Clan Spotlight: NTR 8/5/13

Hypnotik: This week our Clan Spotlight will be on [NTR], >Vidya Gaems. [NTR] is a rising star in the Clan Wars world, coming from a humble start all the way to earning 2nd place during Stage III of the recent Clan Wars Campaign, earning themselves M60 tanks. They describe themselves as "a 4Chan clan", as they are a group of members coming from the community of the same name that got together to fight for success. Read their answers to our questions below to see if you can gain a little bit of insight on how to take your clan to the next level.
This is the extended version of the interview, you can view the abridged version on the portal.
Zazie– Commander of [NTR] who focuses on e-sports, major leagues, and diplomacy. Started NTR as a side project for organized play.
OhSlowPoke – Deputy Commander of [NTR] who "doesn’t really have a specific job in NTR", just a bit of everything.
QUESTIONS:
What are the future goals for your clan? Zazie– To have a larger name than we have right now. We want to be known, since we're still kind of a small-time clan.
OhSlowPoke- My goal is to get us a lot more consistent. I want to work on getting us not just more prestige, but to get better - to stop being bad@tanks.
Zazie– We'll always be bad@tanks - that's a given. But to get better is a goal, obviously.
What would your advice be for clans trying to get on the map? Zazie– Start small. The first time NTR landed, it was on the lowest gold province available (when Africa was available).
OhSlowPoke- Make sure nothing is beneath you. Don't take losing very seriously. If you lose, try not to get so worked up about it, just think about how you're going to win next time - just try again and don't get upset about it.
Zazie– You just have to know your limitations, and keep building up on them, rather than trying to go for something way, way larger than you can do. Know your weaknesses, and how to overcome them. Figure out what you did wrong, and then correct it.
How much of your success do you attribute to skill vs diplomacy? Zazie– The top 5 thing was total diplomacy. Stage 1 we ended up fighting against [REL_3], which was a not-terrible clan that we had to deal with. After it ended we stood our ground, and that paved the way to diplomacy. So there was a mix of both. Every stage at the beginning something went wrong, stage 1 [-M-A-] landed and there was other stuff and stage 2 was [TYR] and [RUSS] chipping us both nightly. We had 4-5 battles every single night for a solid 2 weeks, and they were all at the same time. We actually stood [our ground] and kept on with our land.
OhSlowPoke- Once the clans backed down we went to diplomacy mode.
Zazie– Stage 3 was full diplomacy, and the fact that riots were in made people unable to hold too much land helped that.
Quemapueblos- So it sounds like that skill played a role a bit earlier, and diplomacy came later as a result of your success?
Zazie– Pretty much. Part of the problem of our clan is that we're not really well-known, so we don't get a lot of free diplomacy like many larger clans do. We can't just land in an area and say, "give us this, and we'll help you out" because no one really knows us.
OhSlowPoke- We have to earn it first by fighting for it and earning the respect of the clans in the region, which we did.
What have you learned from the campaign and clan wars in general that you wish you had known when you started? OhSlowPoke- We never had any callers that were from other clans, so I wish someone explained to me how all of the maps worked prior to starting. We learned everything by trial and error.
Zazie– There hasn't been a huge specific lesson. The original structure that we started out with was sound, and it's still what we're doing today. It's just calling experience that we needed back then compared to now.
What process do you have to get ready for a battle? Zazie– We generally have a base plan for the map, and before the battles pop, we all gather up and build our teams based on what we want for each team. We don't really do training rooms much unless we screw something up, or we need to learn a map really fast.
OhSlowPoke- A lot of the stuff we do in NTR is allow players to have more input. We have callers, but we find that a lot of our players are very knowledgeable, and understand the maps, so before we do a specific plan, we generally have an open forum about what tanks we should bring and how we should use them. We then narrow it down to the best strategies. People test things on their own and use that to argue how their plan is better.
Zazie– After we have our team we'll go over the plan within the 15 minutes before the battle pops. After each game we'll have an after-battle discussion, and figure out what went wrong and what should be done next time, and it all gets modified into the strategy of what we do the next time we play it. It takes 10 minutes the first time we play a map, and then up to a couple of hours [cumulative] possibly until we figure things out.
What decisions have you made in the past that you regret now? OhSlowPoke- My initial chip placement in the Campaign was bad. I picked an area that I thought would be safer than it was. And I made some alliances with people that I thought would be able to hold up their end of the bargain, and they weren't able to.
Zazie– Other than the chip placement thing that I was asleep through, and the entire ally situation, which I called right off the bat not working, we haven't really made many large mistakes in that sort of realm.
What was the most exciting match you had during the campaign? Zazie– That would be the match against [VPG]. We had 8 people, including one T1 Cunningham, and we beat them with that while they had a full 15 of mostly M4's. I was in my T-50-2 calling it - that was really fun, and a huge highlight during the campaign. We set up everything in the city [Highway, defense], they sent a group of M4's into the city, and we made sure not to poke. They basically rushed into us single-file, and died to our Pz4 and Ram II. After that we just used our T-50-2 to scout and control the map. We ended up having a Chaffee on our team do 2500 damage, and I did about 1700. It was kind of insane, and it shouldn't have worked, but it did.
What was your favorite tier in the campaign? Zazie– Tier 5 was good because you could run Chaffees and T-50-2's and you could do anything with them. I enjoyed tier 7 though because of the T71.
OhSlowPoke- Most of our clan was a big fan of tier 6, myself included. We love doing Medium tank companies, so we have a lot of guys who like playing with tier 6 tanks.
Zazie– During tier 6 I still just played my T-50-2, so I didn't really care about it.
Before you started doing Clan Wars, how did you get people ready for it? How did you make sure players didn't jump ship and join an active Clan Wars clan? How did you get to this point? OhSlowPoke- We have a playerbase that is extremely loyal to our clan. Several people left other clans to join us because of the community we have, more than anything. Being a 4Chan clan, there is a specific kind of community we have that I'm not sure any other clans have, whatsoever.
How do you recruit people to your clan? Zazie– There's a VG section on 4Chan, which is video game generals, and there is always a WoT general going. We don't actively recruit, unless there's someone we actually know.
Hypnotik - What if someone outside of 4Chan comes to you wanting to join?
Zazie– We've actually turned down a lot of people because of that. We have a very small number of non-4Chan people in the clan, and they're all personal friends of someone in there, and they get the entire community.
OhSlowPoke- We don't let anyone in that isn't from the 4Chan community unless they're a friend of someone that is, and that person can vouch for them. A lot of stuff is personal responsibility on our players' part.