Which clans have been piloting the Open Clans feature? I've been testing it since it was launched in 5.08 and it's working brilliantly for Optimum & Prime- and yes, without prereqs! It's incredible how much variety you see in the flags of players who join via the Join a Clan button vs. via more traditional recruitment. I see a lot of Russias, Myanmars, North Macedonias, and we're finally seeing our fair share of Italians who are vastly underrepresented in the organized strategic community.

I think this has so far been working out as a brilliant feature that promises to vastly expand the reach of the clanned playerbase. This has been my workflow for Optimum/Prime:

1. Keep the clan Open as much as possible
2. When a member joins, invite them to a welcome game and encourage them to join the clan Discord
3. If they don't join the invite game within 24h or don't want to join the Discord, purge them from the clan and free up the slots so we can Open up again

Step 2, as you can guess, is where the prereq work happens. This helps us filter out players who are unreachable or inactive (mainly Idlers, unfortunately, who click the "Join clan" button but are generally very hard to reach or offer any meaningful value to afterwards- if anyone's solved this problem of onboarding Idlers, please share! I'd like to be able to onboard rather than purge). So far, we've had 152 tracked players go through this system. Of those 2, left before getting onboarding games, another 93 left before we could finish the welcome game (usually these didn't join the onboarding game), and another 3 left/were kicked before they joined the Discord.

That said, the players that survive this purge cycle have been great for our purposes and I truly believe that, without Open Clans, most of them would not have been integrated into the clanned community at this stage. So Open Clans have been incredibly good from my perspective.

How's it been working for others' clans?

I hang around chat a lot and mostly I'm only seeing Optimum and Prime regularly flippng the switch.

Is good.

Yes, we have a 2-day purge cycle basically. You can see the details in our spreadsheet if you wanna follow along: https://bit.ly/optimum-prime-tracker

Basically on day 0, we open the clans. On day 1, I process the new members and give them onboarding games. On day 2, I purge those that haven't accepted the onboarding game invite and reopen the clan. Then the cycle starts over again.

I think this works pretty well, like I said, and a spreadsheet does more than enough to fill in for the feature gap in terms of not having prereqs and thus having to manually sort out who should and shouldn't be in your clan after finding it Open. That's the main reason I made the thread, to discuss strategies (among Open Clan leaders) of how to best use the feature. I think I have a working model that might work for others too.

-- deleted --

Called out a trash player from Prime here but thought that it was not worth it.

Edited 3/27/2021 11:52:45

Trash in terms of skill or toxicity? Skill is fine since Prime is meant to find and help newbies who haven't gotten the basics down; the idea is to grow the community by finding newbies who would otherwise quit or never join the competitive scene and offer them the support they need to find the beauty in this game (for more details, see our design doc: https://bit.ly/optimum-prime). This is why I really like Open Clans because they let us cheaply find such players who are otherwise typically invisible.

But if there is any toxicity or community-harming behavior (like cheating or surprise rigged games), please let me know (DM me on any account, or even post it on the forum) because I absolutely do not want Prime to allow or encourage toxicity. There's no way for our screening process to catch toxic players unless they decide to be toxic to me, so if this turns out to be egregious I'll also look into adjusting the screening process to filter out toxic players.

Thanks in advance, Norman.

Nah, sorry, I was being annoyed about a teammate surrendering after turn 1due to "being annoyed with me explaining him how we can win...". However callng him out was petty so I deleted that message.

Edited 3/27/2021 18:52:12

Less skilled players are criminally underrated.
Imo, a flaw in almost every clans recruitment system is filtering players according to their skill, or the lack of it.

Nah, sorry, I was being annoyed about a teammate surrendering after turn 1due to "being annoyed with me explaining him how we can win...

That's something I'd still like to talk to that player about, if you're willing to share their name or profile. Behavior like that would get in the way of learning and growing from a clan like Prime. Don't worry about pettiness, you're actually doing us a favor here.

@Kratt: Well it seems like TSFH at least understands this. You're the first clan to coach-and-poach from Optimum. We've got the first bit of evidence that our pipeline might actually work! Exciting!

