Hello, Lascuarin!
While it would be nice to answer your questions with a simple "yes" or "no", unfortunately, the case may be a little more complex than you might have initially anticipated. At first, we'll have to understand the whole concept of a clan and what types of them are we dealing with.
There are several major clan types in this community:Competitive (Serious) Clans The teams that participate in weekly Sunday Community Skirmish or other tournaments. They usually maintain permanent member rosters and put a lot of effort into heavy co-op gameplay and common training. These guys often play in clan vs clan environments and train in order to have the best performance in high-level and challenging matches while having fun playing with their pals.
examples: The Skyborne, Storm Ryders, Spud's SCS crew, Team Predators, ClanClan, & few more
Casul Clans These guys are more often laid back version of the previous group. You can still find many high levels there, but they usually aim at doing fun and goofy stuff together in the public matches. They usually play together, however, they lack free time in order to participate in the events or are not interested in them. They have a bit more laid back rules, such as not playing in fixed positions or with certain crews but still, preserve some forms of internal organisation. They have the medium amount of members.
examples: Satanistic Squirrel Squad, The Bards, Stray Dagz, Deadstone Company, Sassy Lassies, Grim Reapers & much more
Small groups of Friends People who bought the game together in a 4-pack or something and wanted to distinguish themselves, or clans that limit their recruitment to a specific region (or maybe country). Usually, all members have more than 300 days of inactivity at some point. Calling such groups "clans" may be debatable as clans are organised units, while these are just only people that have something in common, but are without any organisation outside of the game.
Mass-recruiting so-called "clans" which are commonly despised. It's just a bunch of noobs with the same tag in front of their nicknames which doesn't mean that they're an actual clan yet. They lack any organisation, they lack anything that bonds them together and most of the members don't know each other. It's officers often send an invite to everyone in the lobby hoping that maybe at least someone will accept and increase their tremendously stupid member count. Being in such clan has no purpose or meaning, therefore it is commonly despised by the community veterans.
Now with that being said the most restricting group when it comes to clan hopping is, of course, the competitive clans. They often hold some sort of recruitment process with most hardcore including a trial period. You need a reason to join such clans as well as leave them. Since the community isn't big most of the competitive players know each other well and leaders/officers share their blacklisted people and reasons for banning them from their clans. Clan hopping is one of such reasons as no one likes to invest a lot of time and effort into training someone who the very next day will decide to f*ck you over and join someone else.
People in these clans often feel like home among friends so occurrences of leaving and changing the clan are rare. Valid reasons to change clan are:
- Clan disbanding
- Disputes and different views
- Difference in time zones
- Lack of competitive focus, or perharps too much competitive focus
- Lack of community
When it comes to mass recruiters then it doesn't matter. They don't even care who you are.
Good luck with finding your place in the Guns of Icarus community and have fun
