As frogboy stated they wanted thoughts on how the clan system in demigod should work. So i think this thread would be good for the discussion of that.

Right off the bat i think custom games would be a bad place to have the competitive 'clan' community playing as settings can be altered and i guess comp stomps could occur too.

As there are 2 automated search/game entering systems (pantheon and skirmish) i think it would be best to allow clan play in one of these.  Both of these autosearch games should be independentley ranked.  Skirmish would be the best choice as it allows play of all 8 DGs which is better for team balance.

Pantheon would be restricted to random teams.  Having both of these options should keep both halves of the community on the debate of arranged teams happy.  In both pantheon and skirmish the use of AI bots should be removed as it is adverse to any competitive nature of the game.

For the actual clan system to work, the skirmish selection needs to have an arranged teams choice, there needs to be some deicision on the competitive format being used (mostly the number of plays) so that clans can work out lineups and builds.  Having no decision could also lead to the problem where 1 clan wants to play a 3v3 and the other wants to play 4v4 having no game happen.

Clans gain ranks by beating other clans (or if there are no clans online can be matched against a pug team (an arranged team of non-clan people) but gain less XP) similar to the Exp system in the pantheon.  The clan has its own XP however each member of the clan has a 'clan XP' which they contribute to the clan itself.  This way if the top 5 players in the game form a clan and achieve top postion, then leave the clan and remake a new one with the same lineup they will not be forced to stomp noobs for XP however the new clan will not be ranked #1 but ranked within reason say the clans XP can grow to be up to 1/3 of the sum of the clans members total XP.  There would be some limit on the number of people included in the clans rank (i.e. top 10 players count toward rank or such so no clans of 1000 people attain rank 1).

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In regards to group joining, the shift+tab menu seems to be the best place to implement this.  By prefixing clan members with a tag and forcing them to the top of the list would be a convenient system.  By right clicking on clan members (or friends) you can 'add them to party/game/whatever'.   There then needs to be some mechanic of having an interim screen where players can select their DG before starting a match similar to the game lobby perhaps but the party leader has the choice of searching for custom games or starting a skirmish (where you are not shown the oppositions DG choices).

My $0.02