Clan Spotlight: FOXEY
Дата: 20.07.2015 20:39:05
veganzombiez: Tefftorbes – Commander. Runs the clan at
higher levels. Toomstone357 – Executive Officer. Day to
day operations, such as member interactions, etc. SublimeSilence – Executive Officer. Head
caller. Shirks off all responsibilities to other officers.
KiloLovesBoxes – Executive Officer.
Manager of Strongholds and lover of boxes (Industrial
Resources). Can’t read. LVLAsian – Personnel Officer. Head
recruiter, manages incoming recruits, flank caller. This
month’s Clan Spotlight shines on FOXEY, a clan that’s certainly
more than OK at being social and active: they can field teams at
literally every hour of the day! Despite spending most of
their time in Stronghold Skirmishes, FOXEY has done well in Clan
Wars campaigns and on the Global Map. Read on to see what the FOXEY
has to say! What’s it like to be the best clan in PETCO?
SublimeSilence: Clearly it’s because teff is amazing.
Toomstone357: Everything comes from the CO. Without teff,
this clan wouldn’t be a thing. Tefftorbes: I’m blushing.
KiloLovesBoxes: Socially, FOXEY’s on top. You’ll be in a
single channel with your platoon, and soon everyone in the clan
that’s online is in that channel talking to you despite you trying
to platoon. LVLAsian: We’re very social. We’re awesome
because we show up for everything no matter what.
SublimeSilence: We might not be very good at it, but we show up
with lots of people. KiloLovesBoxes: We can field a team at
any hour. Tefftorbes: Literally any hour, as Kilo has found
out. LVLAsian: Even at 3 am against RUS.
SublimeSilence: The joke is that Kilo can’t read because he
schedules battles all the time at wrong hours in Strongholds.
KiloLovesBoxes: I’ll accidentally schedule Strongholds
anywhere from 2-5 am. Tefftorbes: I think you did 7 am on a
weekday once, and we fielded a team. KiloLovesBoxes: Had to
wake up for it. You mess up once or twice and you’re branded,
my friend. Branded. LVLAsian: Missing arty.
KiloLovesBoxes: We’re gonna ignore that. Toomstone357: Can I
tell the story? All right, so back when we were all just
lowly officers, we decided to do an officer count in with our
soldiers. In one of the first pub battles on the West server, at
like 11 PM ET, we got 15 FOXEY synced into a Tier X battle on
Prokhorovka. Eventually, being Prok, it started to become a
stalemate. People on both sides whittled down, and I was the first
FOXEY to die because I did something— KiloLovesBoxes:
Because you’re bad. Toomstone357: Because I did something
silly. Teams are down to a CGC and Kilo. Kilo’s in his
Patton, he’s trying to kill this enemy CGC and there’s like 10
seconds left on the clock before a draw, so Kilo rushes to the CGC.
The CGC is just sitting there because he already shot. Kilo’s in no
danger. Kilo aims in and then bounces the CGC. He must’ve
been within 100 meters and just bounces. KiloLovesBoxes:
This was months ago. They don’t forget. LVLAsian: And that
CGC was a one shot because it got shot earlier in the map.
Tefftorbes: No one in FOXEY forgets when you screw up like that.
LVLAsian: Toom has a YouTube video of that somewhere. You’ll
be efamous, Kilo. KiloLovesBoxes: I’m FOXEY’s punching
bag.
