Do you guys think it is fair to charge us for making a clan (ones we have managed without this system for long)? I think that either members, or the leaders of the current main clans should be able to make a single clan for free.

If it went by your way, then i could have made a clan called {Warlighters} hours ago. There was no official clan system then to regulate who was the leader of which clan, so everything starts from all over again.

I'd love to make it free. Heck, I'd love to ditch membership and ads all together and just make everything free. Every minute I spend working on billing systems, advertisement systems, reporting my income, I consider wasted time. It's time not spent adding new features to the game, which is what I want to be doing.

In fact, I ran WarLight this way for nearly three years. It didn't generate a single penny of income, and all features were available immediately after creating an account. Three years is a long time.

Of course, WarLight was much cheaper to host back then. It ran on one cheap server, unlike the 9 beefy ones that it takes now.

WarLight has to be profitable to survive -- there's no debating this. Amazon won't host servers for free, and it currently costs over $1000/mo just to keep the servers online.

Whether it's "fair" or not is up to you to decide. But just to give it perspective, it took me roughly 70 hours of work to add the clan system (as it is now, it will probably get new features over time which will increase that number.)

Arun you cheapskate =P

I personally think its a great idea.
Its a good way for Fizzer to generate income and its not very expensive.

Bring on the clans!

.....Now to find a cool clan pic

Edited 9/23/2013 07:27:02

arun you cheapstake.

While I don't recognize the value in making a clan "official".

I think Fizzer has done a terrific job and warrants some sort of monetary compensation. I worry he is losing money hand over fist.

-----

Message from the outback. Haven't shot a dingo yet, but I'm eyeing this fucking boar thats been playing around my home.

Arun you cheapskate!!!


Thank you Fizzer , I know a lot of people will really appreciate this, me being one of them
Money well spent in my opinion

considering the number of features that paying members lost exclusivity of in wl 2.0, being allowed to create a clan would have been a nice new members-only feature.

although i understand warlight needs to be profitable to keep growing, and that only happens by putting price tags on things, i don't think three dozen payments of 15 bucks will do much of a difference against the 1000$ a month. on the other hand new people having again good motives to upgrade their accounts to full membership might have been more worth the while.

i'm more scared that warlight might be turning into a "micro-payments for unlocking advanced features" kind of thing, facebook and mobile tendency kind of games. i really detest those.

having paid for a lifetime membership i did expect new features to be freely available to me.

I personally like the price tag on the clan system. It will mean that only serious clans we be created instead of hundreds of people that don’t take it seriously.

No troll clans, 2 member clans etc

i fail to see why a troll wouldn't necessarily pay 15 bucks just to annoy someone they have been stalking. some trollage is just priceless, 15 bucks ends up quite cheap. just saying.

The more troll clans, the more money coming back to Fizzer. Not all bad :)

I agree with @ps about the fact that memebers should not pay for new stuff...

On the other hand it's also good, that there wont be 2000 clans in 1 day... Its not a payment for every player, just a clan creator.

By the way, I could think of many other ways to increase income: make a possibility to buy a "memebrship tryout" - like 5$ for 1 week with members stuff, invest a bit in advert to gain more players, put some WL games with PRO commentary on youtube etc.

Edited 9/23/2013 08:25:51

I tried out the clan system on a friend's clan, from what i saw, the $10 gives you a private forum and also a clan profile listing every clan member.

I may be a little harsh here, but... i thought

Private forum and Private mail are similar, if not the same.
Using a picture or the tag to identity clan members are similar.
A clan profile is not really of much use.

Its really not much IMO, but ofc its money well spent if your intention is to help support the game. :)

I think a good way to boost membership revenue is to tie membership to clan size....

Allot a set 5 members per clan, then you can add 3 clan-mates for every member on top of that.

Fudge the numbers as necessary.

I agree with having a barrier. I just haven't seen anything that makes me want to spend 15 bucks yet. If I can't manage the forum (delete threads), it is a waste to me. I have better control on the google group we use now. I just haven't seen anything I like about this except having an official logo so there are no impostors. But frankly, that has never really been a problem. I am very happy there is an official system, but I just haven't seen enough features yet to make me pay for it.

I agree with Pooh (to tie memberships in somehow). In WG we have 7 active members (only Tenshi does not have a membership), and all our retired members (besides Reza) have memberships. Yet the fee for our clan is the same as a clan with no members at all. That seems odd to me.

it is nice fizzer explainign this but nto explainign why had he broken some fo the promesses he made to the ppl who bought memberships

Clan groupies: "We want an official clan system. This would make wl so wonderful."

Clan groupies: "The membership is worth it. We should support Fizzer."

Fizzer: "Announcing...CLANS!" (They will love this he thinks.)

Clan groupies: "$15 is too much. And even though Fizzer only just made the infrastructure and is brainstorming with us to find out what else should be added to make the clan/league structure work, I am truly disappointed!"

You guys are pathetic. He worked his ass off for you. Ungrateful children. Can't you see the potential?

I think with introducing a fee for clans there is a large danger of theft. And I don't entirely see how it's an effective barrier.

It says in the blog update how you can pay your money and get the logo for your clan which is meant to protect you from and deter trolls. It also says you can appoint officers of your clan who have the same powers as a creator - the one who paid the fee.

I've played other clan type games and ... clans can get stolen. The blog warns against this but it would be easier and more sensible to have tiered ranks of officers who have incrementally less power e.g:

Founder - Can do everything.
Chief Officer - Can do everything but cannot change the powers of or remove the Founder. And cannot disband the clan.
Officer - Can recruit, but cannot disband or change the powers of the founder/ chief officers.

The founder and chief officers (whatever you want to call them) can appoint people to ranks within the clan and give them clan powers by using a tick box and selecting the things they want the people to be able to do.

This will protect the person paying the initial fee from losing their money and their clan if they make a mistake with trust. And bear in mind Facebook groups are also often stolen and lots of people use their real names there, this is an anonymous site.

All of that said. I'm not convinced a $15 fee is the best way to prevent trolls. A better way would be simply for Fizzer to preview clan creation applications. And check they are not using an already taken name or trying to troll. With the images used this will be checkable at a glance and shouldn't take much time. Upon creating a clan you put in your details then a message says thank you, your application has been received and will be verified within X amount of time.

As opposed to a monetary barrier, which only rules out poor trolls ;)

Fizzer doesn't even need to do all the checking personally, there are somewhere anonymous forum mods, I'm sure they could tell the difference between images and names. I also doubt there will be an overload of clans being created on anyone day.

Edited 9/23/2013 15:34:22

All I said is until I see the features it would need to work properly, I won't buy it. I have several questions (mixed within the 3 threads, why people had to start new threads I don't know).

What happens if the clan leader leaves warlight? That is a big one for me. His post said you cannot change the name of the clan, can you change leaders?

@Ska - makes some good points.

What is to stop a troll from stealing a clan site (making it first and blocking the real clan leader from making it)? How will Fizzer police this?