!

Gold from this event will be distributed by Wednesday, September 3, 2014.