You know, after 10 years of being official we'd rather be straight up moved to dead clans than become unofficial, I hope you can show old clans at least this small bit of respect to let them become dead clans rather than become unofficial (if they desire so).


That's merely a technical problem. It is possible to implement a tier which allows only people who enter forum less than X times per month to be there, or players who did not play for X time and so on. Of course it requires devs work, but if you value clans I think it's worth it. If you wanted you could have even organized whole "inactive clans" subboard to move these old clans there and keep clans which often were part of Toribash history and are almost (but not quite) dead there if they are active somewhere - for example on IRC as our clan is.

In general I feel really sad and a little bit offended by this move (but not very much as we all are too old to take online stuff personally I think). It's like the fact that we were good members of community for years and still consider ourselves as members of community (albeit not active) does not matter because staff does not consider us good enough to be acknowledged as official clan. And that it's fine to just get rid of us. It is sad, up to you to make this decision not to us (we've all accepted ToS afterall), but fortunatelly we have the right to be dissatisfied and tell you about it. I just hope that you acknowledge that we feel that it is sad and really unfair way to "thanks" people who often were pillars of community for years. I really hope you can find some kind of middle-ground which would satisfy old clans who aren't that active in game too rather than go with this policy.


It's great if you are willing to take SP into account as an exception though, I really hope it'll save some amazing clans like [T]!

Did hampa end up talking to you?

No.

Okay well an official clan is official because they were active and did good things in the community, essentially. If a clan is no longer active in the community, what reason does it have to be identified as an official clan? If it is pretty much dead the why keep it official? There is nothing left to be recognized as official. By what they are asking with this system it would not be that hard to pass the being active as a clan. All you gotta do is get rid of old members and make room for new ones. If they're not around anymore who really quite frankly cares? Of they come back you can reinvite them. Don't be stingy and keep all the positions held. It seems to me people are taking this a little more personal than they need to be. A lot, and I mean a lot, of the official clans have been official for a long time, therefore, it does not surprise me a lot of them aren't active anymore.

I do. My clanmates do. From what I see in this thread, many members of other clans do too.

You are free to not care. Staff is also free to not care, that's why they can implement this change. But we are allowed to care and that's why we post here stating that we don't like it.

Unofficial clan was created, then it applied for being official, paid TC fee for this and got accepted. Because we wanted to have place for ourselves on our subboard and to wear the same tag. Of course we could have just been talking in-game and remember our nicknames - who needs tags? But we wanted to be official, and we still want to keep our tag and board - even if only one post was done there every month, I'd still want to keep it as it is the only way to read what are other people (with whom I've spend hundreds of hours in-game and on IRC) up to.

For you that is not enough to be considered official, so it is for staff looking at new policy. And that's fine, you have right to have this stance, but so do people like I.

We could easily remove inactive / dead members, just keep ~10 active ones and play enough game to keep activity. But we'll rather be considered dead clan than remove our long-gone friends. That's how idealistic and sentimental some people are, it's an online community afterall, we can afford to be less pragmatic here, it's all about our history and our small, family-like community.

Overall i am against the current change. There have been many good points made and there is nothing i can add there. But i do have a suggestion.

Make this new change from being "Punish inactive clans" to "Reward active ones". With the new AI you could have automated rewarding systems such as icons that show up under your name in game (if it's too hard, in forum even); have special emoticons (maybe even customizable) in forum, the permission of which the clan leader can give in the "Edit clan" page; Achievements (if they ever get fixed) to clans that stay "super active" for a long time. There can be millions of ways to reward active clans.
And for the ones that pop up in-active should be reviewed by an actual clan squad just like they do now, afterwards they can post a warning with a bit more detail than they do now (because it does feel like an AI does it already).

I have no idea how the clan squad operates, but from what i see it's not as organized as the event squad's, in the way that it doesn't encourages the volunteer moderators to actually do their job, and all that is the team leaders job (how to keep a healthy team that does what they have to) (comparing tomatoes with potatoes with all the difference in their jobs and feedback times, but still something very important imo)


Also something aesthetically cool: a message next to the clan page "Clan Squad review pending" with three boxes underneath that shows how many check ups they have failed.

*Disclaimer: i am well aware my clan is beyond hope

Okay i'm a bit tired of being quiet.

It seems to be that no matter what, this new system for clans is just all around not good. From nearly every one who has posted on this thread, and even people who haven't, they all consider this a bad idea. Maybe it was brought in with the idea that it could help the game and forums etc. But rather than benefiting the clans and community, it seems like it will just deteriorate it. Which is not healthy for a small community such as this one. Now I'm no expert but I would think that people as admins would want to better the game that they are a part of, rather than just piss it off in a major way.

There are probably much better solutions to solve this clan problem than this.

Removing official status from clans, especially much older clans... Really?
It took a lot of effort to become official back then. In general becoming an official clan is not just some small feat. It's a hard earned achievement, and you dare come with the idea of taking that away from the people who worked to get it? I can imagine the amount of players this will drive away rather than bring forward with this. Replay-making clans as well are just as important.

Now you're allowed not to care, but when the backlash from this is well above the actual consent of it - then imo I think you should stop and reconsider this.

YES! I totally agree with that.

Will answer some of the questions that CS didn't reply to yet and will try to clear some things up. Going from most recent posts to earlier ones.


You can request clan deletion any time. Keep in mind that when clan gets deleted, all its members are also kicked. Only legendary clans get the privilege of keeping members (and in-game tags) after dying. There's a reason CS have decided to give clans a two-month preparation period so you could decide whether you want to boost your activity, ignore the changes and hope for the best or decide to ask for removal.



