Recently I made my first blog post that I wanted to be shown on the soapbox. Within a day I had a dozen or so users now tracking my contributions and now I feel the pressure to consistantly create new blog posts, I don't know if I can handle it! (/end joke) What I did think about however, were topics that I feel strongly about. Not just topics that I want to rant about, but topics that can be discussed and where I can hear the opinions of others about the same thing. In a follow-up to my other post, which was about the lack of proper voice chat in gaming and how it's used to conversation rather than strategy, I decided to give my opinion on the importance of clans for online gaming. I think almost every online gamer becomes accustomed to playing with their friends or certain people they meet online and than they are unoffically a clan that roam around without any official marking or leadership, etc. It's natural to gravitate towards players you get along with more and to want to game with them consistantly. That is why I really like clan support for games. One of the first things I look for in an online game is clan support. As a matter of fact, if I see that a game does support this, I start to think that they are serious about building an online community and that the developer is making an effort, which I like. I don't know what my obsession with this game is but I cannot talk about clan support without bringing up Socom. It's actually a little sad to remininisce about such a classic game knowing that it's ruined by hackers now, but that is a topic for another day. Socom is stil the example I use whenever I talk about clan support. The amount of options was great, you set your tag, had your leaders, could post daily news and set up clan wars, whats not to like? I think half of my time playing that game was spent in recruitment games making sure my kill:death ratio was breaking even at least. So why is clan support essential for any online experience? Considering that most online games are shooters, it's nice to have the ability to hook up with a group of players and run around, tearing it up with a tag on. I see lots of people change their Xbox 360 gamertags to add a tag, which is silly since it costs ten dollars and it should be an online feature anyway. I think that the first game that is introduced with clan support, as well as private group chat, i'd jump all over it. I think the easiest way to prove my arguement is to look at games without any support for clans. Go online and your going to see people with makeshift clan tags and groups of people that all leave at once or all join at once. They all want to play with eachother, and clans are a feature that need to become a standard in gaming. Maybe I just have too much time on my hands or maybe this is an actual issue, but let's hear what you all think about this. Does clan support need to become a standard feature for online games?