SublimeSilence: To be fair, everyone becomes a punching bag when you screw up. How did FOXEY form? Tefftorbes: We were started by KingAlphyn, actually, and the majority of FOXEY were BURDY players that wanted to get into Clan Wars. I don’t know how many people it was, but about 20-30, which formed our starting core. We grew pretty organically after that, but BURDY’s our parent clan. A big shout out to them. How have FOXEY’s goals changed since it started? Tefftorbes: Back then, we thought we were better than PUPEH pretty early on, and our goal was to supersede them. And what can I say? We did. Realistically, my personal goals since before I became CO has been to improve the clan slowly and steadily, and not compromise our community at all while trying to improve ourselves competitively. And we’re in a decent spot now, but there’s always room for improvement. How do you keep your clan members motivated? KiloLovesBoxes: With Strongholds. LVLAsian: And credit bonuses. Toomstone357: Now that we’ve started combing through recruits instead of randomly accepting people, we pick people who’re super enthusiastic about the game and have a really strong sense of community. So I’d attribute our attendance to just picking people who actually want to be here every single night and participate in Clan Wars, Strongholds, even just pubs. People just keep coming on because that’s what they enjoy doing. SublimeSilence: I’d go a step further: A big thing teff implemented when he became actual CO was to make recruits have to play with FOXEY members to get a +1. After a certain number, you’re in. We don’t let toxic personalities into the clan very often, and those that do get in are weeded out pretty quickly. What’s the story behind your motto: “Foxey. They're OK. I guess. -loz”? Tefftorbes: During the Civil War draft, Lozarus was one of the commentators on the draft live stream. We came up during the 7th round for Inchon’s team. Loz clearly didn’t have anything to say about us, good or bad, so he was just like, “Well, they’re ok, I guess.” I took it. We took it. And now we say it. SublimeSilence: It’s definitely a battle cry these days. It kinda encapsulates everything about FOXEY: We don’t take things seriously. We like to joke around and have fun. We’re ok, I guess. And sometimes we can surprise people by playing incredibly well. It’s a good battle cry. I like it. I have to thank Loz for that. As soon as he said it, we all started laughing in TeamSpeak. Tefftorbes: And even if Loz regrets it, he shouldn't. We thank him for that. KiloLovesBoxes: Every time someone sees him in a pub match, it’s tradition to ask him if we’re good yet. What other traditions do you have? LVLAsian: Making fun of Kilo for his lack of reading comprehension. Toomstone357: There are millions of inside jokes and things we bring up with each other. As you’ve seen, Kilo’s whole thing with missing tanks. KiloLovesBoxes: If you screw up once, that becomes your defining moment. SublimeSilence: Yeah, except that you’ve screwed up 5-6 times. KiloLovesBoxes: In Strongholds, the goal was to teamkill the lowest HP person before time ran out. We were really sad when Wargaming turned the blue names back on. Tefftorbes: There’s a lot of messing around in training rooms. Hide and go seek. KiloLovesBoxes: We call it “Hide and Murder”. One team is 3-4 Tier X tanks, and the other team is smaller tanks like ELCs and Tier I-III light tanks. The Tier Xs turn off their HUDs and the goal is to find and kill all of the LTs on the other team. You have to drive through the bushes, catch them as they run, etc.
SublimeSilence: We do a lot of little games like that at least once a week. We stopped for campaigns because people got burned out. We’ll do stuff like count in, and get 100 gold for killing a FOXEY officer on the other team. There’s also racing in training rooms or Battle Bridge, where we go on Mountain Pass and have 2 teams try to push each other’s tanks off the bridge. Fun little community things are a big part of us. We try to maximize the fun. What’s the culture like in FOXEY? SublimeSilence: We don’t take anything we do seriously. We don’t practice, do training rooms, and 99% of the time our callers don’t have map tactics or anything. Everything’s kind of fly by wire. I think that’s been a pretty big advantage for us. We like to joke around and have fun, and if we have a big loss in a battle or something, we can brush it off pretty quickly because we didn’t really try. Tefftorbes: I will say that when we do take something seriously and try to do training rooms, it can be very difficult because our players do not like to do training rooms. So we just do Strongholds instead. SublimeSilence: It’s like herding a massive group of cats. It’s just not possible to get them to do anything like that anyway, so we just don’t try. LVLAsian: Even though we do goof around, when we need to step up for things like Map Exhibitions or campaigns, we do perform. If gold or reward tanks are on the line, we do definitely put on a serious face and try our best. Toomstone357: Our guys are smart enough to know when we can be laid back, which is just your general Clan Wars or nightly things, but we really know how to focus when it comes to important fights.
SublimeSilence: I think the thing is that our members are mature enough to know when it’s fine to be immature. How would someone join FOXEY? LVLAsian: Either PM me or Sorphius, our other recruiter. Our recruitment process is pretty straight forward: After talking to me or one of the officers, if your stats and personality seem all right, you start platooning with someone in FOXEY. We give evaluations based on performance, attitude, and communication. If they’re toxic, we’d rather not have them in our clan because we just don’t want to deal with that factor. If they’re really awesome to play with, and if the overall opinion is good, we let them in. SublimeSilence: It’s not a really grueling process. We’ve had people get into the clan in an hour basically. It really comes down to the recruits themselves. If they show up on our TeamSpeak and are proactive in getting to know people, they’ll move through really quickly. If they don’t put the effort in on their end to try and get some platoons going with members, then it can be a lot longer. Tefftorbes: Those are usually the players who don’t work out anyway. The ones who are excited and who our guys enjoy playing with get into the clan quickly and stay active. KiloLovesBoxes: There’s also a mini probation after you get in the clan. Once you’re in, we see if there’s any inkling to misbehavior while they were trying to do their best to look good during recruitment.
