Clan Management Tools Need Serious Attention

[Faulcun]

Since the beginning, many of us have been asking for better clan management tools. I have made posts on this over the years, and have voiced my concerns in a few devstream threads. I can understand how these concerns may go unheard, or even ignored, as the majority of the community do not run clans or alliances or are not responsible for event management or clan activities. I can see the percentage of people this actually concerns being less than 1%. But it is us that facilitate the experience for a solid majority of the other 99%. This is no simple task.

With that being said, I dread events. Not because of the challenge, but because it highlights and exaggerates all of the troubles we face when attempting to manage and communicate with our people.

Id like to get a few things out of the way first:

• Not everybody uses discord/teamspeak/voice comm
• Not everybody uses forums
• Not everybody uses steam

• Not everybody uses *input random third party software*
• Not everybody sees the MOTD and is limited in characters

The ONE software that we all 100% have in common though.... is Warframe. We should be able to manage our people from within.

When clans are capable of housing 1000 people, or alliances with 4000 people, it frustrates me to no end that we dont have better clan management tools.
 

1. To begin with, we should be able to communicate with all of our members online and offline and not have to worry about who hasnt been reached. The easiest thing to do is make use of the inbox system. If we could send out a mass email to everybody's inbox, then the people offline would see it when they log on. During events, we find ourselves having to repeat ourselves with what feels like thousands of times trying to make sure everybody is current on information. Its like authorized spamming of clan chat. We spend more time attempting to get information out than we do actually playing the mission.
2. We also need an automatic "welcome" message that we can customize to welcome people to the clan/alliance. We spend a lot of time trying to share and explain resources to new members, or stuff all the info into the MOTD. It would make things so much easier for them to receive a message in their inbox with voice chat information, clan forums, steam group, clan rules/expectations, or anything else that would be useful information to a new member.
3. Another issue highlighted during this last event (every event really...) is trying to track who still needed to even do it. Some members didnt even know there was an event going on, but we couldnt even track people beyond the 20 top people in the clan. A large problem was that for this particular event, the statistics for it were missing from everybody's profile. So we couldnt even do it the super long way by checking profiles. A simple solution to this would be to allow us to scroll through, at the very least, our own clan leaderboards.
4. Access to a more detailed log of clan actions would be a huge asset as well. Right now the clan log shows research completed, rooms built, and people joining and leaving the clan. However only portions of the log update. We have log entries showing rooms and research built years ago, but when you remove say... 20 inactive people, it only shows the last 5 or 6 entries while the research entries stay. We should be able to see administrative actions and who did them. Invites, kicks, research, rooms, deletions, etc. Even if it only shows the last 30 days, when you are dealing with thousands of people, these tools are invaluable. 

Recruitment

The process for recruiting has become atrocious. The old recruiting area has become so restricted, and default sorting set on "date created", while the new clan page area is default set on "most members" which literally has nothing to do with how many people are ACTUALLY in the clan. And if it did, how does a ghost clan compete with a moon clan without somebody having to change default sorting?

Previously the forum system let the most active or most dedicated clans keep their recruitment posts on the first or second page. The new system tore all that down and left us with this:

• Active clans used to regularly get daily requests to join from their forum threads. Now depending on your location in the clan list you get as few as 0.

• The new system seems to just sit static and puts all the requirements of finding a clan on the players.
• Players, and new players especially are not going to play around with the filters and go further than the first two pages.
• New players aren't going to know or care about the difference between the clan types or how to use the clan list properly
• The main thing the change to the new clan view system on the forums accomplished is guaranteeing members for the first clans to set up pages and relegating the rest to the bin.
• the worst part of this new system is it doesn't link to game at all. Even already joined members now have to find the clan listing and join manually.

In game recruiting requires constant active work on the part of the clan with the changes to the forum recruiting this is the only viable way to recruit for clans and it's exhausting.

• You spam something like "{Fusion Community} Storm Clan | Rank 10 | All research complete | Ingis wraith | 18+ | Newbie friendly | " which is meaningless to new players and is swiftly swallowed by all the matchmaking because again New players won't know how to use the chat filters. Hell most high level players don't know how to use the chat filters.
• Like anything in recruit chat you end up near spamming this endlessly just to get a few bites which clutters up the recruitment chat and makes it even harder for players that don't understand filters to use recruitment chat in the first place.
• Excess clutter in recruitment sends normal users to attempt to recruit in region which breaks chat rules, as well as angering the mods because spam.

What I'd really like to see is a Clan register in game with nice columns with headings like name, size, rank, research, occupancy that can be moused over for a tooltip explaining what each heading means then being able to sort by column and search so players themselves have an in game way to review clans and send requests to join to those that look interesting to them.

Ultimately the recent changes made over the last year alone have tied our hands to the point that most clans will simply die and disappear. This last event should be a huge eye opener. The standard was 50% active, and yet look at how many clans barely even made it. Now we feel like we're being choked because we cannot recruit efficiently. Something has to change. These systems need to be looked at hardcore.

