"Founder"
The founding members often do not remain council, but they should hold a place of honor in the roster, and be harder to remove from the guild. A simple majority of Founders (plus Commander to break ties) is needed to depose a Founder, or a unanimous vote of ALL existing council AND Commander. If a founder leaves the guild they lose their rank forever. Titles of "Founding Council" and "Founding Commander" would apply any time a founder held the appropriate office.

"Active Member"
This would replace "Member" these would pin to the top of the guild roster after Command/Lt's/council/founders

"Recruit"
A simple way to show a member is new to the organization. All new members begin as recruits, then council can /guild vote promote while Lt's and Commanders can /guild promote to "Active Member". You can never be turned back into a recruit unless you leave the guild and rejoin later. Recruits are sorted under Active members in the guild roster.

"Reservist"
A way to show you are busy, but not gone. A player may can set this title voluntarily, Commander or Lt may force it, council must vote. Commander or Lt may reinstate, council can vote to reinstate. These names would sort after active members on the guild roster.

"Retired"
For those legacy "emeritus" names on your roster. Long gone, but not forgotten. These players do not see logged-in players or last-logins or or guild bank balances on the vo site. A player may volunteer retirement, or a commander can set it, council vote it, but if the player logs back in, they can choose to come out of retirement. If this were going to be a point of contention, you would just expel them, so they should control the title. Obviously, retired names would appear last on the roster on the VO site….

This all may seem redundant or unnecessary, but it would let guide present themselves via their guild roster a bit more realistically, and help future commanders understand guild hierarchy.

+1

I'd rather have custom ranks

+1 to the OP
-1 to custom ranks

These are all things that only really have meaning if a guild chooses to apply meaning to them. It would be better, in my opinion if a guild management interface were added to the game where you could make comments on a character to indicate these statuses. As for helping future guild commanders understand things, isn't that what guild forums are for?

I'm very much in favor of the Custom ranks with custom powers. As long as Founders are always marked as such (unless they leave).

custom please.

guild controlled access levels, like the guild bank. titles may be set by council vote, commander, lt, and/or each member may set their own title, depending on the guild settings, as set by the commander.

title visibility inside the guild is set by the guild commander.

every member can see their own title, always.

each character has an option to display their guild title publicly.

Draugath's "comment" idea seems cool. This would allow both "custom" ranks as well as status comments. Listing the guild members in order of last login (possibly with the option of pinning specific members/offices to the top) would also give an indication of status. Council/Lt+ rank may be needed to add such comments/pin members...

sure, of course custom ranks would be great, so decide how many ranks the system can have and assign command-line names, because I very much doubt the devs will make a command for /guild vote Grand-Poo-Bah or Lord-high-grand-inquisitor. The number of ranks should allow for a good range of in-game privileges and guild info visibility (what a player can see on the guild info page)

The few I've listed were to allow any player encountering a member of a guild to see if they were new to the guild, a casual drop-in, or old fart just visiting. A lot of inter guild histrionics could be avoided if you could see they are an apprentice/recruit/minion/peon by the old "target-k"

Yes to guild roster viewable in-game, where comments can be filed on each member.

Assuming this comes to pass in some form, the council really should have no say in how custom ranks are defined, aside from their power to affect who the Commander is. The commader runs the guild, the council merely guide it.

If we can't name Mecha Touriaus "King dick god almighty alpha and omega of RED" what's the point I ask you.

Why don't we make it so every guild can figure things out for themselves? Also, what if I want to be Grand Poo Pah high inquisitor of Snkistan?

+100000000000 TRS

I hereby promote ARF_01 to "Grand Imeperial Poobah" of ITAN and declare CrazySpence as "Our King," but he has to wear the silly hat like the guy on the Canadian Tire Money does.

I really don't think there's any way to do this without making a huge mess...

The best would be to allow guild commanders to submit a lua script to the server defining whatever custom guild implementation they want. If they want it to automatically kick a random person any time a council member runs /guild roulette, they could program that into their custom implementation. Or if they want the guild to automatically demote the commander if he doesn't log in once per week and promote the member with the longest running streak of logging in at least once per week in his place. Or whatever other craziness.

That will never happen though.