Coming out of yesterday's live stream and discussion about Clan Wars, I wanted to start a thread about one specific proposal which a few people have mentioned on these boards. I want to battle-test this concept with clans of all shapes, sizes, and skill levels to ensure it works for everyone. Please, be critical.

Assumptions
1. Clan Wars is a skill-based competition and the most skilled clan should win
2a. Clan sizes are fixed for the foreseeable future - some are capped at 40 members, others are uncapped
2b. In spite of this, all clans should be able to compete and win
3. We want to maximize daily active users (DAU)
4. We want to engineer opportunities for players to take breaks without feeling a need to leave their clan
5. Templates should be skill-based and selected by the community

Many of these assumptions are taken from yesterday's live stream and are set in stone. If we cannot wrap our heads around and agree upon these assumptions, there's simply no point in continuing the conversation and discussing potential proposals. There are a few implications to these assumptions; specifically, some popular concepts (removing the clan cap, paying coins/money to increase clan size, the dual lotto template) are implicitly not allowed by these ground rules. If any of these are non-starters for you or your clan, please, be critical and provide clear feedback on the assumptions without getting into the proposal.

[Reserved for edits to Overview/Assumptions]

Proposal
If we are aligned on the assumptions, my proposal is simple.

1. As many or as few players can participate in Clan Wars from each clan as they would like, in line with assumption (3) about maximizing DAU. However, the standings (and implicitly, any territory captures) are restricted to the top 30 players for that particular season in each clan. If you are a Prime member who hasn't played all season, you're more than welcome to play and earn rewards (assuming you can win a game). But you won't help your clan's standing unless you finish in the top 30 among all Prime members.

Major benefits: Maximize DAU. Avoid the situation where an unexpected life event hurts clan performance. For an uncapped clan, alleviate the need to 'select players' for each season. For an uncapped clan, eliminate trolls/griefers from taking a valuable spot. For a capped clan, allow for vacations without needing to temporarily leave and re-join.

2. The coming seasons' templates are voted by the community using a format similar to QM voting. At the end of each season, the top 8 templates are chosen. A responsible community member manages the list of templates to pro-actively remove luck-based templates. At the end of each season, all votes are erased and we start with a blank slate.

Major benefits: Templates are, by definition, the most desired templates. Trendy templates like Kabix 2v2 or Tarabonia's Choice can naturally enter and exit Clan Wars. Evergreen templates like Guiroma must be re-confirmed each season. If the community wants shorter games, longer games, commanders, team games, etc. they can simply vote for it and make it happen.

3. (Minor) The pairing algorithm is tweaked to ensure there is at most one unpaired player per template per timeslot. This is referencing specifically the situation where 3 members of Clan A play against 3 members of Clan B while 2 members of Clan C go unpaired.

4. (Minor) The season should always start at 0:00 UTC, regardless of when the prior season ended.

5. (Minor) Rewards should go deeper into the standings at the end of each season

[Reserved for edits to Proposal]

Considerations
This is a nerf to capped clans. Obviously an uncapped clan with 100 players will be able to put up a better top 30 than a capped clan with 40 players though sheer probability, assuming skill is equivalent. If you are in a capped clan and have serious concerns about this, please, voice these concerns.

Elitists may not see the value in templates which the broader community wants to play. This is arguably already true for the current list of CW templates and this may actually represent an opportunity as well as a risk.

Unscrupulous clans may intentionally seek to lower their CWR by having a core 30 players attempt to win games while the rank-and-file throws all other game. This is obviously unintended behavior.

Griefers may attempt to get 'bad' templates nominated. One option to derisk this concern is to restrict voting to lock voting until players win at least one game in order to vote for the upcoming season.