LVLAsian: The main thing is show up constantly, get to know everybody, and you’ll be good to go. How does FOXEY improve its player base and as a clan? Tefftorbes: Inactive players are removed from the clan, and the players who are active fit in with us, they’re community members, and they largely have very positive attitudes towards the game. We also tend to bring in better players over time by recruiting people who are around or above our clan average. As people leave and we bring new people in, that generally goes up. Over time, our player base gets more experienced, we pull in more attractive players, and our community becomes more attractive. Toomstone357: I would almost base our skill level not on individual in-game skill, but more on people’s activity level and their team play. Even if someone’s not very strong individually, if they show that they can work in a team, and they show up every day, they’re gonna be a welcome addition to our clan. LVLAsian: As long as you’re willing to have a thick skin, and listen to the callers and people in your platoon, FOXEY will definitely improve as a clan. SublimeSilence: A big part of our strength in attendance is that we play a lot of Strongholds. There are always people on at any given time. There’s a lot of learning going on because there’s always someone around. People will learn about a bush and then everyone learns about it. Toomstone357: I’m gonna toot our own horn. In Wargaming’s new Clan Rating system, we were actually Number 1 for Strongholds on the server before the campaign. We run so many skirmishes it’s not even funny. KiloLovesBoxes: Yesterday I ran about 100. Toomstone357: As the leader, Kilo’s close to 4-5k battles by himself. Tefftorbes: How many times has Kilo broken 5k boxes in a week? At least 2. KiloLovesBoxes: I broke 6k. I have a screenshot somewhere.
Tefftorbes: I have one question for everybody: Who has broken 6k boxes earned in a week? Kilo. And nobody else. What do you consider FOXEY’s greatest achievement? LVLAsian: When Kilo learns how to read. SublimeSilence: Teaching Kilo to read. Tefftorbes: I’m going to say our performance in the Third Campaign. That was an enormous organizational effort on behalf of our officers, and we managed to earn a whole bunch of people the tank. Managing our roster took a lot of work because we had crazy attendance levels. We had nights when we could field 5 teams and we often didn’t have enough chips to get everyone into fights. It was very delicate to manage people drama and getting people in the fights.
LVLAsian: We also hit a huge growth spurt before the Third Campaign. We had a ton of new members online and everyone showed up and did awesome in it. What’d FOXEY learn about itself during the recent server war? KiloLovesBoxes: That I can’t call against Brazilians. SublimeSilence: Kilo loses to Latin American clans. There’s just something about him calling against anyone south of the border. KiloLovesBoxes: If they don’t speak English, I’m gonna lose. LVLAsian: RIP us when all non-English speaking clans wardec us. Tefftorbes: I’ve learned that we have a lot of hungry, hungry players, and that was not always the case. LVLAsian: They don’t want to sit around on their hands all day long. Tefftorbes: We get terrible when we sit there. Terrible. After sitting in a spot, we can’t win anything, so we stay active. SublimeSilence: Every time we’ve tried to sit and farm gold, we just play poorly when we get in a situation where we need to play well. As officers, we decided to just be a war clan and go around the map starting fights for fun.
Tefftorbes: We’re not a vindictive opponent. We’ve made friends with a lot of people we’ve fought with. The guys are here to play and they enjoy doing stuff. They enjoy organized combat, team play, the social aspect of the game, and the amount of that I’ve seen since the Third Campaign and going forward has been immense. Since you like to fight so much, what’s been your most memorable clan battle? KiloLovesBoxes: When we fought The Green Alliance. Tefftorbes: In late 2014, we had a war against FUSON and subclans, and we did very well for ourselves. Basically, we had our way, and I’ll just leave it at that. Typically, against opponents we like to fight and challenge ourselves. We don’t usually have our way. SublimeSilence: To be fair to CLAWS, I think we only had 2 fights with them, which were friendly, but they didn’t really want to be part of the war. We had a good spat with ESPRT and PLSGO. We didn’t chip spam or anything; 1 fight per clan. RUS came in at the end as well. We had a couple pretty good fights with them. There was multiple times during The Green Alliance war where we were outnumbered and getting chip spammed, and we were able to genuinely field 2 teams at the same multiple nights in both Central and Western time zones, and there were multiple times when we had 3 teams. Our members just had an absolute blast with that war. Winning felt good, especially because we viewed FUSON as our equals, and it was a big morale boost for us to beat them. It was fantastic training for the Third Campaign. While we didn’t rank really high overall, we were proud that everyone who wanted a tank got one.
