There has to be some positives of a clan. it ensures loyalty to the game and makes sure the clan members should be active increasing the life of the game. Also, gives the player something to look forward to when logging on the ICO being part of a select team and aiding the community. Just random thoughts getting typed down.

Fair enough, getting advice is simple enough but new players need to take the initiative for anything positive to come out from it.

Exactly, no need to have official clans when there is not enough players and everyone knows everyone.

We used to have clans for the first couple years the game was out, but it became kind of pointless after a while.  The reason clans don't really work is that the community is so small, it is almost impossible to get a clan vs clan fight going, and a bunch of random people are not going to fight a clan team, even if we did 4v6 or occasionally 3v7.  Since people tend to prefer to pick teams, there was no real advantage to being on a clan.....in fact, once picking teams became the most common way to play, smurfing became the meta strategy to gain an advantage rather than trying to play as a disciplined clan team.

This game never had enough of an online player base to support having a real clan league with scheduled matches.  Also, 90% of the people online only play vs. AI and not real games, so the number of people playing PvP is far too small to have a clan scene.

Five or Six clans is not "active".  Try 50 or 100 clans duking it out on a ladder.  Heck, for a successful game you'd hope to have a couple hundred active clans at any one time.

I miss Clan X, as in, "I'm gonna do to Clan X what happened to Girl X."