To continue on a particular train of thought from the other thread, the idea would be to split the base game into several game modes. You can see this on quite a few online shooter games, but let's go with CS:GO as a good example, especially since I know Ishq plays this game too. The game modes include casual, competitive, and several varieties of death match. Casual allows you to have tactical games with a variety of players while not being too ridiculously complicated, while competitive allows you to have very hardcore games with very skilled people, all of whom communicate via voice chat. Death match, of course, allows you to pick any gun and have your way with it.
Now, I think I've made it very obvious by this point that I never found clan matches to be particularly entertaining. A lot of players, existing and potential, would agree with this. Not everyone wants strict coordination, nor do they want to have to play with the meta-game set up by the old Tremulous clan elite. Some people just want to download a video game that they thought looked cool so that they can run around cool sci-fi maps and shoot aliens with big guns. These people don't want to be stuck with a dretch or a rifle for the entire game while people yell at them for being idiots when they try something new. Some people just want to have fun, and they might have a different idea of fun than you do. We have the assets for this, so why can't we cater to these people?
While keeping the same (or similar) game balance, the economy aspect of the game should be the mutable one. Our casual mode should remove credits and just keep team progression, while making some other things easy for the general player instead of the clan player. Competitive mode should focus entirely on hardcore people that need coordination and skilled clan matches. Death match should remove base building entirely and have you spawn at random, pre-defined parts of the map with either a random load-out or something that you picked before spawning.
So what do you all think? If we set up servers with these as experiments and way more people play these than stock gameplay, then we know we're doing something wrong.