Large guilds are large guilds because they offer things people want. Point you seem to be missing is large guilds started as small guilds and obviously they were successful in retaining players. This is where your argument is crazy. Why does a guild become evil once they are large? The only reason seems to be that you are stuck with a small guild. Take MS on my server. They are a top notch guild that excels at raiding. They have and will always have all the members they need until there is no one left. Guilds don't stay large because they are large. Over 20 years I have watched many guilds large and small die off. By your logic all those large guilds would still be around. The guilds that have weathered the storm and are still around obviously had something the other guilds didn't. While I won't try to take members from any active guild I run a casual guild. It's not the same as the raiding game. Although it can be hard I don't think anyone can blame a player who moves from a less successful raid guild to a more successful one. While any guild values the players that stick with them through everything the bottom line is players play the game to have fun. Sometimes that involves them leaving for another guild if they think that will be more fun for them. You can't get angry over it you can't try to guilt them to stay. Players pick what is fun for them.
I am going to put my take on this, since I have read every response to the OP, and all points up to this one. Guilds tend to grow, as Corwyhn said, because people are having fun in them. Casual Guilds are just that. They are not in competition with other guilds, they certainly don't enforce much of anything other than "play nice" and be nice in guild chat. If you go out at large and make a jerk out of yourself, you will likely eventually be looking for another guild. My other experience is that most players don't want a bunch of "High School Level Drama". They want to have fun, and do that with other players. What I do NOT find to be fun, is players who try to monopolize General Chat with stuff having nothing to do with the game, and badmouth other guilds. I have seen none of that in the largest Guild in Everquest. Period. I see no point whatsoever in putting any restriction on guild size because it bothers "social misfits". Personality goes a very long way in this game, in my experience, and not everyone exudes charisma. Those who have it are attractive to other players, and should not get nerfed for it.
Well this idea is beyond stupid. Why you ask, well what are you going to do make any guild with over 1k characters remove all the extra characters before they add one more person. There's plenty of people in the game who if they lost their current guild would just quit.
Many people go to Walmart because there are no longer alternatives. There are no longer alternatives because Walmart uses economies of scale to force out smaller competitors. The OP did not say that there should not be large guilds. He asked if there is a point where large guilds get too large for the wellbeing of a server and where that point is. How many guilds would be negatively effected in numbers by a 2000 player cap? One or two per server? How many of them could absorb most of this by purging some long inactive accounts? How many guilds would be positively affected by a 2000 player cap? One, two, three, five? We don't knows. There is a reason sports leagues limit their rosters, as the same forces are in play.
Players want to be in a healthy guild that have enough players to chat and group with. Your perspective is from not only a large guild but an from uber guild. You have the largest guild on your server, and it may be the largest guild in the game, so you do not see how destructive this is to other guilds. You do not have to constantly tread water because players who were formally in the guild move on to the uber guild not because of the people or play style of their former guild but because there wasn't enough people on to group with. To state that your guild has more to offer in friendliness, cooperation, and fun, all other things being equal, is hubris. Obviously, your guild has a lot to offer other than size, but to believe size itself does not make a difference is being blind to the realities of the game. To believe that uber large guilds do not press this advantage is disingenuous. On my server, every time I go though PoK with an anon alt, I am asked to join the uber guild. Many times when I group with the uber guild, they ask if want to switch over to their guild because so many such and such players were on "right now". It is a constant fight just to keep the players we have, and every player poached makes it that much more difficult to recruit. I know it is the same for other small and medium guilds on my server as well because they have told me so. It is certainly your right to disagree, but your perspective is not from the same vantage point as the OP's, mine, or players in many other guilds.
They won't have to be any more selective. The guild will simply make a 2nd Guild, and put all their alts and boxes in that, and just have mains in the main guild. Then when the 2nd one gets too full, they will make a 3rd.
And then after that you create a chat channel to use instead of guild since it would be pointless and not everyone in the guild would be able to see messages! Heck lets just get rid of guilds and we can make our own groups using chat channels with passwords.