I considered adding an inactive rank that would be ignored during checks but decided not to do it for several reasons:
- It would have still had a member limitation
- Users with clan management perms may forget to add users to inactive rank and then start requesting their clans to be re-checked which slows down the check process

First point is the main reason why the idea of inactive ranks was scrapped in favor of giving max points for activity when a clan has at least half of its members active - that's essentially exact same thing. There's also a minor possibility of users who you think are inactive may play for a few days once a month but not tell anyone - in the case of inactive rank being a thing those games would be ignored but now they're not.



I may slightly out-of-touch when it comes to clans, but I don't remember any single clan that got official while having a non-existent in-game presence. The fact that old activity checks were so bad that a clan could pass it by accidentally making a few posts a week prior to a check, have no users playing in game - and only get warned for that doesn't mean that we shouldn't ever start checking activity the proper way. Keeping the official status has to be equally hard to receiving it. It's a pity that some old clans are going to get deofficialized as a result, but it also means that their members also don't care enough. I mean, there's only a few clans that aren't passing the check now but have max points for forum activity. CS aren't particularly opposed to slightly raising the amount of points given for clan activity to make it equal to required ingame activity and we'll probably end up doing exactly that before running the initial check in September (you know, duck is checking clans' progress almost daily to see the trends) - but currently it wouldn't save anyone. Out of clans that'd fail the check if it was ran today there's one clan that'd get max points for forum activity - but they also have absolute lack of in-game activity. And I'm sorry, but Toribash is a game, not a social network. If you have a clan, you're expected to play the game - at least a little. Yes it gets boring over time (just like any game would), but you can still keep talking to friends you've made in Toribash even without a clan, be it IRC, discord, any other messenger or a thread on this forum. You don't need a whole separate board to make ~50 posts per month.



No, there's no irony in that. That was an obnoxiously tedious process, and the main reason why clan checks weren't frequent wasn't that CS or any clan-focused staff team that preceded them had always been inactive, but because checking a clan that has 40 members in it manually was absolutely horrible.
We could make an automated system that'd use [i]exact same[i] criteria for judging clans' activity - and that would've been even easier because old checks didn't take a lot of data into consideration - but it was decided that there's no reason to keep a bad system when making it automated.



That obviously was and still is the case for clans which members you can still see in game after all the years. If a clan is inactive to a point that it's receiving 2 new posts in its board per week with almost non-existent in-game presence, no new member would care about you. Of course there are clans that are dear to old members, but it doesn't mean that the obvious needs to be ignored: there are lots of clans that are actually dead, despite passing old system's checks. Imo it's always better to see a clan going while it's still somewhat strong yet realizing that there's no more intention to play the game as much as it used to rather than see its members arguing with CS over every activity check warning and basically begging for another chance.



While our judgment would actually be often better than yours primarily to staff members' access to different sorts of logs and data, you're always welcome to apply to CS or any other staff team. We analyzed current clans' state before starting work on the new system, and it was decided that clans that are going to be taken down with these checks are those that would've been killed during any other activity check. You don't see the points and exact check results in the OP, but a lot of clans that are marked yellow are just a few points behind full pass - which literally means either getting one or two more of their members to play 6 games per month, playing a war or making a few more posts in their board. And please note that clans that fail to pass the check aren't even going to be deleted as they would have been in past - they'd only lose their square brackets in game and have to use a thread instead of a separate board.



I'm sorry but you're barking at a wrong tree here. Event Squad hosts events, not Clan Squad.
This also applies to your complaint about lack of communication between staff groups. Clan activity checks aren't an ES duty, so it makes perfect sense that ES members don't know as many details about the system as CS and smods+ do. It's called division of labor.


Playing 5 games is nice, and it looks like you played 35 games in total this month - that's definitely a nice boost from 0.
I saw you kicked ten members - which resulted in your clan getting max points for ingame activity. That was, however, unnecessary - with all those members still in your clan you'd still get over 50 points total which would've meant an activity check pass. Feel free to PM me if you want to get those members added back to your clan - I wouldn't advise kicking anyone you don't want to kick now. Wait for clans' personal activity check tools to be added (that'd happen until the end of this month once we're sure no more changes are going to be applied to the system), analyze the data until it's September, then start kicking people if you still want to stay official but there's no other way to ensure you can pass the check.


Well, that's your choice. But that'd also mean your clan will have its official status removed once you completely fail the check or after three warnings. That, of course, if your clan isn't made legendary.




TL;DR: Don't start kicking your members yet, re-read the OP and take note that staff aren't some bloodthirsty madmen looking to kill things.
- Activity check system can and will be tweaked until the initial check is run in September.
- Clans aren't getting killed when they fail the check, they're getting deofficialized. If you want to have your clan killed, however, you're free to request that from CS (I'm pretty sure that'd also require members' agreement though, duck will be more helpful with info on that).
- Old activity check system sucked, was tedious to execute and it's not going back.

I'm sorry but with all due respect to duck, maybe if you didn't want to come over as bloodthirsty clan killers, having him change his forum set before he posted the rework might have been... smarter.

That aside, you cannot deny that this system favors clans that remove all inactive members immediatly, even if that was never your intention. Aeon removed ten members not because we thought it was our only chance to pass, but because it was our best chance to pass again in the future.

In my opinion, no clan should have to make that decision, but I guess that is where we disagree.