They seem to have gone by the wayside. They used to be more necessary, back when you rented your own servers for games, rented your own teamspeak server, and had to do more work to get people to play together. With built-in voice capability in games now, and games that automatically match you with other players, it seems to me clans aren’t the thing they used to be.
I kind of miss them, gaming with ppl you know instead of pickup games with strangers. I miss the sense of community.
[Moderating]
Moving to the Game Room.
Certainly, they’re still a thing, especially if you’re playing something that allows for team play; it’s one thing to get matched with random strangers for a pickup game, and another to have a properly organized team with leadership and command. “Communication is OP” some people would complain, and not ironically.
In my experience, if the game has a forum, you will find clan recruiting there. Even if the game doesn’t support clans per se, there may still be organized groups you might join (iRacing springs to mind as an example).
MMOs have always had these and they are just as prominent as ever. I do miss my guild I was with for many years over a dozen games.
Thanks.
This was going to be what I was going to note. I play two MMOs (Final Fantasy XIV, and Star Wars: The Old Republic), and guilds (or “free companies” in FFXIV) are still definitely a big thing, particularly for players who are interested in content that works better with an organized team, like raids or PvP.
Also, over the past year or two, it seems like Discord has become the hot game-neutral platform for both voice chat and text chat, in place of older platforms like TeamSpeak and Mumble. AFAIK, in Discord, you don’t need to rent a server or anything like that (though there may well be some advanced benefits to getting a paid account, that I’m not aware of).
Yeah, Discord is where it’s all at these days. I think it’s free to make a channel but paid members get the ability to use emoticons from any subbed channel is their chat and having a couple paid members can “boost” the channel for a bunch of other emoticon slots and other benefits. But the core Discord experience is still a good one for clans, guilds or just friends, like Teamspeak and IRC in one.
Plenty of game clans still out there, join any shooter and see all the people with names like [XYZ]Noobpwner where the bracketed party is their clan tag.
I should have known that you would be playing SWTOR. I’m a Founder myself. I’m usually on the Satele Shan server.
I played TOR for years, was in the original beta, and so on, but got tired of it after awhile.
What gave it away? 
I was on the Ebon Hawk server before the big server merge two years ago; I’m now on Star Forge.
I don’t play much any more, unfortunately (and I played a LOT for about three years); the quality of the expansions went downhill, IMO, and a bunch of my friends and myself transitioned over to FFXIV about a year and a half ago. I log back onto SWTOR every once in a while, mostly to see some friends and go to social events.
Is DISCORD more than a voice server, more than Teamspeak? Does it do more than facilitate voice communications?
Yup. You have chat channels where people leave messages, kind of like a continuous Twitter feed. The channels can be organized however you want. You can also post news and announcements in a channel. It’s a great all-around communication platform.
You can also set up bots for things like scheduling events and tag users with things like @GameABCplayer so the bot alerts everyone with that tag that an event for Game ABC is starting.
Discord sounds useful, but I don’t know. . . sounds like less than a website/forums. Probably easier in terms of setup and maintenance, but not as nice.
Maybe I’m just getting like Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapons movies. 
It’s a different feeling. It’s not really supposed to be a website, it’s more like IRC on the text side (although, unlike IRC, you can log in and see what you missed in your servers while you were gone)
On the voice side, you can have multiple channels so some of your friends can be talking while playing Battlefield and others can be talking while they play The Division. But you’re all still under the same server you made and can easily move from channel to channel if you needed to ask the Battlefield guys if there’s room in their squad.
I’m not trying to sell you on it though, that’s up to you. Just saying that it’s what all the clans use these days. Plus game developers use it for community chat and most games probably have an official or unofficial Discord server for Game talk, asking for help or doing events.
No you’re right. It is less than a web site or forums. It’s like comparing a bicycle and a car. Each has its usefulness.
A forum is a place where you can organize discussions by thread, can easily search them, can link to a thread or post to give information, and so on. It’s useful as a permanent record of discussions. Discord isn’t like that, generally what is in Discord is useful now, and is a great way to chat with people live (either in text or voice) or see what others are currently talking about. And like Jophiel said you can see what people are talking about even when you’re not online by looking at the log. But it doesn’t do everything a forum does.
I was a Kickstarter backer for an MMO that has a Discord server and a forum. At one point the forums were shut down so they could revamp them. They stayed down for months. It sucked. Discord is not a replacement for a message board. I ended up not paying attention to the game status and discussions because Discord was a crappy platform for them.
I’m sure they didn’t prioritize bringing the forums back because they thought that Discord was good enough for most people in the interim. They were wrong. The community suffered a lot of attrition and when they finally brought the forums back they were nothing like they were before. They lost a lot of regulars and still haven’t recovered.
I think of Discord discussions as like trying to have a conversation in a public space. When it’s a relatively small number of people it works well. When it’s a huge number of people it’s like trying to talk in a loud, crowded room. Messages fly by sometimes before you can even read them. It’s great for most guilds for general chatting or to organize events. But get too many people (more than a couple of dozen) and it doesn’t really work.
Thanks for filling me in on Discord. My gaming clan is kind of dying off, and I was wondering what was up in that arena, in the interest of finding more folks to game and BS with.
Its disadvantage vs TS3 is, first, that it gobbles resources. Don’t ask me what is that shit doing, or if it’s because everybody likes to have a #bot channel, or what, but it’s noticeable. Second, a mental one: where clans that use TS3 normally treat it as optional except for group events, clans that use Discord tend to treat it as compulsory all the time.