"You don't make a competition fair by shooting everyone that's ahead. You fix it by removing the handicap from those unable to keep up"

I can't agree more with that, you make good points who will fall of deaf ears because removing the cap is not an option for Fizzer. Limiting in some ways bigger clans is the only option left on the table.

It's not ok for uncapped clans to throw mediocre player after mediocre at the CW game and establish a monopoly on the Top 9 based on numbers alone, while we have to grind and do our best to improve and be consistent and if we're lucky we get some leftovers.
And maybe by the end of the season we get something, or maybe we're bleed dry by big clans offering "consistent CW results"...

@JK

Whilst I am in agreement with pretty much everything you have written, I think that it misses one obvious point - Fizzer wants smaller Clans competing, this is the model he sees working in other games. This is his vision for how the game will evolve over the next few years. Your proposal is more of a mechanism to keep things as they are and iron out a few of the flaws, it will not dovetail with Fizzer's vision.

I think that we need a different approach which:

1. Delivers Fizzer's vision for small Clans (25-50 Members) competing alongside the existence of a small number of uncapped Clans; and
2. Accommodates the existence of and benefits of uncapped Clans and does not disadvantage the Members of capped or uncapped Clans.

I think that the issue is that Fizzer does not recognise the value in large Clans. We could give a lot of statistics (which he has but clearly does not look at) about how many Members Harmony has who regularly sign in to play for reasons which are nothing to do with Clan Wars. There is clearly a role for legacy larger Clans which I think that it would be a mistake for him to ignore or seek to destroy.

If we can come up with a solution which delivers both 1 & 2 AND provide supporting data, that may help to move Fizzer's thinking along a little.

My strongest suggestion would be for someone to ask him what he wants. I think that our main problem is that we tend not to consider what Fizzer wants and then find ourselves disappointed when he does not respond to our suggestions.

To my mind it would be foolish of Fizzer to describe what he wants and then ignore suggestions from a wide user base of how he could achieve that. It is similarly foolish for us to keep trying to get him to deliver things which may bear no relationship to his vision.

@TheKai

Can you please have a think about how you would make a fair system with capped and uncapped Clans ?

Any new Clans will be limited in the same way as most Clans are now, so there will just be a small number (4 ?) with large membership. Please note that a Clan of 300 Members does not have 300 CW players. It has about 40 per season (getting 40 players to play has proven difficult).

I think that 25 players from 50 makes it a fairer competition enabling newer Clans to compete more quickly - I can see why that scoring system would work well.

How about if uncapped Clans had to nominate their roster in advance of the season ? So Although Harmony has 300 Members, only the 50 who are interested in Clan Wars count towards the scoring system.

Whatever we come up with must be easy to administer from Fizzer's side.

My strongest suggestion would be for someone to ask him what he wants. I think that our main problem is that we tend not to consider what Fizzer wants and then find ourselves disappointed when he does not respond to our suggestions.

I asked in the AMA thread, but he sorta skipped past it cause he had already been saying things about big clans bad for an hour by that time.

I hope Fizzer writes a blog post laying out his thoughts at some points about why 50 is a reasonable size for a community.

> How about if uncapped Clans had to nominate their roster in advance of the season ?

You could kinda-sorta do this already by taking over an almost empty capped clan and joining that for the season. The problem is these people would have to leave the uncapped clan for that time (or use an alt) and miss out on chat, forum etc., which isn't ideal.

So, what about turning the legacy uncapped clans into "communities" like they partially already are? Capped "clans" would be more like teams competing for the cw trophies (this seems to be the vision for CW anyway), and the old uncapped ones are converted into a new thing, which does all the things that the clans are doing now, but can't participate in CW. Users could be a member of a team and such a community. Teams could even associate with a community if they want to. And if a team is really successful and grows big (and has won a lot of coins), maybe if it desires at some point in time it could also start their own community, with inactive / former team members having their place etc.

I realize this would not be a short term thing to implement, but at least to me it appears as if this could be a solution for all interested parties, because it acknowledges the existence of the legacy uncapped clans as community organizations that exist as a good thing outside of CW, while at the same time streamlining the CW system and offering equal opportunities to all particpating teams.

Edited 10/28/2024 21:21:15

One thing I think you guys should get in front of of: be prepared to explain why the *huge* clans can’t simply move their clan activities off-site.

