Can't help feeling that if you weren't part of a clan you wouldn't be so quick to judge these "peculiar" people.
Quite on the contrary. The reason i am actually in a clan was because of my Teamwork. Instead of complaining I was following some dudes on a server and try to do Teamwork with them. It never occured to me that to be succesful you have to be in a clan. And it never occured to me that not being in a clan is "underpowered". And i still think so. When some Byzants are on we still get owned if the enemy team is playing together and we do not.
Some clansmen though saw me doing teamwork and then asked me if i wanted to join them on Teamspeak to do even more effective teamwork. Hence I'm now in Byzantium.
I still think not being in a clan is perfectly viable if you do it right. But being in one makes the whole thing easier. And thats not bad. It is meant to be so.
There is team work and there is outright exploitation. You can get away with this kind of organised farming in something like an MMO, where your premade is spread amongst a massive pool of players, in CRPG it isn't, the same player base is being farmed by the same clans. Sooner or later there will be a point where this starts to hurt the community, people are already starting to get tired of this bullshit.
Like I said: You get it wrong. Doing Teamwork is the key here. This is a Teamgame. Coordinating your movements as a team is no exploiting. Its the way this game is meant to be played. If you do not like this kind of playstile I understand that fully, but then you are wrong in cRPG. You should go and play native-deathmatch then. Or one of the other mods where you are supposed to play as an individual... But even then you would not find too much of that out there. Most mods with large playerbases I know of are Team-based-modes.
And because of that there is no "exploiting" here. Not in a negative sense of "abusing the system". Because the system consists of Teamwork. People complain there are big groups of players who work together as intended by the gamemode and "break the game". Thats not true. They do just a better job of teamwork as you.
It's no coincidence that both sides of the argument are split almost 50/50 based on clan membership or lack thereof.
I will grant you the fact that opinions are based on clanmembership. But it is in no way 50/50. Most long-time-players are in clans. Thats because most players see this game as what it is. It is based on teamwork. You can teamwork better if youre communicating actively and effectively with other players. Even more with players you know. At best together on teamspeak. And that is how clans work. That is why the majority of long-time players ARE in clans.
I mean no disrespect whatsoever to you and your opinion. I loathe people who argue on the internet and get personal simply because they are anonymous and they can, but I hold the honest opinion that you are in the wrong. You simply want the mod to be played in a way it is not meant to. It seems to me there are people who refuse to see this or want it to be in another way because of personal taste.
Another thing is to me that this theme in general is just the new "argument-flavour-of-the-month."
Sometimes it is polestagger, sometimes it is Ranged sometimes 2handed, sometimes cavalry, sometimes the way you earn XP/gold.
Clans were owning uncoordinated teams since i play this game, which is since 2 years ago. Nothing happened to make this into a "problem" recently...