To clan or not to clan: Stuff to think about before starting a clan.

So you want to be a clan leader? You want to have the best damn clan Contract Wars has to offer? Well hold on to your horses for one moment here and think about some things first. Starting a clan is easy, but building one is hard. In fact, keeping it progressing and growing will be a real challenge!

The most important thing before you sign up your own clan is to realise that it is currently not easy to delete your clan. If your clan fails, for whatever reason, then the only speedy option to end it is to make someone else (or an alt) clan leader and leave the clan. Signing over leadership will cost you 50 GP BUT since you can transfer 200gp MINIMUM to the clan's account, it will take 200GP to be able to leave your clan. If you don't have access to GP, then you can send a pm to the contract wars staff on Facebook or Kong with your IGN (in game name / nickname), your Player ID and a screen shot that proves that you are the clan leader. This method is free, but clan disbanding is a low priority thing to the developers so it can take a long time before your request is honoured. If you cannot buy GP then i would strongly urge you to think the whole clan idea over thoroughly and possibly join an existing clan.

I have been a clan leader in many games, i had good clans, bad clans and even amazing clans yet i found starting and building a Contract Wars clan many times more difficult then every other game i have previously played. Eventually i felt my efforts were wasted and i left my own clan to join OhMy. A decision i will not regret as OhMy offers me everything i was trying to establish with my clan in the first place (being amongst skilled and more important : dedicated players). So i kinda failed as a clan leader, and i had the GP to correct the mistake. The reason i write this topic is not to demotivate you but to make sure you know what your getting into.

Main question you have to ask yourself : Is "being the boss" really the most important aspect of the game to you or is being amongst cool, possibly like minded people more important? Even though my personal status was not the reason i founded a clan, I'm man enough to admit that being in an existing clan gives me infinite more pleasure then when i was struggling to get my own clan going.

Currently there's over 6000 clans, and IMO, at least 5500 of them will not make it, you think you can make a difference? Possibly you will but remember..at least 99% of these clans would also recruit your target audience...making the competition extremely hard.

Fact : People want clan skills, people want to level, no one is happy about donating and yet almost everyone demands clan skills.
As a clan leader the above is something you have to deal with every day. people come and go because when they join, don't see any skills and leave just as hard.

The cheapest clan skill is roughly 4mil clan credits and if you go and look at the clan rankings in CW you will notice that clans with "possibly" 1 clan skill start to appear in the top 150. Meaning you will have to collect about 4-5 million XP before you get a single skill!. Clans with more then 1 skill start appearing in the top 100 and clans who offer more, if not most skills are limited to the top 20.

now take a look at the top 20, these clans have multiple skills. Sure, clans like OhMy, 1337 and FEAR are recruiting players with higher then average skill only but there are also top 20 clans that are not that strict. (Figa etc.) Do take into consideration that if you want to have access to clan skills, you can join a top20 clan.. it's not impossible to get there but it will be a huge obstacle in getting your own clan going (why would anyone settle for your clan when they can have skills already?).

Are clan skills that important?
Before i joined OhMy i would say no, but now i got access to some clan skills i have to say yes, as my game has improved quite a bit so yeah...Clan skills are not groundbreaking, and without them i wouldn't suck either but they sure are nice to have access to. So don't blame people for wanting access to clan skills instead of helping you to get them for your clan. It's only human nature.

My personal opinion on starting a CW Clan : Don't start a clan unless you already represent a group of people on which you can count to donate both XP,CR and also GP! For example A number of DR members split from DR to form LeGcW, the reasoning behind this is their business but they started as a group with a clear goal and currently are in the top 20 already. Together they achieved this in an amazing tempo. Same goes for clan RONIN, disbanded, reformed and top 20 already

Another option could be a national clan. If CW becomes popular in your country, then chances are people will want to join a national clan. Clans like IND, PINOY, FiTH, ARABS, ITALY, OGG can rely on the fact that people of their countries would want to join them to be amongst country(wo)men.
In fact...national and regional Clans make up the larger part of the top 50 clans! Do the math..profit!

Also : Never start a clan for your desired status. People want to invest time into friends and family and not to make you the coolest guy in CW.

Conclusion : Don't think too lightly of starting a clan, if you're sure you got what it takes then by all means ; proceed but if there's only a spark of doubt in you : DON'T and think it over really hard. This may sound harsh, but think of this : I'm level 63, and if i didn't attempt to start a clan, i would have been level 65 by now! (that's the amount of xp i wasted on my attempt!)