Ok, I checked the read before list and this was not listed so I figured it was safe to post. If not i'm truly sorry. I figured I would detail a list of reasons why guild should be cleaned off the player guilds page.

1. There are approx. 66 guilds on the list and of that 10 are moderately active and probably 20 total have at least one active member. 10/66 = 15% and 20/66= 30%. That means around 70-85% of these guilds are likely inactive. Sure there isn't a memory crunch but this is misleading.

2. Many new players often scan the player guilds page to try to find a suitable guild for them. Unsurprisingly they can't distinguish between an active and inactive guild and can't reach any officers for the inactive guilds they are interested. This poses a problem because with all these names it takes a noob longer to find a guild to join.

If the list were even dropped down by 20 guilds it would help noobs find guilds faster which would help bolster active guild populations preventing them from going inactive. This would help slow or stop the cycle of guilds growing and dying within 3 months.

3. Many guilds are well below the requirements for being considered a guild. You need 5 council members or your guild will disband. BoTH, BETA, CDC, GRU, (K), PLAG, and SDN all are under the limitations. Why are they special? Some guilds that did have active guild have been disbanded due to below 5 councilors so why do they remain? If your gonna have that rule then it should be enforced.

I really love this game and in no way am I insulting the developers or any of these guilds. The point of this post is to point out how guild cleansing can help the game and how its not just a way to solve memory or whatever. With less inactive guilds on the guild roster it will give a more precise list of guilds that new players can join.

This would prevent confusion, help guilds grow and sustain themselves, and ultimately create an easier system. Its one thing if there are a few inactive guilds but at this point it is getting ridiculous and with the rate of guilds being created and going inactive its only bound to grow higher.

Thank You!

Yes please

(And a well stated argument)

Yes, this makes sense.

If there is some imperative to not remove these guilds that the devs have, perhaps one solution would be for both the main guild page, and the individual guild pages, to list the date of last activity to the month, and the number of hours the guild has flown in the last 30 days.

On the main page, any member login, and on the guild specific page, each members last login should be shown.

Sort the list by this value with a hard line between those that are still active, and those that have no logins for the last three months.

Even if the list is cleaned up, it would still be beneficial to see these values.

Very good arguement here.

I agree that in-active guilds should at the least be bumped to the bottom of the guild page, and a "date of last activity" added.
And I completely agree that there needs to be some sort of fix for the under-manned guilds. It says you have to have X amount of members to found a guild, and they all have to found at the same time, but that doesn't seem to always be the case.

There's no imperative not to remove dead guilds. Guides have no tools to identify or delete them, and dev intervention takes time away from other stuff. At some point they'll need to stop and write something for that.

I'm the only member of my very active guild, but if you take it away I'll only make it anew!

Players looking at guilds that they might want to join should have a way to determine the probability of successfully making contact with someone that can actually accept them into the guild. In this light, add a date/time stamp to each guild entry indicating the last login of someone that could actually add a member to that guild.

edit: er... actually, it should show when they last logged off, or it should say active if there is someone currently logged on.

I don't think this would even be that time consuming to code. If you're a member of a guild, it already shows you last login date for other members. This could just be adjusted to show a single last login for the guild itself that is viewable by everyone(not just current guild members) ...

Waldoze

VoKB had a the active list that gave actives for guilds as well. firsm bring back that part for them at least....

I suggested before that instead of removing guilds we add a short text at the top of the page under the guild name. So for example:

if the guild has a commander/luit and members logged in the last week/month/whatever it says in green text: This is an active guild

if the guild don't have a commander/luit but members logged in the last week/month/whatever it says in yellow text: This is an disfunctional guild

if the guild dosn't have any members logged in the last week/month/whatever it says in red text: This is an defunct/dead guild

Much ado about nothing. Look next to the names once in the guild page, there's a last login date and time. Just make it so everyone can see a last login date. If they see all the officers haven't been on in a year, it's most likely dead and they can move on.

*shrugs* My opinion is that it's already an empty enough universe without purging more stuff.

The 'last login' as well as the Guild bank amount only show up on guild pages which have a character that's on your account.

I'm all for cleaning up guilds (I didn't read the whole thread, but read the first post and am familiar with the general arguements). However, I would also like to implement some other limitations at the same time that may irritate some existing guilds. Like, say, only subscribed players may create or join guilds. If we implemented this, even some of the so-called more "active" guilds might be disbanded. So, what's the feedback on this? Are you guys ok with the idea of scrounging for more council members or whatever else? (ie, "real" council members, and not Bob The Fake Trial Account).

Also, the existing guilds that should be disbanded but aren't.. I don't think that's due to any special treatment on our part. The whole disbanding mechanism is automated. It's possible (even likely), that there's some bug in the implementation that let those guilds live. I don't really know. In any event, when we revisit this development area, we'll check that out too.. the "rules" are not being enforced unequally due to any real intention on our part (at least, not as far as I know, and I would be highly surprised if that were even easily possible, with my understanding of how it works).

So, to conclude, we aren't intentionally enforcing the rules unfairly. We want to clean up the guilds. And we also want to make guild joining/creating a Subscriber-only possibility. How do you all feel about that last one?

[EDIT, since I failed to mention why I want to make guilds subscriber-only]: We've had some administrative problems over the last few months (and longer, but more often in recent months), with people making fake guilds with fake users to mock other players. This stuff is kind of a headache for me, so I would like to.. remove it as a problem, but making guild creation and joining subscriber-only. Also, it's always been a pet peeve of mine that a lot of guilds are "padded" out with these fake players. I understand that it makes the creation and recruiting process a bit easier.. but I would rather revisit how guild creation works, than have a whole bunch of quasi-nonexistant guilds. I made the creation process a little "difficult" from the getgo, because I hoped to make a lot of guild-specific benefits (which have yet to really manifest) and wanted guilds to represent real player organizations.. rather than offhand ad-hoc player groups. The current creation requirements do mandate at least a little "organization", or would with the no-trial aspect. Lastly.. I don't think it really penalizes the new player to tell them that they have to subscribe to join a guild. An 8 or 16 hour trial is barely enough to get an idea of what's going on in the game.. if they want to be a part of a real, persistent player organization, then demonstrating their own persistence is reasonable, I think.

Anyway, those are my reasons. FYI.

*cough BotH *cough

I've mentioned many times by now that the [NUTS] RP-related guild could be disbanded. It lives on in the memory of those who knows what's it all about, and in the RP posts as a snapshot of the guild info page. But that's old story by now and most new members dont have the slightest clue as to what it is and thus, serves no purpose other than being a curiosity.

I thought that by removing the commander, the guild would disband by itself but apparently not.

So, have a (wrecking) ball at it.

--mgl_mouser

A sensible policy Inc. Most of the major guilds already have a policy of only recruiting subscribers and have regular removals of inactive members. The generation of spurious guilds for nefarious purposes is vaguely annoying to many of us.

I realise defining the rules and writing the code takes time, but a solid revamp sometime in the future would be welcome.

Ecka

How about a mechanism by which guild commanders could reserve their guild's tag for later use if their guild disbands? I suppose there could be a problem with people squatting on all of the cool four letter combinations.

Asp

Yes, incarnate. I think only subscribers should be able to both create and join guilds.

/me agrees, as well.

Yes.