Tefftorbes: We were 7th with the most tanks. 3rd in Twilight of the Gods, which was also very fun. What role does Strongholds play in FOXEY? KiloLovesBoxes: Strongholds is more of a derpfest. Literally play for fun. No regulation on what you can play, depending on the caller. I’m ok with everyone driving whatever to grind tanks. SublimeSilence: There’s really not a lot you can learn in Tier VI, outside of improving focus fire, because it’s really fast paced. A lot of times, members just make detachments themselves, usually without a caller. There have a preset notion of what we do on a map and they stick with that. We don’t beat ourselves up over losses. Tier VI Strongholds are a nice way to get away from the frustration that pub battles can be sometimes. We rarely take Tier VIII seriously either. It definitely helps you learn focus fire and positioning because you need those to beat any clan. Tefftorbes: We’ve even run with no callers in Tier VIII, but then someone will start calling because things don’t work out without one. I think Tier VIII is reasonable practice for new callers, but Tier X is really where it’s at, both for Clan Wars and Raids. What advice do you have for upcoming clans? Tefftorbes: Play a lot of Strongholds. Work your way up; don’t just stick at Tier VI. Watch what the better clans are doing and learn from it. Practice, keep at it, and you’ll get there. SublimeSilence: I just can’t see being a successful clan without some kind of voice comms like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak. Our community’s really active because we use Slack. We have a channel dedicated to Clan Wars so everybody knows when there are battles. We also have our goof around channels, looking for platoons, and Strongholds channels. Then we have our forums as well. Most of FOXEY used our forums before we went to Slack, which really helped build the community. I’d highly recommend any clan starting off to get people on something like Slack or forums. Tefftorbes: If you put people in a place where they can and are encouraged to interact, they’re gonna become friends and bond and make your clan stronger. SublimeSilence: I think a big, big, big thing is getting the community there. Tournaments, Skirmishes especially, immensely help with calling practice. If someone’s building a clan and needs to work on calling, I highly recommend starting a Skirmish team. That’s gonna teach callers how to flex, the players how to work together as a team, and that’s obviously what clans need. Callers can’t call everything by themselves. They really need help on the battlefield, especially when they have a group of tanks on the other side of the field. They need eyes and someone willing to communicate, able to make decisions on their own too. Newer clans should definitely invest time into skirmishes. A lot of members expressed interest in calling, so we started up a caller tourney. We start a training room, and let anyone who wants to call face each other in a bracket tourney, best out of 3. Each caller picks 2 maps that they don’t like and 2 that they do. We’ve found people with very unexpected calling ability. One of our newer callers, Check_Your_Privilege, was a joke addition by LVL, and he turned out to have a lot of promise, which surprised all the officers. He was always one of the members who complained a lot, but then we find out he’s actually a decent caller. That’s pretty awesome and he’s calmed down a lot because he’s taking the responsibility seriously. Good on him for that. It’s a fun thing too to blow off steam, kill clan members, and smack talk. KiloLovesBoxes: You really should have them overturn the teamkill system.
SublimeSilence: You should be able to teamkill your clan members. That’s definitely something many clans want re-added. What other strategic element would you add to Clan Wars? KiloLovesBoxes: Just the TK thing. SublimeSilence: Honestly for us, Clan Wars is a more serious nature. Tank locking isn’t an issue for us, so we don’t mind. But limited chips is a factor. We can field a lot of teams, and a lot times we’re limited by the number of chips, not people in tanks. From what I see in Clan Wars 2.0, we’re really excited chips aren’t an issue. Tefftorbes: Clan Wars 2.0 will play to our strengths. LVLAsian: Losing your HQ isn’t significant enough in my opinion. You should have to defend it with your life. If you can’t defend it, you should have a tougher time. Tefftorbes: If there’s one thing to make Clan Wars as it is now more interesting, it’s to having smaller scenarios where you pit 2-4 clans against each other on a small map and they can duke it out. SublimeSilence: Events like the Civil War was really fun, and I’d love to do it again. If WGNA is able to have more control, like making a map for it, that’d be really, really cool. As it stood,WGNA did do a lot for that event, which was awesome. LVLAsian: I also liked the Attack/Defend game mode. There should be something more similar to that to add more flavor so it’s not always Fog of War, 15v15, wipe each other out or cap.
SublimeSilence: Yeah, my favorite Map Exhibition by far, especially as a caller, was the Attack/Defend. I’d truly love to see that in Clan Wars because I think it’d make the gameplay faster and more exciting. What are your top 4 viable Clan Wars tanks? [Many tanks are listed] KiloLovesBoxes: Object 140, T110E5, IS-7, E100, arty. Toomstone357: AMX 50B. Tefftorbes: Batchat. You need to use one since they’re the most unique. How about E100, a Russian medium, AMX 50b… what’d be the 4th one? KiloLovesBoxes: T110E5, IS-7. SublimeSilence: FV215b. We use a lot of tanks. Any battle we go into, doesn’t matter the map, we almost always a Russian medium. The majority of maps we’ll also have a Batchat. Autoloaders like the AMX 50b and T57 really important tanks. For new players, I’d recommend a heavy line. When it comes to team play, a good IS-7 or E100 driver is not always necessary. What you need is people that will listen and be willing to push as a team, and heavy play is very important. Mediums take more skill because you have to be able to think on your own. Tefftorbes: So we have about 10 tanks on our Top 4.
