Originally Posted by Ele
CS don't actually engage with clans. If I'm CS lead, and it looks to me like a clan is pretty much dead, I'd message the leaders (or whoever's left) asking them if they'd agree that it'd time for their clan to die. If they say no, I'd give them 2 months to turn it around. If there's improvement and it's trending upwards, I'd let them carry on.
Agree to an extent; see appeal.
Originally Posted by Ele
It doesn't have to be some heartless equation that handles clan activity checking, and it shouldn't be - It's inaccurate, destructive and plain lazy.
We don't need some formalised system of warnings, activity points and so on. All we need is a bit of 'human touch'.
Can guarantee that the work that went into the system was far from lazy. A human touch is required, I agree, however the automated system is an invaluable tool if adapted and used correctly.
Manually activity checking is a tedious job and I know I sure as hell wouldn't want to do it. I genuinely believe a balance can be achieved between both a system that can quantify activity
on the platforms toribash supplies and maintains and bit of compassion.
Originally Posted by more Ele
What happens if you're a forum active clan, but don't play the game much? Well now you're killed and you're leaving the website.
So long as you're using one or the other (preferentially ingame, ideally both) then stay and do your thing home slice.
Originally Posted by Powas
I think that the system itself, as it is now. is not bad. The problem is, it is being applied to already dying game and a community which is in a state of regress. Had it been developed and applied ~3 years ago, when the playerbase was 4 times bigger than it is now, it probably would do some good. Right now it is only pissing off the older players.
We just got killed and I'm fine with that as we survived long enough to reach "our" 10 years mark but let me tell you this - even if I join any other clan, I'll be even less inclined to play the game than I am now. Other refags, that lurk post and play ocasionally, will quit doing that for good.
Give it 2-3 more months and the official clan list will consist of ~10 clans, consisting of their original members and survivors of the purge. I don't expect many new clans to rise up and take the place of the old ones. Give it half a year and you're looking at a game with a playerbase of 50 people, half of them being staff. Good riddance.
I agree. A few years ago a system like this would've probably been fine if combined with a few other things like events to keep clans interested and playing the game. Criteria needs to be fluid to adapt to the playerbase and community.
As per the Clan Outreach thread I'm erasing any current strikes. re lives for the time being and we'll see how she does with the newer systems.
Can't argue with the last point, just gotta do what we can to make the game fun again and attract some new people in.
Originally Posted by Ele
@CS, response...?
ayy waddup
Originally Posted by Ele
Checks oughta be done twice a year - Clans should be inactive for a full year before they die.
Checks should be manual.
Checks should consider if an at-risk clan is more forum/ingame focused (i.e. Alpha is ingame), and that should play into whether the clan is warned.
Discord should be considered in checks.
A full year off the bat is pretty excessive. Current suggestions put it at 4 months of total deadness, 6 months if there's still a little bit left with a successful appeal extending that time to a year potentially. I hope that this gives clans a chance to save themselves with active recruitment and stuff.
The suggestion is a mix. I doubt it'll ever go back to fully manual.
Yes.
How would you implement discord checks? IRC has never counted in checks before, and it's arguable that IRC should've been counted as it was a toribash specific platform, which doesn't apply to discord. In my mind discord strays into a seperate thing entirely whereby the community has formed on toribash but is now manifesting itself outside of it. And all we can do as clan squad is take care of the toribash side of it.
Originally Posted by pouffy
None of these things are going to happen
oof
Originally Posted by Moop
This is all so disappointing. Toribash is one of my favourite games of all time and it blows my mind that the CS are still going ahead with this despite the fact that seemingly everyone still left in this community hates it.
I haven't really bothered posting on any of these threads before since every point I could add has already been made. I kinda assumed that after long enough it would sink in that the CS made a mistake here. Toribash is a game with such a tiny community, with the majority of older players only really hanging around for the occasional clan event that is hosted. Killing these clans will reduce the chances of those players ever coming back. If Parrot were to get be axed I'm pretty sure I'd never be bothered to come back, along with the majority of my clan.
