How to Win CoD Ghosts Clan Wars: Building Your Clan

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How big should I make my clan?

So you want to build a clan that can win at CoD Ghosts clan wars and get the Body Count gear? Great! You might be tempted to recruit a whole lot of players, but it isn’t that simple. Clan wars are divided by size: large clans play large clans, and small clans play small clans. So getting bigger can end up giving you a lot more work without any real benefit.

Having more people will put you in divisions that require more wins to take nodes, and you’ll lose precious time just trying to organize your players. On the other hand, if you have too few members–like just three or four–you run the risk of going up against teams that are trying to compete professionally.

We found that a clan size of just under twenty people works best for us. We had to let go of a few people who couldn’t really participate–nicely, with no yelling, taking the time for explanations so everyone understood how not playing was costing the team–and we kept the people who could.

How much do they have to play to win?

In clan wars, more time is better, as long as people aren’t burning out. But bronze-through-platinum division clan wars lasts from 3:00 pm EST Wednesday to 3:00 pm EST Monday (barring technical difficulties): five days of relentless competition. You can’t expect your clan to play 18-to-20-hours a day that whole time. You might wish they could, but they can’t. It’s unrealistic.

For us, the beauty of having just under twenty dedicated people is that some kind of team can play almost all the time. But that team changes day-by-day and hour-by-hour. We always muster as many as we can for the opening push on Wednesday (more on this under the strategy article), but after that, it varies.

We might start with three or four people getting on as early as 6:00 or 7:00 am, and the day might end with three or four people staying on as late as 2:00 or 3:00 am. But the same people don’t stay online that whole time. People leave for work or practice or chores or dinner, but as soon as they can play again they get back online for as long as they can.

During the height of our evening we might have as many as ten or twelve playing at once, but the team changes fluidly. As long as people are showing up at least some of the time, and as long as they are helping when they do, we understand that the day-to-day schedule has to be flexible.

How do I find people to recruit for my clan?

Start with your friends who play. You’re going to see them a lot during clan wars. You’ll be better off if you already get along with them.

If that’s not enough, find people you like playing with by queuing for matches and playing in-game chat so you can hear what the other players are saying. See who’s reasonable and who’s raging. Pro tip: don’t invite the ragers.

Send friend requests to the people who are doing reasonably well and who seem like people you’d get along with. Play with them for at least a few days to see how they are over time and how often they like playing. Pro tip: it’s not always best to invite the guy going 25 and 3. Why not? Because unless you’re in team deathmatch or cranked, he (or she) is probably just farming kills and not actually trying to win. Clan wars are all about game wins, not individual k/d’s.

You can always try the whole “all recent players” recruiting method–spamming messages to everyone you see–but we’ve never done it, and I think you would have a hard time getting a random group like that to “mesh” well. Clan wars can be stressful. You’re going to have to hold your clan together, and that’s a lot easier to do if the people in your clan like and trust you.

How good do they have to be?

Not everyone in your clan needs a high k/d (or “kdr,” a.k.a. “kill-death ratio”) for you to win clan wars. What matters more is how their k/d got that way.

We have people in the clan with relatively low k/d’s because they like goofing off: trying crazy trick shots for no reason, running around with a knife and a grenade launcher because they think it’s funny, or trying to read the castle signs on the stonehaven map. (What? The signs say things! They don’t make any real sense, but you can read them! Try it, I dare you…)

But when clan wars are on, we buckle down and get serious. We don’t try to get gold camos. We don’t play with untested loadouts. We don’t stop to look at the cool cows in the distance. And we definitely don’t run around feeding the other team points just because we’re bored.

Our clan has a well-balanced combination of campers and rushers, but if a rusher has to guard a flag or a camper has to run across the map, we do what we have to do for the win. If we’re getting killed by k/d farmers but we’re winning, we stay and get the win. We don’t rage quit. We put the team first.

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