Ranking
Original Post
Multiclans
Originally Posted by Rai
Now that the initial heat has died down from this situation, there has been some posts with good points brought up and I am keen to see the direction that the discussion takes. What I'd recommend is that you start a thread in the Suggestions and Ideas board and direct people from the Off-Topic thread there where we can try to build something better.

The purpose of this thread is develop a solution to this recent mess regarding Parakeet. Use this thread to suggest alternative solutions to the problems perceived by clan staff.

The problems as clan staff see it:
Our rational is as so:

Parent-child, sibling, feeder or any type of multi-clans like this circumvent many intentional limitations placed on toriclans:
- member limits
- easy war farming
- easy achievement farming
- easy xp farming in general
- much larger (unfairly so) catchment for new recruits
- two recruitment threads, one usually in a space reserved exclusively for unofficial clans
- potential to play twice in clan events
- undefined interaction with activity checking

This Off-Topic thread, started when this new rule banning 'multi-clans' was implemented, has several suggestions for alternate solutions to clan staff's concerns, as well as arguments addressing the validity of clan staff's concerns. That thread should be considered required reading before posting here. I think Redundant's post, especially, shines a light on several good points.
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My solutions to some the concerns raised:
Member limits - If a clan is formed for the sole purpose of de facto raising the member cap of another clan, then sure, ban that. You don't need to ban 'multi-clans' to do this, simply make a rule that says 'Abuse of the membercap system will not be tolerated'. Then, if it ever does happen that a clan is created to raise the membercap of another, you can stop them under that rule.

Easy war/xp/achievement farming - As above, make a rule that forbids abuse of the war + achievement system. Assumedly this rule would already exist. There's no need to over-bureaucratize this.

Potential to play twice in clan events - If they're two seperate clans, with two seperate memberlists, I don't see the problem. If you suspect collusion would happen, ban collusion.

Undefined interaction with activity checking - I'll define it for you. Clans are active, or they lose their board. Both clans would have to be active (if both clans were official (since unofficial clans don't get activity checked)). This is really a non-problem.
Last edited by Ele; Nov 19, 2017 at 08:43 PM.
Note I shouldn't need to mention but I will for the sake of attempting to head it off before it starts.

Don't devolve into insults and tantrums. Keep it civil and continue to aim for a resolution that satisfies, if not pleases all parties.
Any reasons as to why a trial / feeder rank cannot be used within Parrot to sort out new players?

If the player cap within a clan becomes and issue, wouldn't raising that be a better solution to facilitate that large clans still can have trial members?
Now doing recoloring for people not in the clan as-well, PM for more info!
PROUD OWNER OF THORN'S GOOD ENOUGH WRITER AWARD!
i propose an official, inbuilt system for feeder clans: an official clan can apply for a feeder clan that'll be placed in a sub-board - that can be used for the purposes of the new feeder clan, including their discussion and recruitment thread in there. it could also include some other threads such as the discussion of members to progress to the full clan etc. etc.

this can be done so it doesn't shit up the clan discussion, and it also should mean official clans get less shitty apps from newcomers and players like that, these clans would be moderated by clan staff to ensure that they're not doing anything dodgy with the parent clan, if needed then perhaps they could be prohibited from entering clan events that the other clan's a part of.

just my idea, please tear it down and tell me why it's terrible
Originally Posted by Smogard49 View Post
Any reasons as to why a trial / feeder rank cannot be used within Parrot to sort out new players?

Parakeet would house players we wouldn't accept into Parrot. Point of Parakeet would be to build them up to that Parrot standard. We want to be sure about people before letting them into Parrot - Having a trial rank, for people we're not sure of, within Parrot would defeat that imperative.

@Surge, I don't think devs would want to spare the time creating this new inbuilt system for multiclans you're suggesting. Especially since it's not an overly big problem that's being dealt with.
Last edited by Ele; Nov 19, 2017 at 09:28 PM.
Originally Posted by Ele View Post
Parakeet would house players we wouldn't accept into Parrot. Point of Parakeet would be to build them up to that Parrot standard. We want to be sure about people before letting them into Parrot - Having a trial rank, for people we're not sure of, within Parrot would defeat that imperative.

I still don't see why you could not use a trial rank for that? The member standards aren't often applicable on trials, and haven't been in the community for as long as I've been here.
Now doing recoloring for people not in the clan as-well, PM for more info!
PROUD OWNER OF THORN'S GOOD ENOUGH WRITER AWARD!
imagine if every official clan had a feeder clan

don't you think this community is too small for this kind of thing?
@Smogard:
As I said, we don't want a chunk of our clan filled with people who we feel don't meet our standard. It's as simple as that. We do have some pride in our [Parrot] tag, and we wanna make sure that the people who get to wear it are people who we think are worth it.

If you want to complicate it, think of it as an integrity issue. What [Parrot] means gets lessened and diluted by every member we accept that isn't up to par. With (Parakeet), we're keeping [Parrot] as [Parrot], while still opening up and allowing for newer and lesser-known members to eventually have the opportunity to join us if they put in the effort.

@basic: Slippery slope.
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Also, I'm going to redirect focus back to brainstorming solutions for a compromise. This thread shouldn't turn into a basic discussion thread, a la the Off-Topic thread - We've already had that.
Last edited by Ele; Nov 19, 2017 at 09:55 PM.
It seems really unnecessary for such a small community. Alternatively you could reject them and tell them to reapply when they've got the parrot standard (whatever that is!)

Not to mention I think this would too much of an ass ache for staff to maintain.
Potential to play twice in clan events - If they're two seperate clans, with two seperate memberlists, I don't see the problem. If you suspect collusion would happen, ban collusion.