Lastly, I realize the clan cap thing is an enormous disappointment for the vocal part of the community who want to remove clan caps and compete on a truly even playing field. I empathize with Fizzer here, he's between a rock and a hard place on this one. Please, be civil, this discussion is best held on a different thread.

the number thrown out was 25 for daily slots, with 15 reverse slots that could swap in/out on a daily basis

the issue this solves is that most clans can't field a full 40 player roster

as we all know, MB achieves it by creating a clan of transient alts

then there's Harmony, Prime, OP that have at times hit 40, and don't think any other clans are capable of it on a sustained basis

so 40 is really just too high to achieve the dream of having many competitive clans with high % of the playing roster playing daily

25 + 15 reserve seats sounds like a good change to allow more clans to be able to provide a competitive roster

I think it’s a totally fair challenge around 25 vs 30, either would be much preferred to 40 as it is today

One distinction I don’t want to glaze over is you are suggesting the “first” 25 (or 30) each day while I am suggesting the “top” 25 (or 30) each season. I think my proposal is much more agreeable to Fizzer in the context of maximizing DAU.

The implementation of a system like the one proposed here would be a large improvement and finally make CW the skill competition everyone had hoped for.

Fizzer addressed the distinction between _first_ and _top_ 25 per day; he said he felt that the _top_ 25 would give too much benefit to large clans who could spam CW with tons of players, essentially having more chances to get 25W that day, even enabling them to rally together in later slots to make up for lost games; Harmony for example could theoretically have 400 attempts to get 40W each and every day; compared to MB who has 40 attempts to get those same 25W

but the truth is that clans are struggling to get 40 players playing, so while a theoretical 400 is possible ... is it realistic? perhaps, perhaps not, but it is 1 way to practically guarantee they get 25W each day

but at the same time he said he does want CW to be available for everyone to play; but i believe he said that in context of his belief that clans should be small and numerous; while he didn't outright say so (at least i don't think so), huge clans like Harmony are exactly the opposite of what he sees as ideal, so i doubt he'd implement anything which would outright give them or similar clans an advantage

Note - I'm not dissing Harmony here, just using them as an example, since they were they prime example viewed in the AMA yesterday and make for a good comparison on how the rules would apply, notably in contrast with a capped clan like MB; Prime @ 150 members is fairly large too; OP only around 80 but still >> the 40 that MB has so "top" would give all of these a huge advantage over capped clans, thus not likely to happen

but he also said he wants to reward players using their main accounts, and give no advantage to use of alts; not sure if he has something concrete in mind there; if so, MB is in jeopardy at some point

imagine a world where all clans are <=40 members, all main accounts :O

Edited 6/18/2024 17:50:27

The proposal is to take the top 25 (or 30) per season. Not the top 25 (or 30) per day.

On the alt situation, I think this proposal partially addresses it. There are a number of reasons for alts today but most of these boil down to the fact that there are “community” focused clans and “CW” focused clans. The distinction between the two types of clans does not need to exist to the same extent in a world where clans can have “community” members who don’t play CW without being punished for it.

Hopefully it is not lost on Fizzer that his proposal would exacerbate the very problem that is driving alt accounts today.

In my opinion, that would be the best option (increases # of participants in CW); with proper reward system (individual prizes + prizes for top 25 in clan), you can make sure that
1) There won't be 50 players in Harmony playing CW seriously, as their rewards would suffer
2) People from less CW-active clans would play a few CW games, if the individual prizes would be attractive to them.

voting on templates each season is a great idea; the community vetoing bad decisions/restricting candidates to a suitable list of competitive templates also good

to eliminate troll votes, perhaps a rule should be implemented such as only those who played 10 games in the previous season are eligible to vote; if you're not an active CW player, who cares what templates you like; voting is for active CW players

using the top 30 results @ end of season could work; still gives larger clans an advantage but nowhere near the easily abusive level of using the daily top 30 W/L results

conversely, the idea Fizz threw out of each win has worth relative to the size of the clan is also bad; this means a single win for a large clan would be worthless and they'd need to get their entire roster playing every day; obviously not realistic; but relative to the size of the daily playing base might work; so if a clan actually had a day when 125 players play, each win beyond the first 25 (fixed slots) would be worth 1/100th of a point; still possible to spam mass players to get additional territory points but less impact by doing so; but overall it still feels like a poor, awkward solution that just gets difficult to calculate for players to estimate if it's even worth playing; it also changes the concept of having no negative aspect to playing (beyond maxing out the seasonal 40 player cap) b/c under this method, if you play an additional game and lose, you still reduce the worth of the other players that played that day while adding not adding any points; still get the CR reduction but actually territory is reduced compared to not playing and losing - so a bad idea imo

top 25 + reserve seats feels like a better solution

rewards-wise ... presumably everyone that plays and not just the top 25 still receive rewards, else that once again complicates things, where clanmates would need to compete against each other (ie: not together as a clan) to outdo each other in order to get seasonal rewards