KiloLovesBoxes: It really depends on the strat because the map varies so much. Sometimes you want more mobility, sometimes you want to be heftier so tanks don’t melt. What prior clan leadership decision do you regret the most? [long silence] Tefftorbes: That’s a difficult one. Toomstone357: One time when I was paying people out, I typed in an extra zero, and our treasury dropped quite a bit more than I was expecting. KiloLovesBoxes: Toom likes to pay people extra randomly, kind of like the lottery. SublimeSilence: I don’t know if we’ve ever had a big screw up. There’ve been a couple members we let in that were toxic or a couple people we should’ve addressed sooner about their attitude, but teff’s done a fantastic job running the clan. Tefftorbes: My personal biggest mistake was trying to run chips myself. I’m too busy and not available enough to have a consistent grasp on them, so whenever I try to run chips myself, we end up not doing things. SublimeSilence: We can all wear each other’s hats, but we all have very specific ones. Kilo does everything Strongholds, and outside of making credit reserves, if I dare touch any of his buildings, he’ll get really mad at me. KiloLovesBoxes: I did get rather upset at him one time because he made the wrong building and cost us a lot of boxes. I get very protective of boxes.
SublimeSilence: I run the chips most of the time. Toomstone helps out a lot with that, and if someone touches my chips on the map while I’m trying to get something done, I’ll get really angsty about it.
SublimeSilence: To be fair, everyone becomes a punching bag when you screw up. How did FOXEY form? Tefftorbes: We were started by KingAlphyn, actually, and the majority of FOXEY were BURDY players that wanted to get into Clan Wars. I don’t know how many people it was, but about 20-30, which formed our starting core. We grew pretty organically after that, but BURDY’s our parent clan. A big shout out to them. How have FOXEY’s goals changed since it started? Tefftorbes: Back then, we thought we were better than PUPEH pretty early on, and our goal was to supersede them. And what can I say? We did. Realistically, my personal goals since before I became CO has been to improve the clan slowly and steadily, and not compromise our community at all while trying to improve ourselves competitively. And we’re in a decent spot now, but there’s always room for improvement. How do you keep your clan members motivated? KiloLovesBoxes: With Strongholds. LVLAsian: And credit bonuses. Toomstone357: Now that we’ve started combing through recruits instead of randomly accepting people, we pick people who’re super enthusiastic about the game and have a really strong sense of community. So I’d attribute our attendance to just picking people who actually want to be here every single night and participate in Clan Wars, Strongholds, even just pubs. People just keep coming on because that’s what they enjoy doing. SublimeSilence: I’d go a step further: A big thing teff implemented when he became actual CO was to make recruits have to play with FOXEY members to get a +1. After a certain number, you’re in. We don’t let toxic personalities into the clan very often, and those that do get in are weeded out pretty quickly. What’s the story behind your motto: “Foxey. They're OK. I guess. -loz”? Tefftorbes: During the Civil War draft, Lozarus was one of the commentators on the draft live stream. We came up during the 7th round for Inchon’s team. Loz clearly didn’t have anything to say about us, good or bad, so he was just like, “Well, they’re ok, I guess.” I took it. We took it. And now we say it. SublimeSilence: It’s definitely a battle cry these days. It kinda encapsulates everything about FOXEY: We don’t take things seriously. We like to joke around and have fun. We’re ok, I guess. And sometimes we can surprise people by playing incredibly well. It’s a good battle cry. I like it. I have to thank Loz for that. As soon as he said it, we all started laughing in TeamSpeak. Tefftorbes: And even if Loz regrets it, he shouldn't. We thank him for that. KiloLovesBoxes: Every time someone sees him in a pub match, it’s tradition to ask him if we’re good yet. What other traditions do you have? LVLAsian: Making fun of Kilo for his lack of reading comprehension. Toomstone357: There are millions of inside jokes and things we bring up with each other. As you’ve seen, Kilo’s whole thing with missing tanks. KiloLovesBoxes: If you screw up once, that becomes your defining moment. SublimeSilence: Yeah, except that you’ve screwed up 5-6 times. KiloLovesBoxes: In Strongholds, the goal was to teamkill the lowest HP person before time ran out. We were really sad when Wargaming turned the blue names back on. Tefftorbes: There’s a lot of messing around in training rooms. Hide and go seek. KiloLovesBoxes: We call it “Hide and Murder”. One team is 3-4 Tier X tanks, and the other team is smaller tanks like ELCs and Tier I-III light tanks. The Tier Xs turn off their HUDs and the goal is to find and kill all of the LTs on the other team. You have to drive through the bushes, catch them as they run, etc.