This post was written in conjunction with other leadership in the community. I thank everyone for their input.

Edited June 5, 2019 by Faulcun

[Zelmen]

21 minutes ago, Faulcun said:

Id like to get a few things out of the way first:

• Not everybody uses discord/teamspeak/voice comm
• Not everybody uses forums
• Not everybody uses steam

• Not everybody uses *input random third party software*
• Not everybody sees the MOTD and is limited in characters

 

I remember my first time on the internet. The people that don't use those things are a very small group in the current generation of things. The only one I will agree with is the MOTD because that disappears so fast and other than one window is never seen again. For purposes of what the game should have, yes, we should not have to rely on 3rd party applications to manage a clan.

I can agree with a lot of your points. Requirement and even trade could be better with a simple posting window. There is no reason to spam text for the same thing over and over. Should be one window for people to scroll through rather than race to read everything before it disappears off the chat window for ever.

 

[Faulcun]

4 hours ago, Zelmen said:

The people that don't use those things are a very small group in the current generation of things.

Finding ONE person who chooses not to utilize ANY of those things are indeed far and few between. The real problem, which is much more common, is that ONE person chooses not to utilize only ONE of those options. Therefore, we are forced to utilize multiple sources in an attempt to accommodate.

The result is that a group of people dont want to use teamspeak, or another group of people dont want to use discord, and another group dont use the warframe or even our own forums, or some people dont use steam.

This means we have to broadcast across ALL options in the hopes of reaching as many people as possible. Then I start getting complaints as to why we cant just use ONE thing and make life easier. Even then, we still are unable to get the message out to 100% of our people.  Smaller clans dont feel this pain as much. But the more members you have, the more difficult it becomes.

[Drasiel]

Clan communication and member management has been stagnant for years, I hope that when the clan UI is reworked as part of the overall UI rework that we see some improvements like we have with other systems. However waiting with nothing but hopes and dreams isn't good enough anymore, especially if Railjack is going to be more clan focused. We need better in game tools for managing our people.

[2ply]

I agree with the OP 100% on all accounts. 

The rework of the clan recruitment forums section is atrocious, unfair, and deceiving. It's a real slap in the face to clans that actively WORK to keep their rosters full, it diminishes honest recruitment efforts down to ZERG style tactics, buries clans with healthy activity under alliances of who knows what. I used to be on your forums everyday, I used to use your recruitment section to find new players and I had great success in the past...but since the rework it doesn't exist anymore. The forums recruitment section is useless as it stands. But my clan is still full...but how? 

Because instead of having a nice legit automated system of request and confirm...I have to monitor recruitment chat for hours daily, wade through TONS of copy/paste "join our clan adds" to find a player asking for a clan...I spend TOO much time doing this, I don't really even get to play the game itself much, that is if I wanted to keep the clan at full roster. I can hardly even interact with my fellow clan members as my attention is fastened to a scrolling wall of random texts in a recruit chat window for the majority of the time. This is tedious at best and soul sucking. 

CLAN RECRUITMENT PEOPLE...why are alliances allowed in the same area as CLANS when the "front page spot" is determined by NOT the number of actual clan members in a group but the number of times someone (alt accounts even) have hit the "join clan" button. Who in their right mind decided this would be a good idea. This is completely just wrong on many levels. I simply do not even bother using the warframe forums for recruitment anymore. But, that's fine, I don't think we need it, If we had a better in-game system to work with. 

As for the INBOX in game, I understand that there are probably a lot of back systems, server space...etc etc etc that have to be taken into account, this INBOX system was not designed for p2p communication. I get that...but I think it should be priority to make a functional mail system for inner clan related communication. For YOUR health DE. 

DE, we keep your game alive. We the clan leaders, and We the community managers inside the game and inside those clans. We find ways to teach your new players ways to ENJOY your product. We produce community, friendship and a home for players to come back to. We educate them, we equip them and we hold their hand through the sorted progression that is the new player experience. 

Can we at least get some decent logistics to make it easier for us to manage your player base?

For the future of Warframe we need a better system to monitor, inform, engage and enhance the player base in our clans. The majority of players who don't find a good home won't stay in the game long. The great clans of warframe produce that home to come back to, and in that home the players find the other half of the game they were missing. 

The idea of making a new UI for clan communication and management seems like a dream, but so did Warframe itself 7 years ago...so lets make this better clan UI our 2nd Dream, sound good?

Ok, off my soap box, thank you everyone. 

[M3tallius]

I don't often agree with a post that long, but count me in on this. Finding a good clan was so daunting, I gave up and made my own. I never faulted any of the clans I was in, such as ODIN network, great bunch of guys, but really, how on earth could the leadership manage us in this format? It's like trying to run a clan with a 1980's MUD text interface.

[MagPrime]

Yes, please!

[Krakovimon]

As an ex-Alliance leader, I totally agree with all of this. 

The clan/alliance UI need a whole new facelift and a whole new sets of functionnalities