During the early days of online gaming, people would work to become part of the biggest teams in the community. While deathmatch was always a thing, team-based game modes were always a hit with gamers.
As online networks for PSN and Xbox Live have grown, new community features are being built, but gaming clans appear to be left out.
Sony introduced PlayStation Communities on the PS4 and it has been a bit hit within the community. With the community feature having a dedicated mobile app for gamers to communicate on the go. This framework is the ultimate addition to any team of gamers who want to compete together online.
Gaming clans are far from dead. Even if you are unfamiliar with them, you will more than likely have seen players in online lobbies that have a short clan tag in front of their names, usually wrapped in brackets. Even the smallest of teams can use a clan name generator to come up with something cool before heading out to the online battlefield to make a name for themselves.
Modern gaming networks like PlayStation Network and Xbox Live allow us to create one account with one Gamertag and we can use this across all online multiplayer games. The disconnect between the clans that people create in online games and the PlayStation communities feature is one that should really be improved.
When it comes to a Gamertag, you will only ever have one assigned to your account at any one time. With communities, however, you may have more than one. Gamers often create communities for specific games. If better support were to be added to the PlayStation development kit, games could provide the user with a list of clans they can join based on the communities they are a part of. No need to search, wait for moderators or coordinate with the community to know what the correct clan tag is.
Battle Royale games are in the spotlight at the moment, and these types of games put a higher focus on players playing alone. While teamwork is not important, some team-based modes are being introduced and are likely to improve over time.
Allowing players to immediately identify other members of their gaming community automatically would be the ideal way to build a stronger bond between players and encourage more strategic and social gaming within online communities.
Although battle royale games are getting a lot more mainstream press these days, competitive, team-based multiplayer is still going strong. Games like Call of Duty have an annual release which along with the classic team-based game modes, often has a coop game mode where players work together against bots. A popular variant of this is the Zombies game mode that was first introduced with Call of Duty: World At War.
The majority of popular online shooters will allow gamers to simply add a clan tag to the beginning of their online Gamertag, with some profanity restrictions of course! The success of this system is often shown when you are playing team deathmatch and find you are getting destroyed by the other team who all have some form of [TAG] in front of their names. Clans work and they do a lot for the players who like to be a part of a team.
While we may not have integrated support for clans in online gaming networks, the games themselves do and the community still makes great use of them. Console manufacturers are looking for new and better ways to attract people to their network. Network-level support for gaming clans may be something we see on the horizon.
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Tags: Gamers, Gaming, Online games, Online Gaming, Playstation, PS4, PS5, PSN, Sony, Video games