You are saying that a group of players have to declare they are not a clan to not be?
Personally.... in my opinion a clan is a group of people that share a common name characteristic no matter what that may be, and play together regardless of declaration.
If several people don the names 123unique_name_here they are a clan even if there is no website, game servers or declaration. Other wise all of them would have 100% unique names and just be friends.
Ok, ill throw in some examples from my own experience:
Years ago when i switched from BnB to JZM for competition interests there was a couple of weeks inbetween in which i would be deciding which direction to go, while i decided i was playing with several friends whom were also exBnBers and were without a clan, for ****s and giggles we added the tag .SH. (or something like that) to our names, when ppl would ask what does SH means and if they could join our "clan" we always said: "it means "sexual harassment" and no you cant join coz we are not a clan, we are just friends who know each other from a long time ago", and it was true, we didnt had any servers, forums, website, competition scene presence... NOTHING, just the tag.
Now, lets do another example more recent: when i started playing UrT again i did it to play with some friends from a linux community called "This Week In Linux", they have (or had) gaming nights, and one of the members decided to rent a server coz hes cool like that, while playing he and his friend who helped setup the server created and used the |AC!D| tag, they also setup a website and a ts server, a forum (
http://acidlinux.com/?q=forum), etc, but when they first started i asked them what was the recruitment process, they lol´d and told me there was none, i was free to put the acid tag since they were not a clan, it was just for gaming nights, so even with all that, it was just a group of ppl who enjoyed playing together whom also had a interest in common (linux being the freaking win
), who, when asked also declared they werent a clan, now i dont know if they still arent a clan or not, i havent contacted any of them since i started playing at 1up servers
.
"and play together regardless of declaration"...
how does that even makes sense? are you bestowing upon someone the clan status against their will? lol ok.