I will try to keep this brief as I am tired right now:
I have been a guild leader since gw1, and the guild I currently have has been up and running since the GW2 launch. It isn’t dead but always hovers around 20 active members with an average of 3 -5 people being online at any one time.
There are several problems, some which have definately been mentioned before. I will elaborate on each point in a little more detail below.
1) There is no way of telling when the last time that someone logged on was.
2) Non representing players make is difficult to run a guild.
3) The record of people who have been invited only goes back 1 month.
4) Guild missions do not scale with the amount of people in a guild.
1) Has been mentioned before, but Myself and officer’s cannot be online all the time, it’s impossible to know whether to kick someone for being inactive if I don’t know when they were last on. As someone who see’s a lot of people it’s also difficult to keep track of names, so when I see a list of account names I often can’t link the account name to a character name, or I am in danger of linking it to the wrong one. So I may end up kicking the wrong people and not kicking out people who have been inactive for months.
2) Non representing players just make running a guild even more hard work than it needs to be. For a start they appear by default at the top of the roster as online but not representing. This means they are in full veiw of any guild member who presses G. (because of this if there is a member who is always online but never represents I see their name regularly and when I am trying to work out who to kick from the guild I am less likely to kick a name I recognise, and I can’t always remember why I recognise it.)
Seeing people not representing is demoralising for members who are representing. It means that even when myself and officers really put effort into recruiting, it only takes one time for a new member to sign on and see 6 – 10 other people not representing that they get disheartened and leave, or join another guild and then add to the list of non representatives.
It would also be helpful to see the last time a player represented us (when you hover over their name for example) because I do understand that one guild can’t offer everything so some people might want to be in different guilds but it is so hard to keep track of how often a person is representing, especially when also keeping track of how often people are online.
3) In my guild the ranks are based on time spent in the guild combined with activity. However I cannot precisely promote people due to the fact that I cannot see when a member joined the guild. Keeping track of this ontop of everything else is impossible.