What’s written in the title.
Never understood that. Is it an LFG with extra steps?
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A group of many people that you can join and talk to on a regular basis, regardless of being in a group or not, all at once. For example, in ESO guilds (same thing) have 500 people in it. And you can send messages to all of them at once.
Guilds can have requirements everyone has to meet to join, and then you can form groups knowing everyone there has a certain level of competency. Other guilds are more social in nature and a group from them may have just as much skill variance as a group of randoms. These groups still tend to be superior to pickup groups though because the communication and coordination with them tend to be better, since you get to know that person and know what they can and can’t do.
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NGL this sounds like a PUG discord
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Those are similar, which is why they tend to be used as alternate in games without them.
The main difference is that clans have leaders hand curating who can join, and all the members tend to be willing to play with each other rather than having multiple groups of people with conflicting needs like in a discord.
clans is like forming a team that you play with on the regular.
some people are conflicting it with guilds that have many players in it, but clans don’t really do that.
clans is kinda like contenders but on a casual level, you scrim against other clans and play ranked games etc. and sometimes you play proper clan matches or clan tournaments.
so think of it like a normal team thing but for the casual crowd.
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A “clan” is essentially a large group of players with the same interests.
You would often found this in MMO games where raid parties are an essential part of life for the gear.
If OW has a clan, it would essentially be the same but instead of gears, you get SR…which is essentially useless.
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wait, so Clans and Guilds are different?
to make it more easy to understand, think of guilds like an mmo thing where you want a party of 40 people for a raid or x amount of people to do pvp battlegrounds in a premade with etc.
it’s essentially a long friendslist with people that you want to play with but don’t really care about too much as they aren’t really your real friends, more like work mates.
clans are more like teams or kind of a like a guild depending on the game.
for example in counterstrike people would form clans with random people and hold tryouts and have extra people in case someone is getting benched or can’t show up for some reason but it’s only really one team.
but clans for example in a game like warcraft 3 was more so to signify who you train with and what organisation you belong to as it is a 1v1 game generally and the clan was more about to help you practice and elevate each others play or just being friendly with, but it also spurred clan clashes where a clan challenges another clan to show who’s the better one etc but those didn’t mean much but then again there were tournaments etc and your clan could dominate the whole tournament taking first to fourth place.
to summarize guilds tends to be a giant team that can invite pretty much anyone into it and find a place for them,
clans tends to be smaller and more picky thing more similar to regular teams, but clans can also work similar to a guild depending on the game where you have a bigger range of skill or ability ranging from player to player, like having a dojo and a sensei and students within it.
for example, if emongg had a clan it could be just his team or it could be a big amount of people emongg chose to play with and practice with or teach, but probably more the former than the latter because this is a team vs team game.
but the exact definition of these are very fuzzy in the overwatch community and what means X to someone can mean Y to somebody else.
like the words are interchangeable to some people and people think they all mean the same thing etc.
but i simply go by the games i’ve played and how they have handled the words separately.
I personally think you’re kind of confusing the issue by focusing too much on the goals of individual clans/guilds rather than on the system as a whole.
Clans and guilds are essentially the same thing, a large group of players curated by a leader that meet together for some common goal.
What large means will vary from game to game, because different games have different size requirments for different content. And they will organize themselves different or offer different services depending on the game.
But they are all still just large groups of players curated by leader(s) for some unifying video game goal at the end of the day.
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Most other shooters I played with clans It’s basically like a community page. You can chat with other people in your clan, join games together, have the same tags and custom icons shared by everyone. Some games I played were really great in that they offered clan matches and clan tournaments every weekend.
I’m honestly floored this isn’t in OW yet. The first day I bought this game I assumed we’d have It within the first year or something because It seems like something that obviously fits this game.
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Yeah. Same here. I’m completely shocked that they don’t have such an obvious thing for a team game. It makes team forming so much better, as it greatly reduces scheduling requirements without forcing you to play with someone completely random and possibly incompatible.
I just don’t get how you make a game as team reliant as Overwatch and then make it so difficult to form coherent teams. So much of the toxicity, bad matchmaking, etc comes from the absolutely chaotic and slapdash method of team forming.
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well clans and guilds are different to me, because i’ve played in several clans in several games, and i’ve only been a part of a guild in 2 games.
clans tended to be more a small group thing from 5 to 10 where there was no real leader just a group that agreed to get together, kinda like a D&D group that’s running a campaign, like a flat structure.
sure it probably was 3 of them that was real friends but they put out a tryout to bring onboard 2 more to play with them so they could field a whole team or simply let people in the clan but there was no real leader in it.
and guilds was hierarchical and tended to put the founders as leaders and everything was for the glory of that guild or a way for people to just to come together and play more structurally but someone was in charge of it.
but sure, there are arguments you could have pointing them to be one and the same, but i just don’t agree with my experience from them.
I been in too many to count at this point. And the only small clans that I have been in were ones that intentionally limited themselves, even though many clans in the same game were larger.
Some were just more like a community hub and some were very hierarchical, some had very strict requirements and some had none. Tended to come down to the individual organization.
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There was one game in particular that had clans I remember that I always hoped OW would be like. In that game you had your casual matches (aka QP), your ranked matches (which was taken pretty serious)…but then you had your clan matches which everyone went super tryhard in 
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Guilds just like the ones you find in world of warcraft, it will easily be my favorite feature in the game if they added it as I will be gathered with people with similar interests and share the same goals in the game :> easy friend making machine basically
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kinda like these forums and the discord channels that exists allready but are unofficial.
Yeah except it’s in game thus more convenient. That’s the whole point of these features 
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pretty much, but really they don’t have to, if you’re interested enough those will just happen on their own as people would want to congregate.
but i see what you’re saying.
What are you talking about?
there allready are “clans”
but it’s not as widely accessable as it could be.