Ok ban collusion, easy fix. But now staff have to try and figure out whats collusion and what isn't? This whole subclan thing seems to just create a lot of work and worry for something that isn't necessary at all.

Your solutions to all these problems are "make a rule for this" make a rule for that, but why go through all that effort of making and enforcing these very difficult to enforce rules for something that provides very little value. How do you tell a clan thats just trying to avoid member limit apart from a clan thats just an offshoot for less than acceptable members?

I mean I personally don't care if there are subclans or not, but i just dont think the hassle and work it creates is worth the value it provides.
i created the ??? emoji
like a lighter bitch we ignit
Hi hello, gonna just go down and copy paste the points from the OP and address them individually with suggestions and thoughts.

Parent-child, sibling, feeder or any type of multi-clans like this circumvent many intentional limitations placed on toriclans:

- member limits
Ok so I feel that this point was kinda missed. It's not specifically because Parrot was trying to do it, we know they weren't. But it could very easily be used to do so.
The simple solution is to limit the membercap of a feeder clan to that of it's parents.
So if parrot has 55 members, and has a membercap of 70, Parakeet could only be allowed a maximum of 15 members, and Parrot would need to continue warring to up it's membercap for use in Parakeet.
The issue therein is that leveling up for parakeet loses some of it's meaning, but I guess they're different from standard unofficial clans anyway.

- easy war farming
You're right, can be easily fixed with it's own rule. Can add an addendum that states that you can't use the official war system for wars between Parent/Child clans. I don't wanna say you can't war each other cos I imagine that shit would be pretty fun for everyone, especially if the child clan won, just can't use the toriclan system for it.

- easy achievement farming
Same as above, just make sure the two clans have no official interaction with each other within the toriclan system.

- easy xp farming in general
Above.

- much larger (unfairly so) catchment for new recruits
The point seems to have landed with some and others shout that it's pointless.
I think Bish made a pretty good point in the other thread:
Originally Posted by VIDEOGAMES View Post
I think the point he is trying to make is that not moderating the number of clans has potential to lead to squashing regular unofficial clans.
If only half of the current official clans decide to make unofficial sub-clans, the entire first page of the unoffical clan subforum could have 0 regular, non-feeder clans. I think it's easy to see correlation between being on the first page and what clans people apply for. I sort of doubt that many sub clans would arise, but I don't think its right to write rules that only work situationally.

The rules and system that we implement need to work on the basis that every official clan has the ability to create a feeder clan, and if that were the case you have a significant portion of the front page of unofficial clans being taken up by the already well established community, which very much hurts the 13 year old who's just getting into this unique ass video game with a couple of his mates and wants to be the next Nuthug.
Surge mentioned a sub board within the clan board (I'm assuming) but I think that's not really a solution. The idea is that you grab new players, but hiding the DSC within a sub-board of another board in a board etc. isn't viable.
Agree or not there is a very real damage that can/will be done to unofficial clans if feeder clans are allowed to freely act within the same pool as them and I don't know how to rectify this without shitting on feeder clans.
Like the only thing coming to mind are no DSC in the unofficial board (but there can be one in the parent board of the clan).

- two recruitment threads, one usually in a space reserved exclusively for unofficial clans
Similar to my above point, but I would argue it's even more important that genuine unofficial clans be given the priority in this board as it's kinda the sign posted GO JOIN NEW CLANS HERE board.

- potential to play twice in clan events
Again, the rules would feel like I'm shitting on feeder clans but ultimately you could just say if Parrot (or parent) was involved in a clan event, Parakeet (or feeder) would be ineligible to play, end of.

- undefined interaction with activity checking
This one is left pretty broad because it's highly speculative in my mind, it's based on a series of what ifs that will be in effect in varying degrees constantly.
The extreme what if is; what if Parrot dies and Parakeet is thriving? Do we make Parakeet the new Parrot? Does Parakeet cut all ties and it becomes it's own clan?
How would we count them in activity checks? If Parrot was worthy of a warning but the Parakeet board was booming, how do we reconcile the two.
I think I know how this will be answered so I'll preemptively make my counter argument.
Feeder clan IS HEAVILY TIED with parent clan. I've seen lots of arguments say "it's its own clan just with endorsement". In my head it's like a disguised official clan in the unofficial board and so far none of the arguments presented have managed to convince me otherwise. Just people saying "yeah but we could say it's not then what's the difference". Well the difference is we're not idiots and it's obvious even if it's technically independent in terms of rules.

Ultimately the tl;dr for me is that there would be a lot of limitations put on feeder clans i.e. membercaps based on parent clan, DSC limitations in some form, lack of official event participation. Which makes me question is it worth it? And that question isn't for me to answer, it's up to the clans that would want to do that. I don't get/like the idea of a feeder/trial clan anyway, but that's founded purely in personal preference.

With regards to Surge's post about integrating it into the toriclan, I don't know how much work that would be for something that may not get much use. It also only really fixes the membercap/warring based issues, still got the issue of the DSC/activity kicking about.

EDIT: There have been a load of replies since I started writing the post dear lord have mercy I'll try and address some with edits.

EDIT2: With regards to the replies, it doesn't really matter if you feel the community is too small for it. If they want to do it then so long as it's done in a non-harmful way it doesn't matter. Personally I think the community is too small for it, which is why the rules have to be ready to deal with the possibility of every official clan doing this, it's not just about Parrot. Which I already addressed in my reply.
Last edited by Erth; Nov 19, 2017 at 10:08 PM.
She/They

Yeah, I only don't like erthtkv2 because of the mod's name. Make it "tkv2," and the mod will instantly become more popular. This is a valid reason as the name of the mod is still an important feature that no one seems to have yet discussed.