They do.
Have you ever wondered why its only the smaller clans being targeted? They would target each other out of paranoia if they weren’t already colluding. Its not because of some unsportsman thing of too afraid of attacking someone who can damage you back. PVPers will attack larger groups just to get an advantage.
See… you’re not even seeing just a single 10 man clan, or two 10 man clans, but several. If they aren’t actively fighting or plotting against each other. They’ve made agreements or are outside of game friends (or at least the leadership is).
This is why smaller clans get absolutely trounced the moment they try to do anything.
If you reduced the clan size to 5, you would simply spread people out and make it harder to track, but they’re still in their discord. You can make it 3 man and it just gets worse. Even if you restrict it to solo only you’re still dealing with 10-30 people, the only reason it looks like just 10 is because they don’t login all at the same time.
Because the 3 man clan was outplayed by the virtue of the leader only bringing 2 friends. This sounds unfair. But its about as unfair as attacking someone who has less gear. And about as unfair as attacking someone who lets say has double the hours played, but didn’t ‘get it’ and isn’t great at the game. They might have more time, more gear, but if you’re ‘better’ you have an unfair advantage of simply adapting to the game. But we don’t like to consider that unfair because we have our preconceived notions of what fair is. But we’re talking about PVP in a multiplayer environment. To which there is three aspects that ensure your success and failure.
First you have What you Know. What you know is commonly called player skill. This is your experience and time played in the game. Your knowledge of the mechanics, and your ability to use your character in a confrontation effectively. Many think this is all you should ever need. If you were playing checkers or chess or some other similar thing. Maybe. But we’re PVPing here. Lacking player skill means that you can have great gear, and be part of a large team, but you’re a third leg, not pulling your weight. Having great player skill however means you can beat those with better gear and sometimes you equal more than a single opponent in group fights.
Second you have What you Have. This is the character you play. Their feats, their experience points, their levels, their gear, and their recipes. This is the sum of all of the progress you have made in the game and on the character you play. The tangible things that are easily measured and stored in a database. Lacking gear or levels means you can lose to an equally skilled player. Having better gear gives an advantage to the same.
Finally you have Who you Know. This is the most overlooked aspect and arguably the most important. This is your ability to work with others, your ability to lead or follow, and your personal network of people you know that you can call in as allies. That last one happens to be people you know in the community, people you know on the servers you play on, people in allied clans, people in your own clans, and people you know in real life that play the game too. Lacking the number of people needed in a confrontation means you could be overwhelmed. While the inverse means you have an easier time.
I want to talk about that last one. It wasn’t too uncommon when a new game came out, that while I was in the Army sometimes soldiers from my platoon and others in the company would actually play that together. We’re talking about 10-30 people. And since we all work the same hours in the same organization we could frequently login all at the same time. Back then we played Battlefield 2142 and Age of Conan and let me tell you, the poor randoms we encountered had a rough time.
Now how is it someone is going to tell a dozen or more soldiers in the same unit cannot play together? You’re going to tell me a group of players who are like brothers and train for life and death situations can’t blow off steam and play a video game somewhere because of some silly notion of fairness?
It goes further. I have many friends whom I game with who’ve I’ve played with for the better part of several decades. My best friend and I have gamed since the mid 1980s. I have other friends who I played with since Highschool for nearly 30 years. And I still keep up with people I knew in the military for nearly 20 years. These people I can call in for many of these video games and our level of coordination and numbers make it extremely hard to beat.
However these are relationships we have fostered for decades. It makes even the 8,000 hour hardcore CE player look brief. I have the ability to make friends, coordinate, and execute plans and goals requiring a dozen or so players, an ability that took literal decades, not hours, days, or weeks, and why should that be limited?
I mean even at the very basic of telling friends they can’t play together is asinine to begin with.
I’m not going to tell you that you need to join a 10 man clan. You want autonomy, I understand that. I even respect that. But if you have a 3 man clan and are facing 10 man clans (meaning you’re fighting against a coordinate (or somewhat coordinated) team of multiple clans, then you’re going to need to build up your network of allies. You don’t need to be friends. You just need to be able to work together.
If you lack the social skills, charisma, too stubborn to follow directions on occasion, and lack the fortitude to lead… well… you are going to have to accept the idea you will likely lose more than not to those who do. Even if you have better gear, even if you have better skill then individuals. In games like Conan Exiles, allied groups are more than the sum of their parts.