Leon, here is my response (I am a Harmony Manager):

Assumptions
1. Clan Wars is a skill-based competition and the most skilled clan should win

- this does happen, although participation plays a key factor

2a. Clan sizes are fixed for the foreseeable future - some are capped at 40 members, others are uncapped
2b. In spite of this, all clans should be able to compete and win

- only one Clan can win CW and it is not an uncapped Clan - he seems blissfully unaware of MBs dominance and their model.

3. We want to maximize daily active users (DAU)

- I would guess that Harmony has the highest level of DAUs ever known, yet he is suggesting things which would almost certainly reduce that.

4. We want to engineer opportunities for players to take breaks without feeling a need to leave their clan

- Great idea, but he did seem surprised that players take a break from CW and a bit unable to get his head around how that works. He also said that it is impossible for players to remain in Harmony and play CW elsewhere. Yet that does happen, a lot. He also thinks that the c.270 Harmony Members who do not play CW in a season are trapped and 'not allowed' to play. This is simply not true. Those c.270 Harmony Members want the benefits Harmony offers outside of CW.

5. Templates should be skill-based and selected by the community

- :)

So, in summary. His solution (to punish Clans for their size) will punish Harmony, Prime and others for achieving EXACTLY what he asked for: high DAUs & high CW participation. It will remove the many benefits that Harmony Members enjoy as part of their Membership Subscription or whilst they watch adverts (or both).

His perspective is that these players want to play CW, so forcing Harmony to be smaller would enable them to be free and play for another Clan. As far as I know, none of our Members want to do that. Rather ironically, I don't especially love CW. I play it for my Clan - that drives participation - that is what he wants. If someone in Harmony wants to take my slot I am always happy for that, but it is rarely taken. These players will simply not suddenly want to play CW at a specific time every day or so. If they cannot access the benefits of Harmony it will surely drive down the number of those users who are active daily.

I think that we was VERY surprised to see that every Harmony Player he looked at was still active. We have over 300 active players. He wants us to have fewer. This cannot increase the number of DAUs.

I worry that he is making decisions based on bad information. He has an example of someone telling him that they could not play CW because their Clan would not allow it. If that is Harmony, and it is in the past couple of years, it is a misunderstanding. In any event, this seems like it is a very powerful driver for his actions (as it should be), however, he is potentially looking at one or two examples and thinking that it equates to hundreds of players who will suddenly play CW each day. This is not the case. Very few Clans field 40 players by the end of the first day or two, so those players who were told that they could not play could simply sign-up and play in almost any Clan in every season.

Unfortunately, I agree with you that Fizzer seems stuck with some of these ideas and will likely not be persuaded otherwise.

To make us feel a little better let's all remember the time we convinced fizzer not to break INSS

I think that 40 is simply a ridiculously low cap for clans. it should be at least 100.

Naturally, community sizes are going to simply be how many people are sufficiently good friends with others. To limit this is a bit like the
government (trying) to enforce a rule of how many close friends you can have.

What is even more stupid is that some clans remain uncapped while new clans are capped. As we can see, new clans now like to take residence in old clans to be uncaped.

The system will just not work if some clans remain capped and some uncapped.

This has nothing to do with CW and just about what clans are and the real reason people join a clan: friendship and community.

Why didn’t the new clans make sister clans though, to accommodate more players instead of merging into uncapped clans though?

Because while you are close you don’t share the same level of closeness that you do from reading the same forums and all chatting together. You have the distinction of being two different clans and all the resulting headaches of that on a logistical level also.

This is actually a pretty good proposal, nicely done!

In order to maximize the reward for daily games, I would like to add that rewards could be given proportional to the # of games played.

E.g. if 10 players have 85% of the games, they should get more rewards than the 15 that only played until they got the win they needed to qualify for any rewards.

The problem I see with proposal 1 is that it still favors bigger clans, while Fizzer wants to limit that.

