Main Resource Page:
http://www.lotd.org/57.html

I wholeheartedly support this article, being a community advocate I see the same issues with todays games as well as those we will see in the future. Many of todays games also make it too easy for people to create a guild thus giving guild creation and organization little to no credibility. When Guilds are a dime a dozen, the loyalty factor deceases and it becomes very easy for people to bail when times get tough, and very easy for guild members to fall between the cracks due to game design.

A lot of the info really helped out a lot. Shows how future mmo's will really need a unique guild environment to succeed.

That sounded wonderful until this came up:

Limitations
- Fellowships can have a maximum of six members.
- You must be within five levels of every member of the fellowship in order to join.

The level separation continue to be a barrier for regular gamers vs those who only play 2-3 days a week. In other words you still can't group with your friends because of this dumb limitation.

Here is a link to a description of how they've implemented it:

http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?id=106&section=News

Being able to earn guild exp and choose who to share or distribute it to sounds great. How detailed in their system?

Gauge: what's your thoughts on how Vanguard addressed that with the "fellowship" system? (For any who don't know, it's a way for more advanced members to share some of their XP progression with lower level members).

One thing i really liked was the idea of a way for the "Hardcore" to help their more casual guild mates... something that is not really a benefit to them but can help their friends immensly. One obvious example you mentioned would be something like tokens for extra experience which could only be obtained by the "Hardcore" but obviously are more useful to the "casual". of course this has it's problems... unless the tokens were only tradable within a guild, then they would end up being sold for riduculous amounts which would eventually push the gap even further. I can't think of other things at the moment, but the idea of a guild being able to help excel the members which are somewhat behind without having to feel like they've wasted their time would be wonderful IMO.

Those rewards are just suggestions to get people thinking. I would prefer to see rewards that can be reinvested in guild members so that a guild can assist its new, rerolling, or causal gaming members with character progression (leveling, gear, etc).

While I agree the way games handle guilds (well the way WoW handles guilds) is archaic at best the only issue I take with this article is the guild loyalty rewards suggestions. It would effectly force people to join guilds just to get some of those bonuses so they're not screwed over by people in a guild, you shouldn't have to join a guild just to receive some sort of reward.

Those that are loyal are going to be loyal without rewards. I've never felt like i needed to stay with a guild to get something out of the guild. I stayed with a guild because I liked the atmosphere and we shared similiar goals.

Guild turnover issues can either be due to it being a bad guild or just a really huge guild. The bigger the guild the higher the turn over unless its just that awsome of a guild.

WoW did effectively kill the notion of guilds(well it only guild the idea of joinging a WoW guild) for me since it became all about greed and being forced to play excessively if you did want to progress. Hopefully future games won't make this mistake.

Game Designers - pay attention.

Hades managed to make this an article every MMO gamer could relate too, it's not just about WoW or GW or any one particular game, he's hit the points that affect ALL of us, no matter what game we're playing!

This is definitely a "must-read" for game developers...now how do we convince them of that?

This article covers many issues that are near and dear to my heart. Hades pretty much sums up the issues and makes some down to earth suggestions to game developers about in game guild support.

For further discussion guild leadership issues, I recommend the following GuildCafe forum:

http://www.guildcafe.com/forumdisplay.php?f=7