BEFORE YOU READ
If i mention your clan at any point throughout this, please take no offense. I'm not sure how many clans I'll mention and for what reason I'll mention them. I blame all clans for their wrongdoing, including the one i lead myself. I don't see any innocence. Be prepared for a wall of text. nb4tldr
Let the wall of text begin!
After looking in at the pure community from a new perspective, one from the outside, I've realized a few things. The first is that the community and the clanning that i used to love is no longer the same. It's not the pure clanning that i fell in love with years ago. Infact, it's not even the clanning a year ago. There is a constant decline in pure clanning and pulls. There's a reason for the lack of members. I think i have a decently good explanation for it. Guess what? This topic has nothing to do with defence levels. The Problem
There are several main problems that I've noticed that i think have hurt the pure community the most. I'll discuss each one in a separate paragraph.
The first, and possibly most important, is Saturday (and Sunday, but mainly Saturday though) Pk Trips. Almost EVERY clan that uses this website works their tails off all week for a few hours 1-2 days a week. During this day, the clan goes "Pking" for 2-3 hours. During these 2-3 hours there is about 30-45minutes of actual fighting. The rest involves sitting in the lobby, getting crashed, regrouping, waiting for action in single, and my most favorite, getting sniped by a bigger clan is single. Every clan does this, and there's more too it. Every clan leader has to get himself a good leak/spy base before the weekend, or the trip is sure to fail. Clans pay money to chase smaller clans around. They pay money to ruin clans' wars. Why? To show their power! To show how "Good" they are! To be able to write an extra paragraph for their Saturday topic on pure-warfare! Don't get me wrong, I'm as guilty as they come, but so is your clan. So are your leaders.
The levels are terribly wrong! Look at your clan. You have levels 65-110 attempting to PK together all at the same time! It kills me. Every clan will accept many different combat levels, because they want to have more numbers. This leads back to the original Saturday discussion. If clans would keep their levels within a 10 or even 20 level radius, then they could PK at any time and place and have no problems whatsoever. Instead, if a members wants to pk, they have to ask around their clan, in an attempt to try to find someone else their level to pk with. It's terrible. I remember when i helped with EF's reopening back in January 2011. Everyone in that clan was between 60-79 combat for the first few months. It's was beautiful. We could PK whenever we wanted in w57, and we did. This brings me to my next topic of discussion.
Set event times. The clan 'The Archaic' had the right idea of this, but they took it to the extreme. Yes, plan events so you can have alot of your members on at the same time. No, don't plan events because everyone else plans their events at that time. If you ask a leader why preps are from 4-6est, they will say because that's when preps are held. If you ask why a clan doesn't pk P2P on Saturday and F2P on Sunday, then they will say because that's not how you do it. Why not? Who makes these rules that say when you can and can't schedule events. To be honest all i see now during the midweek are preps from 4-6est, that you need to sign up for!
However, there doesn't have to be a set time!
There are never PK trips randomly that don't involve another clan and a pure-warfare topic. This is because clans think that if they don't have someone to fight, then there's no point in Pking. This is terribly wrong! There is always someone to fight. There's always that kid at rune rocks. There's always that small team pking in W18 or W57. There's always somone to kill in the wilderness, you just have to go looking. Sometimes you can PK for loot instead of pking for a topic on a forums that other clans use. The Big Picture
Imagine this. What if every clan, F2P or P2P, randomly Pk'd during the week at random times. You would never know who or what you were going to run into. Every clan would be pking, masser clans would be pking, small teams would be pking, and the action every single day would be endless. It all starts with narrowing the combat levels, and being more laid back about having to schedule every single event. It's not a big deal, you won't lose you 'PW-Rep' if you fight a masser clan. You won't lose your rep if you kill that main team for bank l00t.
So much more fun can be had from this. Sure you can still have your little preps and Pk trips, but don't make them as important as you do. Honeslty, is it that important to pay people 10m+ a trip for locations. Is it that important to hit off somone's teamspeak? Is it that important to attack a clan in single that have less than you, so that you can get them to multi and have an easy win? Is it that important to make everything done as a clan scheduled? That's up to the leaders, and partly the members, to decide. Members if you're reading this, then tell your clan leaders that you want to unofficial pk. Tell them you don't want DDOS'ing. Tell them you want to stop attacking clans in single. These little things can improve the community. It's not getting completely fixed. It never will. It can improve.