Call of Duty Ghosts Clan Wars begin on Monday November 25

Written by Brandon Hofer on November 20, 2013

Call of Duty Ghosts News: Activision reveals that you might want to play COD Ghosts MP this weekend to prepare for Clan Wars next week.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is out for the PS4 and Xbox One marking the debut of one of the most popular franchises of all time on next gen hardware. Activision has revealed that the very first clan wars begins this Monday, November 25. Clan Wars is a metagame that takes place on top of the multiplayer game you’re already playing. The various game multiplayer game modes in Call of Duty: Ghosts match up to a node on the Clan Wars map, which you can view from the free Call of Duty app. One Clan War node might be tied to your success in Hunted; another might be linked to Hardcore Kill Confirmed. As you and your Clan members play multiplayer matches in those modes, you’ll be racking up points that will let you take control of the matching nodes. Controlling those nodes pays off in in-game bonuses and, if you’re really good, unlockable items for your soldiers. Since Clan Wars is layered on top of what gamers are already playing, it’s something that casual, social Call of Duty gamers as well as more dedicated, competitive players can all enjoy.

Every two weeks you’ll get matched up with a new batch of seven other rival Clans. You might find yourself battling some familiar foes more than one week, but “there are a lot of Clans out there, so hopefully you’ll see a lot of variety and mix it up.” In this case, “a lot of Clans” means any Clan with at least three members in it — they’re eligible for Clan Wars and will be automatically enrolled when the system gets underway.

Call of Duty players hate lopsided lobbies, and they will bail on a match if they feel it’s hopeless. Beachhead is well aware of that, so Call of Duty Clan Wars are designed to be fair fights. “Your Clan will get ranked into one of four divisions,” says John Linden, studio head of Beachhead. “We have a new matchmaking system, which takes into account the skill and size of your Clan at the beginning of the War. You don’t want to get one group with 100 people where they all play 15 hours a day versus a group of 100 people with four active players playing two hours a day. You’d get crushed; it wouldn’t be a good balance.”

Rewarding both individual achievement and team effort is a key goal for Beachhead – and to that end, it’s important to note that Clan XP and Clan Wars points are different things. “Clan XP, you earn by playing together, but Clan Wars wins count individually,” explains Linden. “If I win a match in a mode relevant to the current Clan War, I get a point for my Clan; if you play later, you get a point for your Clan. It’s an individual contribution to your Clan. We don’t have to be playing together to play Clan Wars, and we didn’t want to penalize people who aren’t online at the same time as their Clan. With every win, I can contribute.”

Obviously, the scope of Clan Wars makes player diversity a valuable commodity. “You want to make sure you have different people in your Clan who are good at different modes,” reasons Linden. “There are some people who always want to play Domination, and that’s fine, but you’re not going to win the Clan War. But if you have a good mix of some people playing Dom and some playing Hardcore Kill Confirmed, some people playing Blitz and some Cranked, that’s when you’re going to increase the odds of actually winning a war.”

To start things off, this weekend will be what’s being called a “placement weekend” – stats on your Clan and its multiplayer personality will be collected a few days in advance, so matchups can be sorted for Monday’s start. (In other words, this weekend’s a good time to rally up.) You can also expect some Clan Wars communications from HQ, too. “We’ll do an announcement, and probably a push notification in the app,” offers Linden. “We’ll want to remind people to make sure they have at least three people in your Clan if they want to participate, and to make sure they have a badass emblem for their Clan, because that’s what gets stamped on the nodes. When you take over a territory, your emblem gets stamped on the territory in the app. When you go in, you’ll know who is winning the War because their emblem will be all over the place.”

Will you be participating in the Call of Duty Clan Wars? Let us know what you think below.