[crAzerk]

As we know previously, Blizzard promised to bring Clan Support to Heart of the Swarm. Today we get a first glimpse of what this looks like.



From Blizzard:
"Anyone can create or join a Clan, and doing so gives you access to the Clan window. In the Clan window, you’ll find a completely private chat channel, a News tab where Clan affairs can be posted for all members to read, an Info tab where officers can post Clan information, and a Members roster.

When you create a Clan, both a Clan name and a Clan Tag designation are required. All of the members of your Clan will have their character name pre-pended with the Clan’s Tag. The Clan Leader is able to promote members to the rank of Officer in the Clan (and demote, when necessary)."



"Our goal with Clans in StarCraft II is simple -- we want to bring people together in ways that make sense for allowing players to organize into groups, communicate with each other, and recognize others in-game. Like other new features being tested in the beta, Clans is a work in progress, and we’re looking forward to testing it with you."

What is interesting is that they are making a distinction between 'Clans' and 'Groups':

"While Clans are geared towards teams of players participating competitively in StarCraft II, we’re working on support for Groups: players who want to associate casually, and in larger numbers."


What do you think about the preview of Clan support? Has Blizzard delivered what they promised? What are they missing? Is there a need to distinguish between 'Clans' and 'Groups'?

Original post here.
Previous HoTS updates: UI update / Introducing: Leveling

[rezyn8]

14 years in the making... But it is good to see they are finally launching Clan Support for SC2 WoL & HotS. I would like to see some sort of verification process for pro teams as I can imagine there will be fifty clones of StarTale, Prime, Nvidia, etc. There is a 50 member limit to clans as well where as Groups will be much larger.

Not sure how this will affect people who are members of a clan AND a team seeing as the clan tag will be auto pre-pended to the players name. How many 'clans' can you be a member of? Unless they expect the social clans to be termed as 'groups' and the teams as 'clans'.

Hope Blizzard will be giving out another round of free name changes when it is launched.

[Fourby]

Yay finally

[souljah]

Originally Posted by rezyn8

14 years in the making...

wasn't exactly 14 years in the making, they did have good clan set up and clan systems in Warcraft III, which amused me to no ends when they didn't port it over to WoL when they moved to B.net 2.0 even though it was such a good system

Quick Comments

mGGDaedalus:

rez was totally being serious there :P

[TADivinity]

Good stuff. Not very innovative in comparison to wc3 - but I dont think it needs to be. It just needs to beee theree!!

[Dingobloo]

Originally Posted by souljah

wasn't exactly 14 years in the making, they did have good clan set up and clan systems in Warcraft III, which amused me to no ends when they didn't port it over to WoL when they moved to B.net 2.0 even though it was such a good system

It wasn't really a good system from a scalability perspective. Bnet 1.0 was a custom piece of server software which when they wanted to support more people they had to purchase another server to run a realm which worked independent of the other realms. A clan could only have a unique ID per-realm and there were a bunch of other restrictions, like the clan leader had to log in at least once a month to avoid having to keep a bunch of dead clans around overloading a single realm.

Bnet 2.0 on the other hand is (as far as I can tell) entirely built on standard web technology so it's easier for them to scale, they're only tied to having regional log-in servers (KRTW/EU/NA/SEA). They can just purchase server and database capacity as needed from any number of providers as long as they support the server-side langauge that the BNET back end was written in.

The upshot of this is that porting it isn't as simple as taking what they've done previously and use it in the new game, they had to rebuild the server side from scratch to integrate with the way BNET 2.0 works, and the client side is obviously going to be different between WC3 and SC2 so that's not as simple as "porting it"

Quick Comments

crAzerk:

half of the people here will only uds half of this but sounds legit (Y)

[JDGaga]

wish we could have this now TT

if only id joined the 'Psy Raiders' clan id be sweet.

[DeNile]

Excited will be a QED clan in the beta. Unfortunately not me as I'm still waiting for beta invite.

[[TOG]Chrisau]

Cool that clan news is within SC2 too. So team members dont have to go to websites to see what their clan is doing, sort of consolidates it all in one place. Very cool

[Meatex]

Bad for players who want to be in a team AND a clan
Either clans form groups and presumably miss out on the benefits, assuming the groups are just a way to get a private chat. No real idea how they work but I don't think groups would share all the features of clans.
Will have to wait and see on that
Also sucks for popular teams or big clans will we have to see TA1 and TA2?
And I would imagine that blizzard will let pro teams reserve their names otherwise it will just be a cluster F

Quick Comments

Dox:

u suck

[ToRSpartaz]

This was perhaps the highlight what I am looking forward to in HoTS, looking forward to testing the beta of this new feature.

I suppose it is still encouraging the incentive for teams to purchase new accounts for their players or players purchasing personal accounts of vice versa...

[DeNile]

I don't think blizzard really defines teams and clans as separate. It is an assumption but they have never differentiated between the two before. Where as we in the community have had to for tournament structures.

[Zanderax]

Clan Tags is the best thing about this update. I hated having ToR as part of my name because it looked tacky, people would miss understand my name and if I wanted to change clans then I was stuck...

[nirvAnA]

This is amazing!

I love that theres a group feature too so people from mixed clans can still hang out together.

[inFeZa]

TA gets screwed. 50 player cap, needs to be lifted a bit

[ThatGuyDoMo]

Oh wow it's finally coming.

Hopefully it comes out soon in the beta so I can fiddle around with it, going to add another dimension to in game sc2 now that its much easier to spread information around within a clan/group.

Quick Comments

Maynarde:

Tomorrow

[TidaL]

Looking forward to this

It will be interesting to see how Blizzard acts to the concerns raised (pro team names taken, big clans exeeding limit and players in teams & clans)

But anyway I like how you can have clan news, its a great feature to easily find relevant news to your clan

[crAzerk]

Originally Posted by inFeZa

TA gets screwed. 50 player cap, needs to be lifted a bit

I thought of this too, but IMO it's probably because it's just the beta, and they're just testing and stuff.

[Zomgrofl]

Anyone elses clan chat get reset when they do a game?