I don't really see it as "breaking into cliques," but establishing a presence in an org is much harder for me than it used to be, and I'm fairly certain I know exactly why.
Coming back, and with most characters I've made since my first couple, I have had a lot of trouble getting started socially. Despite being a bit of an awkward chatterbox I'm very skittish about socializing, especially with new people, so if I can be self-sufficient and fly solo I'm probably going to choose to do so. Combined with the fact that I play a lot less than I used to, this turns me into a withdrawn character who does everything on their own when they do show up, and aside from skulking in to help at revolts or the occasional domoth snoozefest, I am completely absent from my orgmates' lives. I know those sorts of people from the other side, too. They're the people you see on cwho and think "Literally who?", and then you honors them and get mildly confused when you see they're like 100-something years old. Yeah. Hey.
The only major difference between my approach now and when I first started is that I was forced to interact with people to figure out what the hell was even going on, and this led me to find and form bonds with other people who were in the same boat. Because I had people I interacted with regularly and publicly, others would sometimes jump in and join the discussion, which led to socialization that sometimes began with those individuals and didn't just happen to pick them up in the middle, which gradually resulted in my being better integrated within the main social group. It wasn't a deliberate effort to infiltrate some major clique, simply a natural consequence of building small interpersonal connections with a few people I had something in common with.
Therefore I believe much of the difficulty in "breaking in" is the absence of a willingness or effort to establish a common ground with your peers. You have to start small and figure out who your people, or even just your person is. Just one person you can relate to in some way, who you feel comfortable talking to whenever you see them around. Probably you're going to run into a fair few folks who seem to ignore you or don't mesh well with you at first, but that's to be expected. Instead of assuming there's an insurmountable invisible wall between yourself and the established social circles, you just have to try again with someone else. If you are even a little insecure (and I'm so guilty of this), it can be hard to not make those assumptions and be discouraged, but I assure you it's not impossible.
In my experience, this is the key. Look for a connection anywhere, with anyone in your organization, not simply for an "in" with the big names. As long as you aren't completely impossible to get along with, you'll find that even a single friendship with a seemingly inconsequential individual can open many social doors.
As a bit of an aside: Org-wide OOC clans, which have been mentioned, can help to break down barriers and I don't think they are an inherently bad thing, but honestly I recommend sticking to IC interactions for the purpose of building connections. When the OOC clan becomes the main way people in an org talk to one another, our IC relationships suffer. Not to mention it makes the place feel like a damn ghost town, which contributes further to making those not in the clan feel like outsiders. Someone shouldn't have to join an OOC group in order to feel like they can belong in a game that's based around the interactions of our characters, and no one should feel pressured to join one if they don't want to. I'm not saying it is wrong and bad to have them, just that it is important to be careful not to let them become an essential part of the game.
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