SublimeSilence: We do a lot of little games like that at least once a week. We stopped for campaigns because people got burned out. We’ll do stuff like count in, and get 100 gold for killing a FOXEY officer on the other team. There’s also racing in training rooms or Battle Bridge, where we go on Mountain Pass and have 2 teams try to push each other’s tanks off the bridge. Fun little community things are a big part of us. We try to maximize the fun. What’s the culture like in FOXEY? SublimeSilence: We don’t take anything we do seriously. We don’t practice, do training rooms, and 99% of the time our callers don’t have map tactics or anything. Everything’s kind of fly by wire. I think that’s been a pretty big advantage for us. We like to joke around and have fun, and if we have a big loss in a battle or something, we can brush it off pretty quickly because we didn’t really try. Tefftorbes: I will say that when we do take something seriously and try to do training rooms, it can be very difficult because our players do not like to do training rooms. So we just do Strongholds instead. SublimeSilence: It’s like herding a massive group of cats. It’s just not possible to get them to do anything like that anyway, so we just don’t try. LVLAsian: Even though we do goof around, when we need to step up for things like Map Exhibitions or campaigns, we do perform. If gold or reward tanks are on the line, we do definitely put on a serious face and try our best. Toomstone357: Our guys are smart enough to know when we can be laid back, which is just your general Clan Wars or nightly things, but we really know how to focus when it comes to important fights.
SublimeSilence: I think the thing is that our members are mature enough to know when it’s fine to be immature. How would someone join FOXEY? LVLAsian: Either PM me or Sorphius, our other recruiter. Our recruitment process is pretty straight forward: After talking to me or one of the officers, if your stats and personality seem all right, you start platooning with someone in FOXEY. We give evaluations based on performance, attitude, and communication. If they’re toxic, we’d rather not have them in our clan because we just don’t want to deal with that factor. If they’re really awesome to play with, and if the overall opinion is good, we let them in. SublimeSilence: It’s not a really grueling process. We’ve had people get into the clan in an hour basically. It really comes down to the recruits themselves. If they show up on our TeamSpeak and are proactive in getting to know people, they’ll move through really quickly. If they don’t put the effort in on their end to try and get some platoons going with members, then it can be a lot longer. Tefftorbes: Those are usually the players who don’t work out anyway. The ones who are excited and who our guys enjoy playing with get into the clan quickly and stay active. KiloLovesBoxes: There’s also a mini probation after you get in the clan. Once you’re in, we see if there’s any inkling to misbehavior while they were trying to do their best to look good during recruitment.
LVLAsian: The main thing is show up constantly, get to know everybody, and you’ll be good to go. How does FOXEY improve its player base and as a clan? Tefftorbes: Inactive players are removed from the clan, and the players who are active fit in with us, they’re community members, and they largely have very positive attitudes towards the game. We also tend to bring in better players over time by recruiting people who are around or above our clan average. As people leave and we bring new people in, that generally goes up. Over time, our player base gets more experienced, we pull in more attractive players, and our community becomes more attractive. Toomstone357: I would almost base our skill level not on individual in-game skill, but more on people’s activity level and their team play. Even if someone’s not very strong individually, if they show that they can work in a team, and they show up every day, they’re gonna be a welcome addition to our clan. LVLAsian: As long as you’re willing to have a thick skin, and listen to the callers and people in your platoon, FOXEY will definitely improve as a clan. SublimeSilence: A big part of our strength in attendance is that we play a lot of Strongholds. There are always people on at any given time. There’s a lot of learning going on because there’s always someone around. People will learn about a bush and then everyone learns about it. Toomstone357: I’m gonna toot our own horn. In Wargaming’s new Clan Rating system, we were actually Number 1 for Strongholds on the server before the campaign. We run so many skirmishes it’s not even funny. KiloLovesBoxes: Yesterday I ran about 100. Toomstone357: As the leader, Kilo’s close to 4-5k battles by himself. Tefftorbes: How many times has Kilo broken 5k boxes in a week? At least 2. KiloLovesBoxes: I broke 6k. I have a screenshot somewhere.
Tefftorbes: I have one question for everybody: Who has broken 6k boxes earned in a week? Kilo. And nobody else. What do you consider FOXEY’s greatest achievement? LVLAsian: When Kilo learns how to read. SublimeSilence: Teaching Kilo to read. Tefftorbes: I’m going to say our performance in the Third Campaign. That was an enormous organizational effort on behalf of our officers, and we managed to earn a whole bunch of people the tank. Managing our roster took a lot of work because we had crazy attendance levels. We had nights when we could field 5 teams and we often didn’t have enough chips to get everyone into fights. It was very delicate to manage people drama and getting people in the fights.
