What you like about clans

[Alesan]

The reality though, is that I ended up banging on sparring dummies alone... day after day.  Or patrolling through streets alone, day after day.  Sitting around the barracks idling while I play something in another window.  Schedules suck for combat clans without active leadership.

I don't play a game like Arm to play solo.  I abhor solo RP.  It's boring and I feel pretty uncomfortable with it, to be honest.  A little silly.  I know people who are fantastic solo RPers and they enjoy it very much.  I'm just not one of them.  I wish I was but I'm not.

I play Arm for the interaction.  I play for the emotional highs and lows and the terror and the camaraderie.  The chance to rub elbows with heroes, to take down villains, to mourn great creations of other players.  It's so much more real than on some graphic game because we describe it all.  It goes through your brain because you read and you have to phrase a response.  It becomes part of your life experience.

...

I understand that clans don't want to waste training time and materials losing recruits who get bored and go wandering off to become scrab food.  I don't want that either.  But something needs to be done about the combat clan without an active leader.  Leader players have RL things that happen where they can't play...so some kind of interrupt needs to be built into the follow-schedule-or-else function, to give lower ranking clannies a way not to get bored out of their skulls because they're trapped.  Unless you want to play a rule-breaking sort, I suppose!  

I agree with all of this.

And there needs to be some balance between letting players of leader PCs handle their RL shit while also not letting them just sit on a leadership position for sometimes weeks on end without doing anything of note.

[Harmless]

This thread is confusing because there don't seem to be many options to pick if you like clans. It's also hard to answer with some of these because they don't touch on the reasons why I pick certain clans. For most it's totally different reasons.

It's not that confusing.  Maybe read it twice?  Harmless is right to attempt to collect a set of information about whatever it is she's working on.  This isn't the be-all, end-all.

First of all the thread original post has been modified multiple times since I made that post, so maybe I should read it three or four times. Secondly the title of the thread is "What you like about clans." So that's why I found it confusing that there were so few (like maybe 1) options that was positive towards being in clans.

Collecting data is great. Collecting less biased and more clear data is even better. I never said anything about what the OP should be doing so I don't know why you felt the need to go off like I was shooting down the idea in its entirety. I like talking about clans and collecting opinions on them. I just didn't like the poll for multiple reasons, and I'm clearly not the only one..

In my OP I welcomed people's suggestions for how to make the poll better. Nauta made suggestions (and dman made one), and I took them. I admit I have biases, but it's not like I have some super sekrit agenda or something. I just wanted to see where people stood on these, and it's quite interesting to see what clans do right and what people are divided on.

[Molten Heart]

I didn't answer the question: "Do you enjoy/dislike being led by another PC and having my PC's life in their hands" because it totally depends on the PC leader. Sometimes those leaders are complete morons and I'm stuck because they're the only PC leader in that specific clan and I if I want to be in that clan I have to somehow deal with it even if I don't like it. In these cases I simply don't join that clan because I have no confidence in the leader. Sometimes a clan PC leader is awesome and I'd follow them anywhere and do anything they asked. It's completely dependent on the capabilities of the PC leader in question.

When it comes to choosing a clan, who the clan leader is comes in just under how ICly appropriate it'd be to work for that clan.

[Old Kank]

I voted that I like the stability of clans.  I wouldn't mind seeing shifting and changing in the clans, but I voted that way because I wouldn't want the fate of clans to rest in the hands of the players.

I voted that I don't like new recruit restrictions, and I don't like RPTs/missions.  I've been really struggling to play arm for a while now, and a big part of that is the way new recruits are treated.  Recruits, and even non-leaders (to a lesser degree) just seem to be treated as a liability in terms of plot.  Most of the military missions/RPTs my characters have gone on in the past 2-3 RL years have amounted to this:  "Your job is to kill this monster and/or guard this person.  I'm not going to tell you why.  Don't ask questions, just kill and/or guard."  I feel like I have to blindly donate 500+ hours to repetitive tedium before being given even a glimpse at the clan's story du jour.  Or I could just go read a stack of books, watch an entire TV series or three, or play a couple rounds of Civ V.