Should FAF clans matter more? What should be different?

Currently, FAF clans have some impact on the community, but I believe that they could have a lot more. I imagine that clans could be better utilized in FAF to further improve the new player experience, player retention, fun, player skill improvement, the sense of community and connectedness on FAF, etc.

Perhaps some sort of active and competitive clan system might help. Or, perhaps some other new features, flavor, or clan-related leaderboards might be good incentives. Or, perhaps you have another idea?

What changes/improvements/new features could improve the impact of having clans in FAF? Do you think any changes to the FAF clan system or how we use it should be implemented? If so, which?

This thread is intended to be an open discussion. Please chime in if you have some constructive thoughts on any of this.

1. Implement Galactic War, or Galactic War Lite (basically ladder league but for tallying faction wins in ladder and TMM).
2. Let players join a faction each season, give them a chatroom and tag showing their faction, like clans currently have. People in this chatroom can be grouped by rating or labeled as trainers.
3. Players are incentivized to train members of their faction in order to win the war, and players are incentivized to improve in order to win the war.

Each faction would essentially be a big clan that persists for a season and has a built-in incentive for community building and player improvement.

We could have some clan stats, like average rating of the players or games played in the last month, and then a leaderboard for that. Atm you can only sort the clans by amount of players. This would be relatively easy to add.

Something more difficult and that would also need some design work (like how it would work exactly) is adding a competitive leaderboard where recent clan vs clan game stats are shown.

If I were to promote clans and make them more relevant, I would approach it like this:

Host tournaments you sign up for as a clan with various formats throughout the year. Some potential ideas:

• Mixed event BO5, where the first two rounds are 4v4s, then a 2v2, and then 1v1s if needed.
• Rating restricted (<1400) 1v1 tournament.
• 4v4 rating restricted tournament.
• Rating unrestricted Master's Cup style 2v2.
• Rating restricted BO7 "winner stays on"/"all kill" style 1v1 tournament.

Placing in these events will award points according to some distribution; the points collected, as well as placement in events, will be highlighted on a leaderboard. Placement in 1v1 events can contribute points to the leaderboard but to a lesser extent. The top clan for each quarter of the year could get a unique temporary avatar as long as they maintain their spot, get a spot in the news page, etc..

The mix of events will ensure that it's not just the clans who have the best top players that will dominate, but rather the clans that are most active and have the most diverse set of players that will top the leaderboard.

Clans atm are beyond useless,mostly those are groups of friends but yeah,clan wars are fun but a pain to host,during GCW,there were permanent issues with timezones so i guess we'd need some sort of pointing system that can count the indirect clans participations like amount of ladder wins,tmm,gloabl games per players that are in the x clan and in case there're 2 players from the same clan in different teams,just don't count it at all.

Thomas has the right ideas so, i think clans should really be about getting new players into the game and right habits and such. Galactic War is pretty essential to that, and i think after TMM - GW was the plan? Atleast thats what i remember being said.

Yes, sort of, ish, soon ️. We’re always looking for more people who want to help us program it!

What game have people played where clans were the entrypoint for new players? I’ve never seen that before. I’ve seen clans for nationalities, for competitive dudes, for casual groups of dudes that play together, etc, etc.

Don’t really get why you need a clan to train new dudes nor why you would incentivize that with a clan war superstructure.

Golden clan tags.

@ftxcommando said in Should FAF clans matter more? What should be different?:

What game have people played where clans were the entrypoint for new players?

A game called 'University' - only they call it student societies.

Did your student societies have a leaderboard with prizes for who is the best? At my university, the closest would have been the resident halls you lived in where people did competitions against other halls, but this compares more to a clan based on nationality imo.

@ftxcommando In my class half the people playing Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 or Team Fortress Classic did so because a friend or classmate was part of a clan and pulled them in

But results from 2 decades ago are not assurance for the future.

@valki said in Should FAF clans matter more? What should be different?:

@ftxcommando In my class half the people playing Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 or Team Fortress Classic did so because a friend or classmate was part of a clan and pulled them in

But results from 2 decades ago are not assurance for the future.

My worry here is more about the behavior making this some competition reinforces.

“Everybody wanna get big but ain’t nobody wanna lift some heavy ass weights”

This applies to FAF.

You’ll notice like nearly every dude over 2k rating hardly got training, the key factor here was they wanted to spend the time to improve and had the time to do so. Like 8 of 10 dudes I’ve helped out with training SAY that want to get better but they play 1 game a week and don’t really want to think for themselves on why a loss happened.

