Rocklizard wrote:
I am slightly wary of clans though - for many new players there is always a feeling of alienation, of not being part of the in-crowd... it will be important that clans are open to anyone and that there is some balance of skill level between clans
Very good points! Yeah, we definately don't want anyone to feel alienated, because that totally defeats one of the purposes of clans, to bring everyone together. I hope we haven't done that. The only reason the NWO isn't recruiting right now is because we are hoping to see a few more clans formed (2 opposing clans aren't enough for this system to work well, in my mind). It is nice to see there is some interest out there, and maybe at some point a few other people will take some initiative to start a clan.
As far as the skill level issues, I totally agree. We need to make sure there are people from all experience levels in the different clans to make the clan tournaments more fair, but we haven't come up with a good way to do that yet. We don't want to do too much clan regulation because that will limit the ability of clans to be creative. In the clan war that we've been designing, we do have some encouraging factors to make sure your clan members play against well matched opponents, but that doesn't work if one clan has all veteran players. Any suggestions you or anyone else has to make this system better would be welcome.
Another point I've been thinking about is that clans don't really solve the problem of not being to rate ourselves individually. It is more of a team effort geared towards having more interesting matches not following a traditional league setup.
So I agree with Dracovious on the need for more tournaments, leagues as well.