Battle.net

Updated February 14, 2013, 5:00 p.m. PST

Previously in this blog, Production Director Chris Sigaty announced that Clan support was coming to StarCraft II with Heart of the Swarm. As of our Beta Patch 2.0.1 this week, testers will be able to create and join Clans and put this new feature through its paces. Here’s a first look:

Anyone can create or join a Clan, and doing so gives you access to the Clan window. In the Clan window, you’ll find a completely private chat channel, a News tab where Clan affairs can be posted for all members to read, an Info tab where officers can post Clan information, and a Members roster.

When you create a Clan, both a Clan name and a Clan Tag designation are required. All of the members of your Clan will have their character name pre-pended with the Clan’s Tag. The Clan Leader is able to promote members to the rank of Officer in the Clan (and demote, when necessary).

We also have a few notes about Clan functionality in the beta for you:

• Clan names must be 3-24 characters long, and will be case sensitive, allowing spaces, numbers, apostrophes, and commas.
• Clan Tags must be 2-4 2-6 characters long, and are also case sensitive, allowing letters and numbers.
• Clan names and Tags must adhere to standard name policies.
• The Clan Tag is automatically pre-pended to a player’s name.
• There is a limit of 50 members per Clan.

Our goal with Clans in StarCraft II is simple -- we want to bring people together in ways that make sense for allowing players to organize into groups, communicate with each other, and recognize others in-game. Like other new features being tested in the beta, Clans is a work in progress, and we’re looking forward to testing it with you.

But wait! There’s more.

This is the first part of a larger social system being introduced in Heart of the Swarm.  While Clans are geared towards teams of players participating competitively in StarCraft II, we’re working on support for Groups: players who want to associate casually, and in larger numbers.  We expect that Groups might be focused on a specific genre of Arcade game, geographic location, BarCraft, community website, popular personality, or eSports organization. How you use Groups will be completely up to you!

Both the Clans and Groups features will be made available to Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm players. We’ll have more to say about Groups soon.

Check out our other recent previews of the upcoming UI changes and the new Leveling system, and feel free to let us know what you think about Clans in StarCraft II in the comments below.