It\'s nice to see someone pointed out some sane hierarchy.
(however it would be nice if you could elaborate on what the government doing inside the clan, and why they are 2 guild trees in a clan ... i thought that in your hierarchy a clan = government)
Clans are a tricky idea, you have noted that guilds also exist inside clans, but i think that suggests a rather large size of a clan.
for me, clans seem like an expansion of what we know from classic paper and dice games as \"parties\" (a group of friends with ussually no commmon jobclass as opposite to guilds), therefore i guess the only description that fits this *creature* is, a \"clan\". (which actually makes sense, unlike all the other games i know ^^)
While i could imagine the \"iron crest\" dwarven clan which resides in a certain region inside a mountain and has a group of blacksmiths and miners, it still won\'t come close to a real town guild, therefore the craftsmen in that example clan would just be freelancers.
So the questions is, to what extreme would the game push the players to, if a person could succeed easily as a lone craftsman (like in most games), the whole idea of guilds (not clans) would not really work.
and on the other hand, if players won\'t have any edge in large scale combats (for example castle sieges as i have seen in a few recent titles) it won\'t encourage players to form huge clans.
To be honest, i\'ve never really understood the idea behind mmorpg\'s clans, apart from the pk battles, it seems to me that people just want to stick a tag and think they belong somewhere and they got a \"back\" of nasty friends.
If that\'s the case, i bet we\'ll see lotsa pointless clans instead of a fewer and larger (well made) ones.