I know that others have made this point already, but I am really surprised that it hasn't been listened to. It just seems like common sense. Instead, staff are just squeezing Toribash's neck harder and harder until the inevitable.
Again - it's so disappointing
Hi Moop ily
Originally Posted by sleepwalking
i'm pretty most of the CS are in clans that are dead or in danger of dying. could be wrong, but the fact that any of them are sums up this whole thing pretty well
I'm hoping to improve clans to the point where I want to leave a dead clan in order to join an active one to participate in the new features. That's how I'm going about this, if that helps.
Originally Posted by smaguris
Most official clan members aren't interested in playing the game or using the clan forum, they have other means of communicating (e.g. discord), so it becomes a chore to play the game in order to keep the clan board.
But if you're not using the two things that being a toribash clan fundamentally provides, why should you be an official clan?
Hi Fear, how are you? Did you win LoL yet?
Under the new criteria it is possible for a
very active forum clan to pass checks on forum activity alone. I'm hoping to encourage people to go ingame through the rest of the stuff, but we'll keep that as a baseline.
Originally Posted by Powas
Embrace the entropy and hope that toribash next, if it ever happens, reiginites a spark of interest in some people, and then use the current system as a basis for something better, make a new start. Forcing activity right now won't do you any good.
There are a lot of ways you can approach the current situations, but here are some ideas:
1. Give old clans an option to retire. You could make a new subforum for such clans (could be hidden), move them to dead clans or simply mark as retired on the clan list. Retired clans would keep the square tags, the ability to post in their forums and wouldn't take part in activity checks. Some limitations could be introduced, such as:
- retired clans can't take part in in-game clan events (such as clan league) unless they prove their activity by passing a check month before such event starts. That'd require some additional communication between CS/ES and retired clans, to let them know that a clan event is coming.
- only clans older than X years can retire. I'd suggest 3 years but that's up for a discussion.
- retired clans can't recruit new members
- retired clans can't get points for clan perks as they are not part of the checks.
This way older generation of players, no longer actively engaged with the game itself, could stay as a part of community, while you could still keep active clans up to a certain standard.
2. Simple. Put the system on hold till the release of tb next, take that time to take a feedback from community and reinvent it.
3. Make it ,,3 failed checks within a year mean removal" instead of ,,3 warnings in 6 months". Get some more ideas for perks, give clans on ,,activity" streaks point modificators (f.ex x 0.5 for each active month), while clans in the yellow (warning) state get reduced perk points.
Hoping to use this as a base for next, ye.
We explored the option of retired clans. A lot. Here are some extracts from the various conversations that explain why we ended up not going in that direction: (omg leaking)
the whole discussion on clan retirement, though I haven't read it in detail, feels to me like it's destructively ignorant of the actual underlying problem.
[...]if a clan's worth keeping around into retirement, shouldn't the system just be designed so that they'll be alive anyways?
Core of the issue isn't checks being bad anyway, it's people not being given any challenge after they spend a certain time in game
If a clan is really dead, it should be dead - unless it's legendary
Originally Posted by Dinis
Don't overthink it though, this is unnecessary. Before asking yourself the most efficient way to go about this, ask why you're doing this in the first place.
Hey Dinis. So I had a think about this after reading your comment and this is a portion of a text wall post I made in the CS board.
Originally Posted by Erth
A clan is a group of friends/players with a common goal. That goal can be winning things (Alpha, win, Urban etc.), it can be more peripheral skills such as art or single player (T, doc, evo), it can just be a group of like minded people (raid, TLL, Aeon etc.) or it can even just be people who speak the same minority language (Undead, Hack etc.).
Given this, it's far from our place as staff to say "you're not good enough at being friends to keep your clan tag". The goal should only be to remove totally dead clans, not to telling people who are kind of alive that they're not doing a good enough job at enjoying the game.