I feel turning training into a competition makes it an entire “luck of the draw” thing where you see which clan managed to have a member online when the next sev7en comes around to quickly rise in rating once he gets some pointers on the nuances of the game.

Beyond that, it begins to discourage general training in public channels. Why would I want to train somebody in the Discord if they could then go and join a random clan and get rewards for a clan that did nothing to help the guy?

This might leave public training channels with blind leading the blind as everyone begins putting priority on their own private clan stuff.

I’d rather player improvement be a public good where everyone pools resources together so that those that DO have time and motivation can quickly learn rather than having to go through this hoop of joining a clan to get relevant advice.

Now if "clan tournaments" became their own separate thing and instead you have some U1500 segment where clans could win that, which in turn is divided from some O2000 segment and so on, that would allow clans to pick and choose what area they want to focus on and maybe eventually allow clan categorizations as certain clans specialize in certain areas. I just wouldn't try and make every clan some frankenstein monster of doing everything if they want to win some generic "clan war event"

Use clans to capitalize on the fact that people want different things from the game and make it transparent which clans serve which purpose, that should be the objective.

@ftxcommando PLD and SCR and EDC had teaching campaings

and coincidentally, I barely see anyone with those clan tags helping anyone in public channels, well EDC did at least.

@ftxcommando said in Should FAF clans matter more? What should be different?:

Use clans to capitalize on the fact that people want different things from the game and make it transparent which clans serve which purpose, that should be the objective.

To me this seems to be the relevant idea that got overlooked in the thread. Everybody is talking about tournaments and clan competitions, but imho that misses the point of clans.
In a clan you can gather likeminded people to make it easier to coordinate the games you want to play. Clans with a certain language, rating range, time zone, map selection, game modes, or gentleman rules come to mind. This is the actual value of clans. A clan competition doesn't encourage this usage of clans at all.
We should focus on how we can relay to new players what clans exist and what "ethos" or goal they have, so they can pick a fitting clan.

Are we really certain that clans are a collective thought? I have been in a few clans and the ranges of game types, competition, etc may be evident with several well-known ones, but for the most part they are just a group of close friends that play together. There is not necessarily a single "voice" of each.

The most obvious to me is a clan that has a country of origin, sentons-only, or a casual one. There are VERY few that are competitive-based.

SA clan = competitive 1v1 just like the majority of members who were lifted from BAW

ZFG = zero-fucks given, just a casual clan that happens to have some competitive players

SNF = not really sure how to describe them as there are so many, but for the most part seems like a mix of everything

EDC = now disbanded

ONI = not that active anymore? When I was in it, they were 90% very casual spare a few competitive players like AchievedJaguar. For the most part it seemed like a group of Brink following (not a bad thing, just saying)

GB = mostly inactive, but was for the longest time a group of casual UK-based players, grew to have some of the better players in the community

JEW = mostly sentons

SC = Sentons chat mostly sentons

ANZ = collection of Australian-based players

PLD = I believe this one is mostly Russian-based

SCR = mostly disbanded but same concept as PLD?

JoP = competitive, high-level players with some VERY active and mostly inactive players

These are just to name a few, but the other less-knowns are really just casual players that just come to enjoy AI games, custom games, etc. I don't see all that many as vocal as the ones aforementioned.

Perhaps some clan reps could weigh in and say "This is what our clan is all about."

EDC still exists! Technically maybe.

The point is that there is zero reason for a clan identity to exist, explaining that clans currently have zero identity doesn’t showcase anything. I’d also argue that history shows that when clans are given a purpose they absolutely respond to changed circumstances.

Recent example:
The last major restructuring of clans happened during the last clan war when com, lol, and bc combined into jop. Beyond that, the last dying breaths of baw and a few other high level players that didn’t bother being in a clan formed SA. Pretty sure SCR was also formed with playing in the clan war as a main reason since that clan also began to die around the end of the clan war.

This also happened during the first clan war.

Basic idea would be to use rating brackets and allow a clan leader to assign themselves for a rating bracket. You can have 2000 rated players in a clan to make 1300s improve, but don’t expect the dude to be playing in the 1000-1500 bracket.

Use that as the first kernel for clan identity and then people will also begin to market themselves in whatever appealing way to attract more motivated players in their rating bracket.

Nothing really needs to be tied down by rules, have events for singular maps like sentons between senton clans. Have events where 4-5 1000 rated dudes interested in getting trained get paired with a clan and after a month they do a 1v1 tournament.

You can also reward clan leaders with some ava, unique or not, if they become an “official clan” that participates in said events.