A certain degree of prerequisites isn't useless.
DARKLORDS didn't fail at the recruitment phase. They failed at the Darklordio-kept-going-offline-and-the-clan-had-no-purpose-beyond-recruitment phase. NEETs/Prime have already solved that problem because the clan is plenty active & has a central mission (high CW participation & fulfilling Idle requests & sharing Idle advice to improve members' Idling experience).
In general, I'd say the prereqs for clan membership have been set too highly in the past and have been a reason the Clan system remains very niche. While being in an active, motivated Clan can completely change someone's gameplay experience, Clans have only managed to capture a fraction of a fraction of the active playerbase (5% if we're being rather generous).
From the get-go, we lose the bulk of the playerbase that sticks around past the first 5-10 games because Clans are hard to find and- for all Clans historically, and for non-Open Clans today- it's non-obvious how to join a clan (the invite system):
Even when it is obvious, you have to request an invite. By the time someone gets this far, they've already passed a bunch of activity and interest filters. Once you have activity, interest, and non-toxicity (which is a soft prereq at best), 80% of the work is done and the rest the clans can do themselves through player development.
Then requiring players be high level or high skill or have nice-looking profiles on some other metrics is a big self-imposed filter Clans put on themselves. If anything, DARKLORDS (and TLW, and Cats, and briefly an older incarnation of Prime) showed that Clans can reach a
much larger share of the playerbase than they're currently reaching via lowered prereqs & active recruitment- you just need to: 1)
do something with that so the Clan is a thriving community [TSFH figured this out], and 2) scale so that the clan's value benefits from agglomeration [TSFH did not figure this out, and NEET-Prime will struggle with this if they get this far because a CW-focused clan has a value-cliff due to the 40-cap on CW].
Edited 9/5/2022 18:48:52
