…wow.
After reading all of this thread, I am struck by two glaring points:
*A lot of people here want the current guild system changed because after dictating how players may use it and failing, they want ANet to force players to conform to their idea of how guilds should work.
*Much like PvP, there seem to be a lot of people who can’t adapt.
Not everyone wants the same old guild system. I love the multi-guild system. Sure there is room for improvement, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be reduced to the format used by most other games. While I have seen my share of hopping, I’d rather deal with that than lose the ability to chat with friends who are more interested in other guilds than the one I am in.
Everyone knows a guild is made by its members, and if those members (usually the leaders/officers) don’t give new members a reason to stay, it’s not anyone’s fault but the guild. Guilds aren’t a contract; just because someone joins doesn’t mean they can’t leave when they choose. The leadership has to work to keep players interested in staying; unless a player has some motivation to stay (close friends, time or money investment, whatever it may be), the leadership has to keep “selling” them on the guild.
I appreciate very much the guilds in many games who understand that players may want to “try them out” first and don’t mind inviting someone who may leave after a few hours or days. Not every guild is going to appeal to every player. As leaders, most try to set up the tools they want their members to have access to outside of the game, get their guild established within the game with perks and banks, and say to new members, “This who we are” hoping to find as many like-minded players to join their ranks as they can.
Ultimately, if guilds can’t keep members, they need to look at what they are doing to encourage those members to hang around. Sure it might be easier to swap to another guild in this game, but otherwise, it’s not much different than someone not liking a guild and leaving to find another.
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A few other things I wanted to mention which were a bit off to the side to me… If a leader/officer expects every member to know who he/she is, that person needs to personally invite every member, make sure every recruiter who invites mentions them, or include it as a statement to be read by any potential new member. Otherwise, they need to realize that not every new member cares about looking up every member of the leadership, their alts, professions, birthdays, facebook pages, and favorite colors. Most care about the person who actually invited them or the point of contact who got them invited. Until they actually chat, party, or just hang out with another member of the guild, the only thing which distinguishes any other member from the random player out in the world is that guild tag next to their name – which doesn’t show up when that person receives a whisper out of the blue.
Not everyone has the same reason for joining a guild, so it’s pretty easy to see that not everyone cares about the same things within a guild. When I have joined a new guild, unless the leader invited me, or introduced themselves as the leader, I didn’t care who the leader was or who the officers were. I wanted to see how the people chatting related to each other because the attitude/personality I see in chat is the single most important thing to me in deciding if I want to stay in a guild. When I have been a leader/officer of a guild, if I wanted a new player to know my rank, I introduced myself with that rank because I know that what may be important to me, may not be important to the new player who just joined.
