Factions and how to prevent abuse

[Steve Kort]

In the extreme case, no player would be allowed to run more than one clan at all.  But that seems to be going a bit too far.  It's my assumption that a very-low-ranking clan isn't big/important enough to affect the game play significantly, even for opposing factions.  And I think that playing only in factions that are mutually accepting of one another limits the players choices an awful lot, especially if they're all going to end up with some inter-faction conflicts with someone.

So, if you were in one of 7 factions, each of which had 2 friends and 2 opponents and 2 neutrals, not all in neat pairs, how many clans do you think you could reasonably run in different factions without getting any two of them to be opposed in some fashion?

My guess is you would be hard pressed to play in more than 3 different factions if you were to only have 7 total factions.  I see most players playing the majority of there clans in 1 or 2 factions.  In the Midgard USA version I played 10 clans most of the time 8 in one faction and 1 in 2 other factions.  I think the most factions I ever played in at one time was 4 and in that version of the game I beleive there was 15+ playable factions.