But to be honest I dont really see how to fix that while simultaneously:
a) not cause uncapped clans to be forced to kick unproductive and bad players
b) keep things fair for the capped clans
c) respect assumption 2a

Ideally capped clans would get a higher cap (60 or so seems reasonable?), but that is a discussion for another forum thread.

try not to get caught up in the "Fizz is stuck in his ways, he's not listening, he won't change things" mentality. he's shown us a number of times that if we convince him it's a good idea, he adjusts. but don't approach this as a fight, but a chance to discuss what's best.

- Great idea, but he did seem surprised that players take a break from CW and a bit unable to get his head around how that works.

he's not a true player himself so he doesn't understand the full scope of what it takes to be a dedicated CW player; rallying the troops to be ready in a given timeslot, not getting enough matches/free wins, not having templates you like, worrying about a 40 player roster, trying to communicate who has/hasn't played in a given season, how many slots are left, etc. these are things he likely doesn't have a good grasp on

He also said that it is impossible for players to remain in Harmony and play CW elsewhere. Yet that does happen, a lot. He also thinks that the c.270 Harmony Members who do not play CW in a season are trapped and 'not allowed' to play. This is simply not true. Those c.270 Harmony Members want the benefits Harmony offers outside of CW.

in the context of his design, it is impossible. he's considering that everyone plays with 1 main account only, and if this context, players in Harmony with their 1 main account can only play CW for Harmony. what you're talking about are players who in Harmony with 1 account (likely their main) and playing CW for another clan with an alt. i don't think this was made clear during the AMA

and an aside: another thing to consider ... in changing CW other clans are more competitive and able to challenge MB, they could also in turn migrate to another clan and play from there. MB is after all just a vessel for alts; if some change gives a big enough advantage to larger clans so they can't win anymore, they could just put their alts in (for example) Masters instead and play from there to reap the benefits of uncapped clans, a reversion to the early days of CW where Masters wins every season; the top skilled players will still continue winning games, no mystery here; worded differently, think about what best benefits CW as a competitive but fun competition that all users can compete in, get rewards based on the skill of a clan roster

but in general i agree with the sentiment that clan purpose is a bit segregated between 2 aspects of (1) CW which focus on 40 or less and Community which ideally focuses on 50 or more; when i see a clan with 40 or less, i think of an underdeveloped clan that has less to offer than a clan of 80-150+ members with a richer base and more to offer; with only 40 players, it's hard to offer much

Edited 6/18/2024 21:06:06

I'd suggest not locking CW roster on a seasonal basis. Instead lock it on a daily basis.

Then, any 30 players (give or take) from a clan are free to play each day. First come, first served.

As long as the per-day limit is sufficiently below 40, it should neuter any advantage held by 40+ clans.

At the same time it would help boost activity because all clan members could (in theory) play each season. Also know roster spots would be sacrificed by low-activity players joining early in the season and then quitting.

@fork, to my understanding, that's the idea. 25 slots each day, anyone from the clan can fill them, leaving 15 "reserve slots" in a 40 member clan, and for larger clan, it'd just be the first 25 people to play each day that get to play that day

but now that I think of it, i wonder if this would actually cause more kicking from clans

in the past, when a player who wasn't supposed to play but did, one slot was consumed for the entire season and there was no way to fix it, so kicking that player asap didn't solve anything, you just waste the slot and get 0 further wins for it, but leaving them in the clan could get more wins, even if they weren't originally meant for the roster, there's no gain in kicking them until near the end of the season

but in this new proposed system, you can save the rest of the season if you kick that player same day as the infraction; if a player who isn't supposed to play does play, that slot is only consumed for that day, and that slot is available again the next day, so kicking that player would prevent them from joining again, but leaving them in the clan means they could continue messing up the playing roster all season wrong

tho i suppose conversely you could just scold them and tell them not to join, and only kick if they repeatedly did it

with 40 players, this isn't a huge deal anymore that all clans have more or less given up trying to dethrone MB (it was important when several were still trying hard, fielding a full 40 roster for the season and even a full 40 playing on some days, but these days are gone) but as the # drops to 25, having the intended roster players play may become an issue again