It's definitely a slap in the face, but I can't say it wasn't unexpected by Dice.
Like OP posted, Dice used to be proud of the communities which were built around its games, but nowadays, it seems they'd rather have no clans at all. It's not really surprising as many of the key personnel within Dice, who were pro-communities and willing to communicate with them directly - have one by one left the studios after BF4. We've been watching these developments with fear at UP, and known things would get harder before they got any better.
Much of it is probably due to decisions fueled by cries of unfairness from individual players, who see clans playing together and dominating servers. Also, the overall sensitivity of people in general, which leads to crazy design decisions such as removing the ability to chat to all players on a server, because heaven forbid someone types EZ in the chat after a round - we certainly can't have that in our safe (wargame) environment.
I think the fundamental problem is that people playing casually alone see only the negatives of clans and clan administered servers, because they don't have any idea of all the positives clans bring to the game. And since Dice/EA hasn't yet figured out a good way to monetize platoons/clans - they see their existence as a deterrant to individual players spending money on the game along with the costs of developing community tools.
Unfortunately, I don't see this changing, and I very much doubt we'll get any official response from the developers to this thread no matter how many likes it gets.
But, we'll keep fighting...
Very well put and I agree with all your points.
We actively encouraged solo players to come and play on our servers or with us in a lobby so show them the positives. We always tried to spread guys out on both sides of a server equally and welcomed others into our parties and lobbies. Messaged people GG end of rounds and was proactive in showing people that platoons are not negative environments.
There has to be a better solution than this. But to treat is with such disregard, after the years of building these communities and bringing so many events ect. Keeping the V community afloat during all the dark times, we deserve more than being thrown away without word. Keep fighting the fight guys!
I hear you on all of that! Breaks my heart and the hearts of so very many others.
