Short version: if your clan fights a range of different opponents, nothing here changes for you. Nothing at all.
Imagine a school sports day. Every class is meant to play every other class. Instead, two classes play only each other, over and over, all day long. By the end both have an enormous score, they are top of the board, and nobody else got a game.
That is not really a tournament any more.
From now on, your clan can go to war with any particular clan once per season. When that war is over, your next war is against somebody else.
Last season we explained that rewards notice who you fight. That looked at one player against one player.
Some arrangements are simply bigger than that. Fifteen people in one clan and fourteen in another can share the same trade out between them, and then no single pair of players looks unusual at all. Everyone is only a small part of it.
So the game now also looks at the picture between two whole clans.
Two questions, and the second one is the important one.
Does everybody get something? A real war shares out the spoils. Both clans win some fights and lose some fights, and both walk away with gold and experience. An arrangement pays almost everything to one side.
Were the fights actually fights? In a war you send an army that might lose, because you do not know how it will go. In an arrangement you send many times more soldiers than the defender is holding, so the result is decided before the army leaves.
That second question is why a clan that is honestly losing a war is safe here. Losing looks one-sided too, but a clan that is losing sends smaller armies and gets beaten. That is the opposite of sending overwhelming force, and the game can see the difference clearly.
We checked this against every clan war declared this season before switching it on. It picked out none of them.
For now, nothing automatic. It gets written down for a person on our team to look at.
We would rather watch the numbers for a season and be sure they are right than take something away from somebody who was only playing hard.
Right now a small number of clans get most of their gold and experience by arranging fights with one partner clan instead of fighting the server. Nobody is being called a cheat for it, and it has not been against the rules.
But it slowly makes the leaderboard mean nothing, and that is not fair on everybody who is playing properly. We would rather fix the rules than punish people.
Open a ticket. We can see exactly what the numbers say and why they say it. If we have got it wrong, we will tell you so and we will fix it.