LVLAsian: We also hit a huge growth spurt before the Third Campaign. We had a ton of new members online and everyone showed up and did awesome in it. What’d FOXEY learn about itself during the recent server war? KiloLovesBoxes: That I can’t call against Brazilians. SublimeSilence: Kilo loses to Latin American clans. There’s just something about him calling against anyone south of the border. KiloLovesBoxes: If they don’t speak English, I’m gonna lose. LVLAsian: RIP us when all non-English speaking clans wardec us. Tefftorbes: I’ve learned that we have a lot of hungry, hungry players, and that was not always the case. LVLAsian: They don’t want to sit around on their hands all day long. Tefftorbes: We get terrible when we sit there. Terrible. After sitting in a spot, we can’t win anything, so we stay active. SublimeSilence: Every time we’ve tried to sit and farm gold, we just play poorly when we get in a situation where we need to play well. As officers, we decided to just be a war clan and go around the map starting fights for fun.
Tefftorbes: We’re not a vindictive opponent. We’ve made friends with a lot of people we’ve fought with. The guys are here to play and they enjoy doing stuff. They enjoy organized combat, team play, the social aspect of the game, and the amount of that I’ve seen since the Third Campaign and going forward has been immense. Since you like to fight so much, what’s been your most memorable clan battle? KiloLovesBoxes: When we fought The Green Alliance. Tefftorbes: In late 2014, we had a war against FUSON and subclans, and we did very well for ourselves. Basically, we had our way, and I’ll just leave it at that. Typically, against opponents we like to fight and challenge ourselves. We don’t usually have our way. SublimeSilence: To be fair to CLAWS, I think we only had 2 fights with them, which were friendly, but they didn’t really want to be part of the war. We had a good spat with ESPRT and PLSGO. We didn’t chip spam or anything; 1 fight per clan. RUS came in at the end as well. We had a couple pretty good fights with them. There was multiple times during The Green Alliance war where we were outnumbered and getting chip spammed, and we were able to genuinely field 2 teams at the same multiple nights in both Central and Western time zones, and there were multiple times when we had 3 teams. Our members just had an absolute blast with that war. Winning felt good, especially because we viewed FUSON as our equals, and it was a big morale boost for us to beat them. It was fantastic training for the Third Campaign. While we didn’t rank really high overall, we were proud that everyone who wanted a tank got one.
Tefftorbes: We were 7th with the most tanks. 3rd in Twilight of the Gods, which was also very fun. What role does Strongholds play in FOXEY? KiloLovesBoxes: Strongholds is more of a derpfest. Literally play for fun. No regulation on what you can play, depending on the caller. I’m ok with everyone driving whatever to grind tanks. SublimeSilence: There’s really not a lot you can learn in Tier VI, outside of improving focus fire, because it’s really fast paced. A lot of times, members just make detachments themselves, usually without a caller. There have a preset notion of what we do on a map and they stick with that. We don’t beat ourselves up over losses. Tier VI Strongholds are a nice way to get away from the frustration that pub battles can be sometimes. We rarely take Tier VIII seriously either. It definitely helps you learn focus fire and positioning because you need those to beat any clan. Tefftorbes: We’ve even run with no callers in Tier VIII, but then someone will start calling because things don’t work out without one. I think Tier VIII is reasonable practice for new callers, but Tier X is really where it’s at, both for Clan Wars and Raids. What advice do you have for upcoming clans? Tefftorbes: Play a lot of Strongholds. Work your way up; don’t just stick at Tier VI. Watch what the better clans are doing and learn from it. Practice, keep at it, and you’ll get there. SublimeSilence: I just can’t see being a successful clan without some kind of voice comms like Ventrilo or TeamSpeak. Our community’s really active because we use Slack. We have a channel dedicated to Clan Wars so everybody knows when there are battles. We also have our goof around channels, looking for platoons, and Strongholds channels. Then we have our forums as well. Most of FOXEY used our forums before we went to Slack, which really helped build the community. I’d highly recommend any clan starting off to get people on something like Slack or forums. Tefftorbes: If you put people in a place where they can and are encouraged to interact, they’re gonna become friends and bond and make your clan stronger. SublimeSilence: I think a big, big, big thing is getting the community there. Tournaments, Skirmishes especially, immensely help with calling practice. If someone’s building a clan and needs to work on calling, I highly recommend starting a Skirmish team. That’s gonna teach callers how to flex, the players how to work together as a team, and that’s obviously what clans need. Callers can’t call everything by themselves. They really need help on the battlefield, especially when they have a group of tanks on the other side of the field. They need eyes and someone willing to communicate, able to make decisions on their own too. Newer clans should definitely invest time into skirmishes. A lot of members expressed interest in calling, so we started up a caller tourney. We start a training room, and let anyone who wants to call face each other in a bracket tourney, best out of 3. Each caller picks 2 maps that they don’t like and 2 that they do. We’ve found people with very unexpected calling ability. One of our newer callers, Check_Your_Privilege, was a joke addition by LVL, and he turned out to have a lot of promise, which surprised all the officers. He was always one of the members who complained a lot, but then we find out he’s actually a decent caller. That’s pretty awesome and he’s calmed down a lot because he’s taking the responsibility seriously. Good on him for that. It’s a fun thing too to blow off steam, kill clan members, and smack talk. KiloLovesBoxes: You really should have them overturn the teamkill system.
