The clans / BA regen / activity issue... (in General)

Let's have some cold, hard numbers.

At 6/20 BA regen, you kind of expect to fight exclusively clan targets, and mostly 6-point-clan targets (let's say 80% of your targets).
Even if you are NOT in the habit of buying your daily BA, and you only burn 80% of your daily BA, that's still around 345 battles, out of which say 275 are against 6-point targets and 70 against 4-point targets.
That makes a grand total of 1930 clan points per day, the very least, for a clanner you'd barely consider at all worth having. Or, let's call that 50k points per month, give or take a couple of k (depending on how many Sundays the month has or other factors).

At the other end of the spectrum, say around 9/20 BA, you would expect people to buy their BA at least twice a week, and fight at least half of their opponents as clan targets, even if mostly 4-point ones. Let's call that an average of 3 points per battle (even if you'd expect more akin to 3.5 on average, but meh), and burning even less of their BA per day due to the "stress factor", say 70% of it. That's still over 3k battles per week, call that a round 12k per month, and let's lowball it to 35k clan points per month.
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So, you have 50k CP/month as barely acceptable for "oldies" and 35k per month as barely acceptable for "newbies", with a preferable number closer to 70k per month from just about anybody.
Let's look at the MONTHLY clan roster and count them...

There are:
* 26 people over 70k/month
* 16 people between 70k and 50k per month
* 16 people between 50k and 35k per month
= grand total of 58 people in clans that earn a pittance of 35k points per month
That's out of 184 active users from the past 7 days.

BARELY OVER A QUARTER OF THE PEOPLE THAT PLAY THIS GAME PLAY ACTIVELY ENOUGH TO EVEN BE WORTH KEEPING IN A FIGHTING CLAN.
This game has barely over 50 active-ish fighting clan players.
Doesn't that sound horrible ?!?
It sounds that way to me.

Can we please take that as a sign that there's something really, really NOT good with the way the clan system, clan bonus and whatnot else is structured ?
We need far more incentives to get people into clans, and KEEP people into clans, while at the same time motivating them to stay active over a longer period of time.
What we have right now just isn't working.
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My take on the most likely solution to work ?
There's actually plenty, and each could work either separately or in combination with the rest, but here's one in particular (plus reasoning).

While on one hand the competition in "stealing" clan points might promote some rivalry which might promote some extra fighting in theory, in practice, it just make people LEAVE CLANS AND THEN STAY OUT. When joining a clan costs money, and you either get booted from the clan because you were bringing the clan down, or your clan was disbanded, that's one of the very few ways you can actually LOSE CB$ for no particular fault of your own (other than not being active) in a game where you normally just can't lose CB$ unless you want to.
For that reason, I'd have to say, you should just remove all "clan-point-leeching" out of the equation altogether, and remove the clan disband feature.
Just make it a finer gradient for the clan point earning, anywhere from 1 (non-clan target), 2 points (target in bottom 33% clan) to 6 points (top 10% clan target), for instance.
Also, why not make clan points last for one WEEK instead of one day ? And why not remove the silly "no Sunday points/bonus" rule altogether ?
And last but not least, increase the bonus of top clans to something more attractive (like say 20% for top clan instead of just 15%, which combined with the 7/6 push upwards in potential clan-bonus earnings by also adding Sundays in would mean a bonus equivalent to 23.33% of the old one for the top clan).

Eh, what do you say ?

Motion seconded :-)

If you go for the 1-year option (to see how many manage a longer-term sustained activity with clan stability), you want at least an average of little over 40k per month (call that a round half a mil per year) for people that climb up with a N*B, and a nice 600k per year for longer-term players as a bare minimum for "might be worth keeping").
A desirable and stable clan member would rake in 840k+ per year.

Guess how many of those we have ?
Yup, 18 desirables, 17 decent, and 6 passable, for just 41 people that could just barely be considered the "backbone" of the stable fighting clan section.

Sure, some of them might be placed much better in the monthly stats, but they didn't keep up their work all year round, or they haven't even been in a clan for one complete year.

Yet, people still get a 6% bonus with almost not fighting and being in a singleton clan... Clan need to be more competitive, not less.

That just means you need a much steeper gradient and earlier cutoff, in order to have it competitive.

i think adding some achievements/titles/medals for clan participation would be a nice way to boost interest. add some type of system generated xp/cash/bs tokens/ba bonuses and i think people would be trying harder to be a top clanner.

Now I'll get behind that dudemus.

That does sound good dudemus!

I would think more of a problem would be there are ONLY 58 people in CB actually fighting. Give or take a couple that are not in clans.

That should be alarming more than anything.

Perhaps we should try to figure out why our fighting population is dropping.

Perhaps a Carnage Blender 3 along with some publicity on social websites and free games databases websites?

The screwed-up way disposable teams are encouraged with the current version of the N*B system.
The feeling that you can't do much without CB$ purchase, and the desire to sell out for profit.
All the positive things that keep dwindling, all the negatives that are either just annoying but never addressed, or are downright getting worse.
And so on and so forth.


A blood transfusion won't save you if nobody patches up your torn-open gut at the same time.
It's not the lack of advertising, new people keep coming in all the time... they just leave very soon after, and more and more of the older ones just can't take it anymore and quit too.
You need to "fix" the game itself first, THEN advertise for new blood.

