I made the following suggestion many months ago, I think it was even in the old Taleworlds forum, thus being deleted now
Simply create something on the character page that looks like the faction box in Strategus:
- Everyone can create a new faction
- Below this you have the option to join an existing faction. You can choose from a dropdown-list and then click an "apply"-button
- Every faction leader has some basic options for faction maintenance, basically a list with all members and a few buttons next to them, e.g. "accept"/"decline" (for applications), "promote/demote" (for members, to promote them to officers to allo be allowed to accept applications) or "promote to faction leader"/"kick" for some definite decisions
- banner balance gets reworked. Every server has five free "slots" (I don't mean real slots increasing server population) per team for clan players. So if two groups of clan players between 2 and 5 players join, each of them will be balanced into one team. As soon as the five slots are exceeded, another pair of five slots opens, and the players get distributed another way, but always trying to place same clans into the same team. But the difference between the teams will never be more than five clan players.
Examples:
(Left column are the clan player slots for team blue, right one is for team red)
A|B
A|B
A|-
A|-
A|-
or
A|B
A|B
A|C
A|C
A|C
----
A|C
A|C
-|C
-|-
-|-
or
A|A
A|A
A|A
A|-
A|-
This way noone can just "leech" on a foreign clan, but simultaneously the need to do so will be lowered, too.