Posted by DemonDude2 on 11-10-2020 at15:49:
Patch Notes: v. 2.4.5 - Clan Size Changes
TL;DR
To better incite the games primary theme of conflict:
- Clans should be limited to 10 members,
- With new mechanics added to increase that count alongside the number of available Zone 2's.
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Patch Notes: v. 2.4.5
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Great Patch! Nice little changes. I'm left wondering as to whether or not its gone far enough.
The maximum amount of people in any one clan is dropping from around 50+ to 30. Let's break this down.
- Ultimately, this means that there will be more clans on a server.
- It also combats the "mega clan" problem by dividing the most motivated and opportunistic players into smaller groups.
- Being a pseudo perma-death styled game, this is great as BWs revolves around War, Strife, Struggle, and other synonyms for conflict.
OK. So overall, this change makes sense and is a good change. However, I believe that it does not benefit servers in equal measure.
Lets review how it this takes affect for the UK player base.
- Firstly, this is for Seasonal Servers only. So UK1 and UK2 arnt changing.
- UK3 restarted this morning, so I cannot check its active player counts.
- UK3 had ~700 accounts on it yesterday.
- UK4 has ~470 accounts on it as of today.
- Unfortunately, the rankings on UK4 are misleading. For example, I play three of the characters in the top 25. I know many in the top 50 are also other players alts too.
- It's safe to say that there are approx 20 unique players on UK4 that are active enough to count towards the games ecosystem.
So while very cool on paper, we now see that this change means nothing towards UK4 and likely UK3 too.
UK1 has a much bigger population, and thats great. But even if this was applied on UK1 today, how big of a impact would it really have? The main thing to consider, is that this change seems intended to inspire the games core fundamental, which we've already established to be conflict.
Basically: it further emphasizes the incentive to war - primarily due to the limited number of top tier zones available.
I argue that there is effectively an unlimited number of zone three's in Blood Wars. The game simply isn't popular enough for 144 active members (plus the 13 from Zone Two and One). It's also safe to assume that Zone 1 will almost always be bouncing between the clans in positions #1 and #2.
This means that, when we're talking about the incentive for war, we're specifically talking about Zone 2.
This then boils down to the follow statement of absolute truth.
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| In order for the games fundamental concept of conflict to exist and its ecosystem to flourish, Any Blood Wars server needs to have more active clans than there are Zone 2's. |
Players need to have a chance to win. Far too often have we seen top players forming into a "mega-clan" making it pointless for smaller clans to waste time trying. And right now, while limiting clans to 30 might work on a handful of servers in other regions - it does not work here. As mobile games take over the market, I can only assume it does not work in most other regions too.
10 years ago, Blood Wars certainly did not support small clans. You needed to group up for two reasons: Safety and Expeditions. When you could only join 1 expo a day, you needed a regular team of people committed to you.
Good news though, the game has fundamentally changed due to one thing: the Good Samaritan feature. You can now have a clan of only 6 people and remain competitive towards every PvE encounter in the game.
Let's not forget, clans serve two other functions worth consideration: community and the clan armoury.
Like any mobile game out there, the community is served via the inclusion of the global chat. So thats fine. The clan armoury is indeed a sticking point, but if anything, smaller clans creates a critical task for each player: to help and develop your clans CA.
This leads me to my final observation. Smaller clans are better clans. Not only does it encourage players to work as part of the team once again, through arranging expo times and CA sets, a dynamic that is missing the game right now. But it also encourages the conflict, which does not exist in any UK server anymore. At all. Zilch. Zero. Nadda. etc.
So what is the right size? We can make do with 6. Sure. Totally! But is that too extreme? Most likely.
A better solution is to use the current mechanics in the game and twist them to work better.
- Clans start out limited to 10 players.
- The maximum member count of a clan increases by 1 for every 100 active accounts.
- Active accounts are those that have gained at least 100 points in the past month.
But wait... what about servers like UK4 that still wont have enough clans to match the number of zone two's out there. That brings us to part 2.
- The default number of Zone Two's is 2.
- Another Zone Two unlocks for 40 active accounts on the server (double the number of clans to war over the zones).
- Increasing to an eventual maximum of 12.
Done v2. These two changes will insight conflict within a server, forcing clans to fight over resources. They bring a sense of community and teamwork back into the game in a time when it's needed most.
Phew. This is the bottom, you made it here, woo! Sorry for the story... I couldn't see any easier way to tell it ^^ What do you think? Am I mad? I would love to hear your comments down below. Let's debate this one
