In my oppinnion, I believe clans and sites are very helpful to the average mapper or melee player. I think most would agree that in order to achieve a higher tier of Starcraft knowledge you would have to join a clan or team. A clan can be defined as a group of friends with similar starcraft interests. Therefore, SEN could be defined as a clan. In the professional melee seen traditionally there have been 10-15 members in the top 10 American teams on private ladders. Therefore, I think that in order for you to have a strong dedicated clan to last you several years, you need to have a solid base of battle.net friends. If you look at the UMS Mapping clans throughout time you will see that they were made up of groups of friends. Clan (U), Clan oO, Clan Mp, Clan Chef, Clan [T], Clan [V], Clan [ExDr], Clan (MC), Clan O, and many others are examples of clans that have friends inside them. In Clan(U), there were the friendships between Legacy, Kenoli, MrMooCow, Salacious that kept the channel alive. In Clan Oo, the leaders kept the clan alive with always having a channel. Clan Mp had weak leadership, therefore it dies and remakes. clan [T] and Clan[V] had many good members, however as the game grew old its members fell out. Clan [Ex] died because there were only a few members left in it and Enter-The-Dragon found no purpose to continue leading it. (Enter-The-Dragon, Quebec, Alice, WhiteKnight, Etc) In order for future UMS clans to work we would need highly dedicated mappers who are on Battle.net on a regular basis. You may ask why they must be on battle.net on a regular basis. The reason for this is that real SC Knowledge comes from being on Battle.net, making your map on Battl.net, playing games on Battle.net, and meeting people that we are already not associated with. Thinking of who is normally in our common UMS channels, I can think of only a few people who could possibly make a new clan. There are actually only a handful of people who would even be possible of this with connections.(Sixen being one of these). Therefore, we can conclude that the UMS mapping community is weak because there are few clans. I suggest that you increase that community strength by promoting propaganda geared towards those clans. It is sad that you may find a community like broodwarmaps.net where there are a couple dozen active mappers and commentators in a melee community. It is my believe that the average clan must consist of 12-15 solid dedicated members for a clan to live for more than a few years. Clans must be a team and not based on a bueracracy. This is because the ranks really don't serve any purpose. A standard status quo, such as 5 maps made or 1 elite map, is a much better method suited towards clans. In order for us to have a strong website or more clans in the future, the most important things for there to be are leaders. Nothing is as important as a leader doing his job well. I believe that when you look at all the strong sites you will find dedicated battle.net players. Since there are only a dozen or two dozen active players on this site I suggest the leadership goes out and finds them. As Yoshi found (U) and brought them to help with their knowledge, so should we find those who actively play Battle.net. There are many out there who could help our site in different areas. These include rpg players, bounders, defense map players, and micro players. They could contribute to this site by providing their map db folders and advice for good maps in the form of text. Basically, this is just a big blob of text of ideas of which I hope can further contribute this site to becoming a Utopia for addict community.
*Feel free to add your coments on what you think the purpose of clans and sites should be and what they may help you do.

And look where it got them...After reading that line I stopped before I put my head into my desk.

Also, paragraphing would make that wall of text a little less frightening...

GREAT POST!

First of all paragraphs would definitely help with the readability, but besides that you make some interesting points.

However, I don't agree that the lack of clans are the direct cause of a weak UMS mapping community. I think the hidden variable that is both the cause of a lack of clans and a weak UMS community is just the lack of mappers overall.

Even so, the mapping community isn't that weak, especially when you have a community like staredit.net. The lack of a battle.net presence is just due to the fact that a lot of SEN members don't even play on battle.net and mapping is different from gaming, because you don't even need to be on battle.net to make a map. It's not like melee where you go on battle.net and look for opponents in channel. If anything, all you do as a mapmaker is hang out in a channel and possibly ask for help or give help, but all those things you can also do at SEN.

I don't even like the idea of clans on battle.net solely for mapmaking. I think the only successful mapping clan was (U), because it was only made up of the best. I think all the other clans were just silly, and the whole thing with <insert clan name here> Productions in all the maps made by a clan member is just lame. Take CheF for example, or the "dyne" crap. You have all these maps with the name "Dyne Something" and it's just dumb.

I agree that a regimented clan is unnecessary. Part of the success of (U) is that there weren't any ranks, and there weren't any real requirements for the clan after you've joined. All you did was just continue doing your thing and making maps at your leisure. The only thing that wearing the tag really served was the reputation it brought.

I think clans can help improve the community, but the same effect can be achieved without clans. Op SEN basically serves as a sort of clan channel. It is where all the mapmakers and members of SEN gather. Even though we aren't in one formal clan, we are all part of the SEN community.

I agree with you on your statement about posting "(Clan Name) Productions" was lame, but Clan (U) is apart of that list.

I have played couple of maps made by members Clan (U) with "Clan (U) PrOdUcTiOnZ" posted in the mission briefing text message. I don't have a list in my head right now, but upon your request, I could look for them.

House of the Haunted, probably one of the only Clan (U) maps still played by public (Which is by far what counts)