inc might not like this, but the time zone and activity by different days makes this not plausible unless it's automatic... like tgft and itan just chooses to accept newbs. i'm not not trying to cause trouble... but tgft and itan might not be online when newbs are.

This is all explained in the OP:

This application would be asynchronous (not requiring any guild members to be online) and would go to the guild's LTs, who could then read it and respond whenever they next login. We might have some kind of email-notification system that pings the LTs of new applications (limited to once-per-day or something).

It's intended to function across timezones, clearly.

So why not let the opt in be automatic? for the guild the player chooses?

First of all, the "opt-in" term that was being referenced, was whether guilds would choose to be posted on the board or not. That term was not applied to whether users would be automatically joined to any guild they applied to.

I don't have any problem with letting guilds choose to auto-accept any player who applies. But, I'm not sure about adding all those "security-level" type features that were also requested, to keep spies from trivially joining guilds.

I fundamentally agree that auto-joining will result in more people joining guilds. But, that's only useful if the guild is willing to follow-up and greet all those new users and welcome them and engage with them. Otherwise it's just a completely hollow process.

By having the guilds manually accept the users, I can detect that the guild is engaged enough, on a regular basis, to accept new applications. So, if a guild should have its LTs suddenly drop out and stop responding to applications, I can automatically drop them from the board (also mentioned previously).

Similary, having users automatically join guilds isn't necessarily better. The best option for user-retention is to cause a player to log in again, the next day. So, if a player applies to a guild, and then later receives an email announcing they've been accepted into the guild, they will have a new reason to log in and learn about the new guild that they have joined.

Now, all of this could similarly be achieved by having the "join" be automatic, but the guild LTs have to manually issue a "welcome" to the user on a daily basis, to prove the guild's engagement, and also to draw the user *back* into the game again. Then that ends up effectively being the same thing, but with the benefit of the user's impression that they're automatically joined to the guild.

But, if auto-joining also mandates a bunch of new features around "probationary player" flagging and mechanics, that definitely adds complexity.