If almost half (13 in 30) of the official clans in the game have a "De-Officialization" or "Activity warning" thread sticking out, don't you think this is completely unnecessary? You can't be fiending for those kilobytes that badly. This is only killing the members who come back every once in a while to reconnect with the old friends he made a couple of years ago.

i agree it does more harm than good

i do not speak for CS or higher staff, i just personally think these specific sorts of checks are stupid (really stupid) [really really moronic and counter-productive]

i think it sucks too
there aren't enough players to have more than a few clans that meet the requirements

additionally, alpha got a warning and then win everything

I'd rather not have this kind of system in place. The clan incentives are enough for our clan to keep some of us active, but with the clan system essentially forcing us to play, I either have to force my clan to play games, or make the difficult decision to kick our most inactive members.

Can a CS member explain why they made this decision? I'm still a little lost as to why they really did this

It really isn't that hard to meet the requirements of these checks, and the clan gets three warnings before they lose their official status. I really don't think it's unreasonable to expect the official clans, that are supposed to represent the community, to actually play the game once in a while and use the forums they are given.

If more than half of your members don't even play 5 games a month, and you don't even use your forums, I don't know why you should feel entitled to keep them when there are some much more active unofficial clans out there. If a clan is that inactive, why do they even care about staying official?

Even if the clan somehow fails 3 activity checks in a row, it isn't deleted, they just lose access to their clan board unless they reapply for official status. I really don't see how this is the big issue people are making it out to be.

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They aren't deleted, they just lose official status and access to their boards.



The reason they need to lose their official status is that having inactive clans as official devalues that status. Again, if your clan is so inactive that less than half of your members play 5 games a month, and no one uses your clan board, what purpose does that clan serve, and why would you care if it isn't official?

Inactive doesn't mean all members don't play. What we find happening when 'inactive' clans are killed, is the remaining active members usually quit. This is part of the reason why people say these checks are destructive to the community. We lost a lot of older personalities due to this bullshit.

We used to kill clans before, years ago. It wasn't as big a deal then. The community, while still small, wasn't nearly as small as it is now and the 'activity checks' in place didn't seem purposely designed to 'catch' clans out, as the checks by Gynx ('clan butcher') and Duck ('wannabe Gynx') were. The problem is in the way the activity checks were designed and presented to us by Gynx and Duck, and the problem is in the current size of our community.


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.

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'.

If remaining active members of these clans are quitting, that is a problem, but I still feel like the checks are lenient enough for those people to turn it around if they really care about their clan. The only real differences between official clans and unoffical clans is that official clans have their own subforum, and I don't see why 5 people need a whole subforum to themselves. After failing the checks, they will still have their clan, their clan thread, and the ability to communicate on other platforms like discord.

I don't feel like these activity checks are purposefully designed to catch clans out, they just catch extremely inactive clans that don't deserve to remain official, in my opinion. The clan checks were done by humans before, but it relied on unpaid people taking their time to do it, and the checks weren't always being done. The current system already gives a clan 2 months to sort things out.

Glad you agree.


From an insiders perspective (someone who was CS during Gynx's reign), I can tell you that Gynx just wanted to kill clans. De-cluttering the official clan list was a secondary objective. The argument we used to justify it back then was that 'officialness needs to mean something', same argument you're using. The /difference/ between then and now is that we have almost no-one playing and we have no growth. It /just/ ain't as necessary now.

Also, since we're looking at motive, Duck directly stated that he made the auto checks strict because he wanted to force in-game activity. 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. It was counter-productive af, and he received massive backlash for it.


Don't volunteer if you don't want to do anything. That is such a ridiculous argument that people make, especially for Clan Staff, given the fact that CS literally do next to nothing. It was 0 skin off my back to check through 1/6 of the clans (everyone has equal share) twice a year. I don't remember it ever taking more than 20 minutes. It was not hard work. It was PEAK idiocy/laziness for Duck to implement the auto-checks.


Current system kills you if you don't get enough 'points' after the warning. Different to what I proposed.