Defend why “Harmony” can’t be a discord channel that chats, shares private tournament links, connects experienced players with noobs, etc. “Harmony” could also spin up a ~40 member CW team of the same name on-site as a “clan” for just the members interested in CW. And there would be no need for alts!

Unless you can clearly explain this, you’ll be facing an uphill battle.

Prime on the other hand, yeah, you guys got screwed. No clan requests off-site unfortunately…

I've endured the latest Fizzer's AMA. Things are worse than expected. According to Fizzer everything what is being done, is done intentionally by design. Fizzer's long term goal is to eliminate big clans and to make sure that only small clans exist. His currently hopes to achieve this through various incentives and if they don't work, he will look for better ways to convince big clans to shrink their size. According to him, if all of "nice" measures fail to achieve his intended goal, he's going to impose manual 50 player limits on all big clans and then refund cost of those clans creation.

Here's some notes I made about his last AMA:

• Bigger clans being more desirable than small ones is a mistake.
  
• Fizzer wants for big clans to be unsuccessful.
  
• Big clans are essentially just a bunch of tryhards. CW should be reserved for "serious" clans.
  
• Big clans should not be eligible for most of available CW rewards.
  
• Fizzer doesn't want heavy handed approach just yet, he prefers to eliminate big clans through incentive system. The rewards will grow for small clans (or shrink for big ones) for as long as big clans refuse to disband. If this doesn't work, only then Fizzer will attempt to destroy big clans by imposing 50 player limit.
  
• New scoring system is bad on purpose and is meant to intentionally make it impossible for big clans to compete.
  
• Examples provided by Texx and others are irrelevant, because they come from an era when different CW mechanics were in play.
  
• Fizzer doesn't "hate" big clans, he just thinks that they're unhealthy and that solution to this problem is more small clans.
  
• Things are best when all clans are of equal size.
  
• Bigger clans achieved their success through loopholes. It's important to close them.
  
• Joining smaller clans will make players happier. Things are going to be much better in small clans than in the old big clans.
  
• Harmony clan is not being punished, it is just being thrown into the same era as 99% of remaining players.
  
• The reason why there are so many dead chat rooms is people's inability to use proper punctuation.
  
• Harmony, The Last Alliance and other clans have 3 following choices: abandon CW, force more players to participate in CW or kick most of their players. CW scoring system getting fixed is not an option.
  
• This is only the beginning. Fizzer fully intends to go further into this direction.
  
• Small clans are an industry standard. This is how things are done in other games.
  
• Fizzer doesn't mind if CW seasons become longer. He will not use that as evidence of his system failing, but will rather shorten future seasons.
  
• According to Fizzer our opinion is not necessarily wrong, but it's not Fizzer's opinion. Fizzer believes that his changes will be for the better and legitimacy of our concerns is unimportant.

More things have been said, but these are all that I managed to note. I went into the AMA expecting it to simply be about CW, but then Fizzer also decided to start talking about how he wants to eliminate all big clans and bring in the bright future of small clans. This got me extremely concerned, so I began making notes right away.

The worst thing is that Fizzer understands our concerns. He knows what we want and he knows our complaints. Fizzer consciously chooses to ignore us and is going to go through with his vision regardless of our arguments. At this point these are the two main problems:

• CW will intentionally make large clan efforts irrelevant.
  
• Fizzer will try to slowly encourage more and more players to abandon big clans. Eventually he wants to get rid of big clans altogether.

In my opinion the following would be the best solutions to this issue:

• Create community run real time competition. This way we will be able to ensure fair scoring system and avoid any unwanted interference from Fizzer.
  
• Set up off site clan infrastructure in case Fizzer never backs down and goes through with his enforced clan cap for big clans.
  
• Use feature request forum to showcase player demand for clan cap removal and fair scoring system. This could get ignored, but it should be the best way to show Fizzer how many players want these improvements.
  
• Setting up new clans or reusing abandoned clans for CW. This is not the most ideal solution as Fizzer might use it eventually as an excuse to justify big clan removal.
  
• CW Boycott. This might be hard to pull off, firstly due to Fizzer not caring about big clans and secondly due to him likely just taking this as an opportunity to make further Clan Wars seasons shorter.

