TL;DR: We're running public feeder clans in Optimum (https://www.warzone.com/Clans/?ID=202) and Prime (https://www.warzone.com/Clans/?ID=263). If you want to help out newbies, hit me up and/or join our Discord: https://discord.gg/8XArswR74U.
Over 1.38 million Warzone accounts have been created. Of those, 4,662 (0.3%) have participated on the 1 v 1 Ladder. The competitive strategic community represents a small portion of the active playerbase.
Optimum and Prime are part of a project to change this. Thanks to the 5.08 Open Clans update, we're leveraging clans as a way to discover newbies, casuals, and anyone else who could use support finding and appreciating the strategic scene of this game- and then giving them that support. In more concrete terms, this means that we recruit usually absolute newbies (or at least newbies to strategy) via Open Clans and Quickmatch, show them the Warzone community, and create a training and social environment that makes them less likely to fall through the cracks (quit the game, never quite discover the strategic side of it, etc.) and more likely to get good at the game, find the community, and one day show up in competitions like Clan League or the ladder. Here's a detailed design doc if that's your thing:
https://bit.ly/optimum-prime.
We've already received a lot of support from community members (shout out to Nauzhror, Ursus, Platinum, Redqueen, Xenophon, JK_3, Kenghis Ghan, Just_A_Dutchman_, Athena's Child, and the people I inevitably missed in that list) but right now we find ourselves needing some more to keep up with demand. We need:
- managers- yes, that comes with Manager Rights- who will help run the day-to-day operations of the clan by being active on clan chat, explaining to newbies what the clan does, recruiting off of Quickmatch, and playing onboarding games where you assess players' incoming skill, ask about their interests, and tell them more about the clan. We've formalized the process a fair bit (https://bit.ly/optimum-prime-management) and are in the process of automating the tedious parts (https://bit.ly/optimum-prime-tracker). Right now the main goal of our managers is to keep the clans active/running smoothly and our trainers busy.
- trainers, players of competent skill level (e.g., if you can hold your own on the 1 v 1 Ladder) who are willing to share tips, analyze games, play training games (1v1 matches - https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=26285572, exhibition matches - https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=26272166, coached games - https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=25905941; https://i.imgur.com/L9v3jtD.png, https://i.imgur.com/lwZ4noG.png, team games, and anything else that works for you). You don't need to be a top player- most of the time, Optimum/Prime trainees are very new to the game and we spend our time going over mechanics (like how picks work or how move order works) and fairly early tactics.
- poachers (or "ambassadors"), representatives from other clans that are able to take on players further once they've gotten the basics down. We want to hand off our members to clans like 101st, Discovery, M'Hunters, TSFH, TLA, CORP, VIW, Apprentice, HAWKS- anywhere where they can get further training suited towards players who are further along- and so we want representatives of such clans to be on our Discord server to pitch their clans. You'll get a little ad channel where you can advertise your clan and can keep tabs on us to see if you'd like to take any of our recruits and of course you get a bunch of access to our player pool via Discord.
This will not be a time commitment of any specific size. We'll take whatever you can spare! If you want to just hang on our server and analyze games every once in a while, that's great. If you're up to mentor a newbie one-on-one, that's great too! Right now, we're about a month into this experiment and focused on proving our core value proposition- that we can take players who would otherwise quit before getting into the strategic scene and instead nudge them toward strategic competitive Warzone- so we also could just use your feedback and creativity and anything else you want to share with us.
As for what's in it for the contributors (beyond a warm fuzzy feeling that comes from helping other people get into your pastime), Optimum & Prime are public feeder clans and operate on a coach-and-poach model. We're building a new recruitment, lower-risk channel for other clans: instead of wading through QM, advertising your clan, etc., you can instead find through Optimum/Prime players who're already active+communicative, already invested enough to join Discord, and have some grasp of the basics. And it'll be a lot easier to convince those players to join your clan if you interacted with them a lot as a trainer.
This is a somewhat ambitious project to try and build something new and useful using Fizzer's recent clan improvements. If it succeeds, it might make the game better for the rest of us. So come help it succeed! Even your advice on this thread will help us out a ton.