I hope this system aligns more with that kind of mentality, and I hope the community agrees, at least, that positive steps are being taken to achieve a solid solution.
Originally Posted by Nike
But could you change the system a bit to the point where a clan could stay alive just by being forum active. To my current understanding, no matter how much you post / play ingame the point you will get just the maximum point of those area, why not make it if it is already on the maximum point it still could increase but not as easy as before it reach that maximum area?
Done.
Originally Posted by Thrandir
Just make it carrot instead of the stick. At this point killing clans makes very little sense, make the checks easier to pass so that only clans with nobody caring are deleted. Give more prominent prizes for active clans. Make events for clans with sneak peeks some time earlier (like 2-4 weeks) informing that only clans with X points of activity will be allowed to take part in them so that they put their effort into doing so. Just goddamn make people WANT to be active because it's cool, profitable, fun instead of throwing clans which were part of their life for a long time into the trash because "you don't need it with this level of activity anyway". We certainly don't need them for almost anything, but we go out of the way to fight for it anyway - that should show you as the staff that we still have some, even if very little - attachment to this game and if you ever want to make it active (for example when Toribash Next comes) with our force, it might be good idea to cherish this instead of pushing forward with policy which users clearly hate.
And you prefer to throw it into the dirt anyway, for what? What were good things you've noticed in the community after introducing this system? Except of occasional activity spikes from some players who were forced to play, because I mean global statistics - did you see increase of average posts per month? Did you see increase of active players pool and average time they spend in toribash? Did you see community being happy about this experiment?
Hi Thrandir ily
We're hoping to implement way more interesting ways to gain activity points with ingame "quests" and competitions. The faaaaar reaching end goal is to get the community to a stage where we could put up some fun not giant clan events.
Bolded part is bolded cos big mood. While we don't want to keep totally dead clans there is an element of wanting to keep them around for maintaining a toribash microcosm of their own.
Originally Posted by Wounder
This issue, hell even this thread alone proves how disassociated high ranking staff members are from the actual game / community, it truly is a shame. 100% of the normal players who have posted here are against the way the clan system is currently in place, yet they are deciding to keep it the way it is anyway, it's almost like talking to a brick wall.
Ouch.
I somewhat agree, but I'd prefer not to get into that kind of discussion. At least here.
I'm hoping to bridge the gap a bit more, because it's wider than it's ever been.
Originally Posted by Tuna
Instead of putting the effort into an automated clan system, it would have made more sense to put that effort into making new ways for the ES to make the game interesting. New regular events. With, most importantly, new tools for them to utilise, host new automated events so that their workload is alleviated. God knows they need that more than the CS. But hey, hindsight is 20/20, I'm sure Duck had good intentions when he rolled the new system out, if it was even him.
It's just time to accept that it didn't work.
The two weren't/aren't mutually exclusive. Developments have been made in all areas.
I'm glad someone recognised that there were good intentions, because I truly believe there were and are.
Originally Posted by Frost
Clan Checks should be done for every clan, not just official. Equal rights to all, right?
I couldn't tell quite where the rest of your post came from/was going so I'm gonna ignore it for now lmao
We don't do this because unofficial clans are just using a thread in a pretty large board. Official clans have been rewarded with a board, tags and respect because they've paid their dues and the checks make sure that all of those things are still used and appreciated. Plus, Johnny Fortnite, new 12 year old player finds the game, finds it super interesting, makes a clan with him and a few of his buds for a little bit and is suddenly being bombarded with activity checks? Nah man, official implies a degree of organisation and knowledge of the community, so it's fair to check up on them.
Originally Posted by Ynvaser
You are the hero we need, Erth. Don't fuck up.
A new thread found
here details some changes to the system and criteria that I'm hoping make it more acceptable to the community. Imo it's definitely a step in the right direction at least.
It's another text wall, so I'm sorry for that but it do be like that sometimes.
Going to close this thread now in the hopes of stimulating discussion in the other one. o7