You can find Fizzer's AMA here: https://youtu.be/9GhvudkVqzo
Feature suggestion for clan cap removal: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/767989-remove-clan-cap

I encourage everyone to vote for clan cap removal. At the moment there's no official suggestion thread for CW scoring system improvement. Once such thread is made, I will make an update about it. Right now I don't know what best scoring system might be and I think this should be discussed further by the players.

I personally like ideas of managers manually selecting 25-50 player roster and idea of first 25 games giving full score, games 26-50 giving increasingly less points and later games giving no points. Both ideas still need further refinement in my opinion. I will think about this further.

---

For final note, the situation appears to be dire. CW scoring will most likely always give high penalties to big clans and over time Fizzer intends to introduces more and more difficulties for clans like Harmony, The Last Alliance, knyte Club and others. Fizzer is aware of our complaints and he is consciously choosing to ignore them.

I like this new system.

But there seems to be a good amount of players that will boycott CW because of the changes. I think Fizzer should increase the rewards for CW to attract new players. With this new system, small but strong clans will start joining again.

And btw, there should always be more team games in Clan war.

Why can't Harmony be a Discord server on off-site group? It can. But why should managers put extra effort into it, when we already have a clan system? Why make a system which is more confusing and cumbersome to everybody? That is like saying, why have game chat, when you can mail each other? Why have WZ mail, can't just people e-mail each other? Why have forums and global chat, when you can post in WZ discord channel?

Edited 10/29/2024 06:32:07

Others have suggested being able to link a CW clam to an uncapped one. Same clam chat, same requests but different CW. This would allow Fizzer to get what he wants without destroying communities. I have a feeling even the largest clams would be hard pressed to find 50 people who want to play clam wars anyway.

But then Fizzer doesn't seem to want to accept that clams have a function beyond clam wars even though they predate clam wars. Quit frankly anyone who believes "The reason why there are so many dead chat rooms is people's inability to use proper punctuation." either has no idea what is going on or just like the Honey Badger don't care.

One can make all the suggestions they want, but if Honey Badger is on the war path, there is no point.

Speaking of punctuation, Fizzer might've made his update a bit too quick for even his standards.Maximim reserve seats is 25, so for clans with more than 50 players, win strength = 25 / (ClanSize - 25). This ensures clans of various size can compete fairly

I hope Fizzer writes a blog post laying out his thoughts at some points about why 50 is a reasonable size for a community.

I don't think he's ever addressed "community". He's not part of the community so it's not surprising that he doesn't see it as an important aspect of the game. He doesn't even managed his own clan ff, Ethan does.

He often compares WZ clans to Clash of Clans and other similar games. I've never played CoC but I've spoken with some who have (and other games like it), and the mentality is that it's totally insignificant when someone joins or leaves your clan, it's a fleeting thing, happens all the time, people come and go sometimes multiple times in a day, and no one cares.

WZ is obviously very different. If you suddenly leave a clan, you'll likely be queried not only by your clanmates but by other players. "Oh you left XYZ, what happened?" Clans are a big deal here. But he's not part of that WZ culture.

The CW changes make sense if you ignore the aspect of Community from clans. Think of clans purely as vessels for CW.

So maybe go back to OG clans? Change your name to add [clanname] to the front and chat on Discord. WZ clan chat is pretty garbage anyhow. No channels, scrolls quickly, cluttered with WZI requests.

I am starting to think that fizzer and his feedback team did the math on how many more clans could take part in clan wars if all the large clans were to be split up in smaller chunks.

I can only assume that their assumption is that all the smaller chunks will start to play cw too.
Perhaps krinid is right and clans are intended as a vessel to play clan wars only and nothing but cw.

But what if of these smaller chunks only the one chunk per clan will participate?
Is our clan cohesion being tested all to find out that nothing really changes?
Or are we to split up in subclans A, B, C etc and dedicate only A to clan wars

At the end of the day MB will still beat all of our subclans and now it wont be clan x, y and z they are playing against but the subclans from xA, yA and zA.
Where the members switch from A to B if they dont feel like doing cw for a season or maybe to C or D if they want to join a particular clan event.

I myself am not a fan of the small clan preference over the large clans. And I sincerely hope that fizzer and his team realise that their future only results in more inconvenience for the players who may have to move from between this and that clan, only because many more small clans are viewed to be better.