SublimeSilence: You should be able to teamkill your clan members. That’s definitely something many clans want re-added. What other strategic element would you add to Clan Wars? KiloLovesBoxes: Just the TK thing. SublimeSilence: Honestly for us, Clan Wars is a more serious nature. Tank locking isn’t an issue for us, so we don’t mind. But limited chips is a factor. We can field a lot of teams, and a lot times we’re limited by the number of chips, not people in tanks. From what I see in Clan Wars 2.0, we’re really excited chips aren’t an issue. Tefftorbes: Clan Wars 2.0 will play to our strengths. LVLAsian: Losing your HQ isn’t significant enough in my opinion. You should have to defend it with your life. If you can’t defend it, you should have a tougher time. Tefftorbes: If there’s one thing to make Clan Wars as it is now more interesting, it’s to having smaller scenarios where you pit 2-4 clans against each other on a small map and they can duke it out. SublimeSilence: Events like the Civil War was really fun, and I’d love to do it again. If WGNA is able to have more control, like making a map for it, that’d be really, really cool. As it stood,WGNA did do a lot for that event, which was awesome. LVLAsian: I also liked the Attack/Defend game mode. There should be something more similar to that to add more flavor so it’s not always Fog of War, 15v15, wipe each other out or cap.
SublimeSilence: Yeah, my favorite Map Exhibition by far, especially as a caller, was the Attack/Defend. I’d truly love to see that in Clan Wars because I think it’d make the gameplay faster and more exciting. What are your top 4 viable Clan Wars tanks? [Many tanks are listed] KiloLovesBoxes: Object 140, T110E5, IS-7, E100, arty. Toomstone357: AMX 50B. Tefftorbes: Batchat. You need to use one since they’re the most unique. How about E100, a Russian medium, AMX 50b… what’d be the 4th one? KiloLovesBoxes: T110E5, IS-7. SublimeSilence: FV215b. We use a lot of tanks. Any battle we go into, doesn’t matter the map, we almost always a Russian medium. The majority of maps we’ll also have a Batchat. Autoloaders like the AMX 50b and T57 really important tanks. For new players, I’d recommend a heavy line. When it comes to team play, a good IS-7 or E100 driver is not always necessary. What you need is people that will listen and be willing to push as a team, and heavy play is very important. Mediums take more skill because you have to be able to think on your own. Tefftorbes: So we have about 10 tanks on our Top 4.
KiloLovesBoxes: It really depends on the strat because the map varies so much. Sometimes you want more mobility, sometimes you want to be heftier so tanks don’t melt. What prior clan leadership decision do you regret the most? [long silence] Tefftorbes: That’s a difficult one. Toomstone357: One time when I was paying people out, I typed in an extra zero, and our treasury dropped quite a bit more than I was expecting. KiloLovesBoxes: Toom likes to pay people extra randomly, kind of like the lottery. SublimeSilence: I don’t know if we’ve ever had a big screw up. There’ve been a couple members we let in that were toxic or a couple people we should’ve addressed sooner about their attitude, but teff’s done a fantastic job running the clan. Tefftorbes: My personal biggest mistake was trying to run chips myself. I’m too busy and not available enough to have a consistent grasp on them, so whenever I try to run chips myself, we end up not doing things. SublimeSilence: We can all wear each other’s hats, but we all have very specific ones. Kilo does everything Strongholds, and outside of making credit reserves, if I dare touch any of his buildings, he’ll get really mad at me. KiloLovesBoxes: I did get rather upset at him one time because he made the wrong building and cost us a lot of boxes. I get very protective of boxes.
SublimeSilence: I run the chips most of the time. Toomstone helps out a lot with that, and if someone touches my chips on the map while I’m trying to get something done, I’ll get really angsty about it.
Clan Spotlight: FOXEY