Carnage Blender 3 is a pipe dream. CB2 ruffled enough feathers, and Jon was very active at the time. But the part that will tick off current players is that that pipe dream would require some form of rudimentary graphics to really lure players to stay past fifty fights.

And clans do need a revamp, but I don't like the idea of increasing the bonus past 15%. With so few clan fighters, the top clans are pretty much set in place (with the current system).

You could have fixed bonuses for the top 4 clans (25%, 20%, 10% and 5%), then use the curve we have now from the 4th clan downwards, but with 5% instead of 15%.
Effectively, only the top 3 clans would earn decent bonuses (and first two better than any we have now), everybody else would scramble hard for a bonus that would barely be better than what an idle solo clanner would get nowadays.

I'd rather see us start off by leaving the clan points calculation as they are, but having the system multiply the score of anyone not in the top twelve by zero (meaning they don't get a bonus). That would leave the active clan members with decent bonuses, and it would force the solo fighter to join real clans.

Competition around the bottom of those twelve would surely increase.

Or, we could remove the MPR limits on joining (so a clan could just as well have even 20 members) and just reward the top 2 clans (second clan gets a variable bonus depending on how close to the top clan in score they are), with nobody else getting any bonuses whatsoever.

At my size, there are only a handful for Clan fighters around, nd I have exactly zero of them on my fighlist.

Couple that with my lack of enough cash to purchase the ludicrously expensive NCB BA, and the general missing of BA due to RL, and I'm a crappy clan fighter.

But hey, as long as I bring some sort of overall positive amount of points, I'm not being a liability.

Oh and mechanically, Clans suck. ;) (Socially, they rule!)

I agree that change is definitely needed. Marketing for new active players is most definitely necessary; in order to do that, all the problems that steer players away need to be addressed.

as i have stated before, when our retention is zero, bringing in new players will do nothing for our playing population.

we need to fix retention before we do anything. get the mailer daemon working so that we can gather feedback on why our retention sucks and then fix those issues. once our retention is better than nothing, then we can worry about marketing.

we get new players every day, quite a few actually, and if we can keep them then we can go from steady loss through attrition to steady growth by word of mouth again.

we all think we know why people don't stick around but until we can find out for sure we are pretty much spinning our wheels.

Pretty much every system we have in place will work smoothly and wonderfully if our player base was about 100x what it currently is. The game was well designed to grow, except in overall design.

A game where you have no real chance of competition inside of five years with the top guys, and nothing really to strive for other than the top spot, there is only a select breed of players that will stay with the game.

I am still an advocate of a player cap, with some sort of compeition once you get there, I've made many suggestions of how this can happen, and this flaw of not having a cap is what is really keeping the player base low.

I'll still play this game for a long time because I enjoy it even though I won't be competitive for a very long time, so will the other 100 people that might read this post.

Guess we'll all just keep playing together, hoping for more like minded people to get born and learn how to use a mouse.

"A game where you have no real chance of competition inside of five years with the top guys"

Lies.

6/20 people don't even get 3 sets of natural regen BA per day, maybe 6/20 BA should count more towards clan points because of low regen.

More like, BA regeneration should be slightly less different from min to max, and cap should cover up to one full day of no-login at the max point without losing any BA.

i tried goin into clans but kept being booted out since i wouldnt/couldnt play as much as most of you here.

Can somebody tell me what's wrong with this picture ? :P

Are they already on your favorites list?

The score gap?

Eliteofdelete : the fav list is clearly shown on the left side and the relevant scores have a big red ellipse around them...

I don't see what you are trying to imply. You are going to have to explain something.

Oh oh I know! What is wrong with the picture is that you have yet to add those people with the higher score onto your favs list!

Or your pointing out the huge score exploit KoP is abusing without any penalty?

If its not either of those then I am at a loss.

Get it yet?

Ohhh yes thank you hatch. Now it all makes sense! :)

I don't know, look above, the thread didn't start with that picture, it was put there to make a point after the long, long preceding discussion.

How about...

That there's virtually next to no people between 3.5 and 5 mil score in clans ?
That the vast majority of longer-active clanners are either in the top score region (very little people that can attack them) or in the process of running a N*B ?
That a lot of high-score people are really high-score just because they're not in clans, so clan members simply ignore them ?
That the way the clan system is set up, it keeps driving more and more people away from clan fighting ?
And so on and so forth.

If you're at less than 4m score, you're probably less than 2m MPR or doing something wrong... If you're less than 2m MPR right now, you should probably NCBing if you're not running a bonus char already.

So, basically, we're back to the age-old "score wall" problem that was for a short while ago temporarily mitigated, it's just that the score wall is no longer at around 4 mil but at around 5 mil... and that's only thanks to the fact MPRs increased by at least that much, if not more.
Clan system, score system, everything linked together, everything almost beyond salvageable, ain't everything just peachy ?

There's a score wall around 5M I must have missed it.

Oh you mean that wall I flew right at around 1.8M score.

Actually Sickone, there really wasn't any type of score wall a few weeks ago. The score system and bonus was great. However, after KoP started his little abuse of the score system and keeps pulling them down, a lot of the NCBs seem to have bottled up around the 5 mill score range. However, if your start is good and you have a good tattoo you can get around it i.e. me and titan.

You mean, you could have gotten around it, as in, past tense..? :P

Er I think I am around it considering im in the 6.5-7 mill score range.

Not singular "you", as in, your personal character, but plural "you", as in, everybody else that starts about now.