Thorn's post was just a sarcastic response out of misunderstanding what I meant. He doesn't have any legitimate involvement in this game anymore anyways and just comes here to fuck with people.
@Plague Bringer: Your post misunderstood it even further. I think that staying out of the competitive clan scene means that you're helping the game at a bare minimum level, unless you're doing developmental work. A huge reason that the game died down was because the competition died down. No competitive scene means no interest for competitive players who want to scrim and match.
A player who doesn't get into clans and ends up leaving the game, that will pretty much always do no damage to the game. If a player is a key member of a clan, and he leaves the game, the clan may weaken or die, which results in a weaker clan scene, and if the clan scene is already weak as it is, the whole thing can break down, leading to the possibility of many players leaving the game. You can do the figuring to realize how else this might happen from similar scenarios.
Clans that form purely for the sake of forming a clan are useless though, and yeah, they're popping up a lot still. That probably happens in every game where the idea of making a clan can come up.
Clans that compete but are unstable (see Sonic's "How to Make 100 Clans in a Year") still contribute for a time, and the members of these clans tend to just hop as soon as the clan dies or goes inactive. Keep in mind that the idea is for the competition to be noticeable in the full scope of the game; it doesn't matter who's in what clan, so long as there are enough active clans for the competition to continue.
Stable, skilled clans are necessary to create a reason to compete other than fun. The concept of improving and being better as a group is one driving force for founding clans.
Anyways, if you don't like the idea of clans at all, then it doesn't matter at all because you're all happy and content with your public games, which don't require much. If you don't like clans, but you bitch and moan about the game being dead, shut the fuck up.
Could care less if this is off topic btw, this whole topic doesn't even belong on this site. Lol X Server.