What if clans were limited to providing an x amount of players to cw. Maybe a system where clan lead can select or include and exclude players from participating could be implemented.
The result is not so very different but saves us players a lot of management by having to managed multiple fractions of our clan.

You ask us to slice the cake but we are the ones losing the best crumbs in this proces, which is a shame imo.

Edit:
note to fizzer:
I hope you will invite players to your team so future projects with such a large impact can receive constructive feedback from us too before you set for us on such a bumby ride in the future.


Edited 10/30/2024 12:04:32

In my experience, the MB approach to clanning doesn't scale. You're never going to get more than maybe 1-2 of those types of clans, because if they're not in the #1 spot (or very close to it), the clan will fall apart. Just look at M'Hunters, very soon after MB knocked them out of #1 the clan imploded and never recovered. That's what a pure CW clan looks like, #1 or dead. As far as I can tell, the thrust with this update is to try and force everybody into that kind of a clan, which is a great way to all but kill both Clan Wars and clans in general. Even MB is probably bored now as nobody is remotely close to challenging them for #1.

aren't there a number of thriving communities on this site of <40 players? MASTER, Python/Turtles, most of the clans before the Clans update?

does Harmony have more than 50 members that would be missed if they did a clan wide purge? even the big clans ime have core groups. Doesn't seem that catastrophic for a 50 member cap to be imposed on all clans, even the grandfathered-in ones. The OG clans with clan tags & off-site chats also didn't get that big.

Maybe the clans should just respond to incentives and size down.

"WZ is obviously very different. If you suddenly leave a clan, you'll likely be queried not only by your clanmates but by other players. "Oh you left XYZ, what happened?" Clans are a big deal here."

I know whenever I left a clam, I always had emails of kind words. Feels good man.

As for MB they are at almsot triple the other clams in points, they have never been anywhere near that far ahead before.
That is not good, but at least communities have been busted open and people annoyed so that's good.

That being said, I have no idea what can be done to make the battle for 1st an actual thing instead of a sure thing for MB, they have gathered the best of the best and thus will dominate any set up that isn't set up in some sort of ham fisted method to screw them.
Unless perhaps.... Duel Lotto for all!

That being said, I have no idea what can be done to make the battle for 1st an actual thing instead of a sure thing for MB, they have gathered the best of the best and thus will dominate any set up that isn't set up in some sort of ham fisted method to screw them.

MB is a lock for #1, outside extraordinary circumstances (like the ones that led to MB displacing MH), because they're at a massive advantage for attracting the best players.

If you're a high skill player who wants to play CW, the rewards-maximizing & impact-maximizing strategy is to just join the clan with all the other high skill players. If you join Prime, you will not make the clan substantially more likely to win the season- your impact to the CW Rating will largely offset your wins. By the design of CW, whichever clan has the high skill players now will be the best place for high skill players to go. It's just agglomeration effects, like in real life where industries tend to cluster around specific centers.

You don't need a ham fisted method to screw MB. You just need to fix the ham fisted design that creates MB. CW is anti-competitive by design.

Edited 10/31/2024 16:50:40

With a competition of 25 players/points it would be easier to get us defeated.
But other clans dont have commiment like we do, thats the main difference, not the skills.

How much effort do you expect them to put in when the deck's stacked against them by the design of the competition? Same participation with a lower win rate is what happens when they try- there have been seasons where OP has tried before, always falling short because they can't keep up with MB's wins/game even when MB plays slightly fewer games/day. It's the win rate gap that's practically unbridgeable by the design of CW, where OP would have to pour in extraordinary effort to catch up & MB could put in minimal effort to deny them.

After dozens of seasons of the same clan winning each time, it's a little ridiculous to still insist the competition lacks agglomeration effects.

Edited 10/31/2024 17:26:39

Well I kinda disagree with that Cicero. I disagree with the idea of MB is lock#1, we will see what the time will bring.
But it isnt just a commitment issue, as like to be put it short, if you arent winning head to head games against MB (in a good percentage), you arent gonna take 1st place from them.
I believe though at one point it will be a competition rather than what it is currently.
I wont explain why or how I think that since I have stuff to do irl. Maybe later.