Edited 3/27/2021 19:17:19

I think it depends what type of clan you want to have, Garbij has made me realized that there are types of players so for the purpose of each clan they should recruit accordingly. From a fresh pair of eyes perspective I having any experience with clans in Warzone and creating my own I've felt that opening up the clan it just invited random players and filled up the clan with players I didn't get to filter.
My main unsolicited opinion as a new player to clans here is that it is a little confusing the way its designed on the website An example : once you've joined clan under your Username Tab the "Join a clan" link remains "Join a clan" it should be a direct link to your clan's page instead, I think if theres a way for Fizzer to make it easier he definitely should
Often players that I recruit have trouble understanding how it works where to go to go and join clan
It gets easier the more you use it of course but It never should've been complicated in the first place

Testing out a solution to the problem of having clueless players join the clan not reading the description and not having any idea what's going on.

For a normal Open Clan, the clan page looks like this:


Easy as pie to miss the Core Info and just click the Join button. I suspect most users don't even look at multiple Open Clans, just pick one at random (or based on # of members or clan icon), go to its page, and click the join button. Because there's not much to go off of on the open clans list:


But I figure, the one thing we can get these Join a Clan users to see is our clan image since it's right above the "Join" button. So trying this out with Clan Images and will see if it works. If you're running into the same problem, you might wanna try it too:



I think this is a pain point that adds some toil to running an Open Clan. For example, a significant amount of the purge cycle in Optimum/Prime happens just to filter out Idle-only players who do not realize Classic exists and therefore don't even realize they got an invite to a welcome game. If they read the clan description, though, they would be less likely to join us.

I think a more robust solution would be to allow clans to have join message pop ups for new members. Or to move the join button down below the description so players have more to go off of than a pretty image.

You need to get a girlfriend.

Open Clans + no clan forum moderation abilities = clans are now highly susceptible to spam attacks. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the same troll spamming the Help forum, wound up joining Prime. We removed them within 10 minutes of their joining, but the graffiti they left on the clan forum can't be scrubbed. We just have to hope that our clan members downvote their post enough times that they get hidden (does hiding work properly on Clan Forums? I hope it does).




In either case, Open Clans have increased the need/utility for having some sort of clan forum moderation system. This might also be easily fixed by Fizzer deleting this account's whole post history, like he did with Tabby Juggernaut and Semicedevine.

Same guy, same clan, just returning to troll. (But we were prepared this time....)

Here is the same troll with 4 more accounts, all 6 of his accounts joined clans. Right now, there are multiple clan managers working to kick out the same troll over and over.

That is why joining a clan should require players to be at least level 3, or have an account that is more than 24 hours old.


I hang around in global chat a lot, and i got a few alts in clan that are regularly open.
The general trend is that a lot of players join, immediately go inactive, and get kicked out a few days later.

All the inactive accounts not only kill (almosts) all form of community, they also continuously keep clans closed for players that do stay active for more than 4 hours. On top of that, it gives a wrong signal to new players if all they see when they join a clan is New clan member! Welcome "{name}"" to the clan!, since it shows them that clans are not an active form of community.

EDIT: he made 8 more troll alts, who all joined clans before doing anything else. I hope and assume they will all get perm banned, but its just taking up some very limited space in the new clans, and not every clan kicks out inactives every few days. Maybe having accounts auto-leave a clan once they are perm banned would fix that issue.

Yes it seems prerequisities and/or clan moderation options of some sort (Fizzer knows best here) would drastically improve the Open Clan experience. I don't know if I like a hard level 3 req because Optimum/Prime want to capture players before they get to their 20th MP game... but making this filtering a little more automated somehow would be nice. The welcome/purge cycle is starting to become a chore so there has to be a less painful solution here.

I banned some of these accounts and automatically deleted all discussion posts of these players.
Please check if this included the clan forum as I cannot check this.
If an account that was banned has posts remaining, please contact me first to doublecheck the timestamps.

If any other accounts need to be banned, or have their forum posts removed for similar reasons, report them as quickly as possible.
I cannot ban or delete posts for accounts without a report.

There are quite a few trolls. Europa Youth and Bakkah-Mecca both. I had to leave them. Should be level 3 or 5 after you get your bearings.

Thanks.