IMO, the best large guilds are hybrid guilds. They find a sweet spot between casual and raiding that appeals to all levels of play. They foster progression and cultivate cooperation between their members. They enforce their own rules and set reasonable expectations of all its members. No guild is perfect, but there are MANY guilds who successfully execute their mission according to their members. It's not complicated. It just takes work and dedication on the guild leaders and officers' part.
And he said that it would only affect the inactive players the guild has which has ZERO affect on anything so it was just sour grapes. AND if you as you say it would only affect one, two, three or five guilds then it also makes no sense. They ONLY guilds it would affect are those that carry large amounts of inactives on their roster and that is just sour grapes to suggest that as a good idea. Forcing any guild to "purge" inactives is just foolish.
My guild is definitely not an uber guild because we really can't include inactives and I expect a number of raid guilds have as many people online as we do. We are large for what is left of casual guilds though. You seem to be dealing with a guild that has no scruples. Normally that gets dealt with by their bad rep. But you also do not want to put in rules that affect large guilds that are not behaving badly. That would be throwing out the baby with the bath water. Now as to the hubris claim I have no idea where that is coming. I did not state that my guild has more to offer in friendliness, cooperation and fun all other things being considered equal. BUT I do state we are pretty low drama because we are. Not all guilds can make thant claim. I DO state that we have been around 20 years and been active that whole time. I do state that we are able to draw folks and have good online numbers. Guess why I state those things? Because they are objective facts not crap I make up. As for the other things I leave those up to people who join my guild to decide. I always suggest people who are unsure to just put a test toon in and see how the guild interacts and operates. No need to suddenly guild all a persons toons just let them test things out. I leave whether we are more fun and helpful to the people who can see it for themselves. THAT IS NOT HUBRIS. And with my guild the only folks we would ask to join us are people in single player guilds or completely dead guilds. If I had anything doing otherwise I would ensure it stopped. So all large guilds are not alike. Now one things that does happen and I lose players to this as much as any guild of any size is sometimes folks start playing with peeps in another guild and eventually decide to join them. I do agree tha that guilds actively trying to group with players of another guild just to get them to join them is a a scummy move though in the end what can you do? It all comes down to the player. If a player leaves a smaller guild for a larger one there is nothing preventing them from going back to their old guild if they find they were lied to or misled. But if they just end up having more fun isn't that what all of us who are guild leaders want? They want the players to have fun. The cold hard fact is that in today's EQ there are a limited number of players and each year the game goes on it gets harder and harder to recruit folks regardless if there are big evil guilds or not. My guild was once one of dozens of large casual guilds and now that field has narrowed down. Now for new TLP servers the situation may be a bit different but the social framework of play nice is also much weaker on those servers. I find them to be more cutthroat.
Your question can't be answered objectively, OP. No two single guilds vet their rosters the same or have the same culture. A raid holds 54 people and that is really the only absolute. How that raid gets filled, if a guild even raids, is on the people running that raid. The more accomplished guilds would rather not have loot/skill/level dilution, so they would prefer a smaller active roster that is as close to 54 as possible with little redundancy. Admittance to that particular guild is structured around that roster alone, but even then there are FnF clauses. A raid roster and a guild's membership roster are not one in the same. If a player doesn't log in for a while, they typically keep their tag. There will then be a probationary period to demonstrate that absentee player is ready to be a willing participant again if they want to be eligible for raid rewards. That is in addition to there being room for their class. Having a bunch of benched players can be detrimental so its best to be avoided. Most all guilds have rules in place to address those issues if that is important to how they conduct business. Again this is focused on raid participation and not on general membership. The more casual/family style/group guilds will let in anyone as long as they respect their mates and tend to maintain a more G rated atmosphere. All Guilds seldom kick anyone out after they have passed whatever membership probation is required for FM, unless someone is a total A-hole. Even the most hardcore of raiding guilds don't want to deal with anyone who is totally toxic. Usually it doesn't come to that even. We are all adults and know when it is obviously time to move on. So in short there is no hard and fast rule about when a guild is too big. I personally have not witnessed a roster cull in ages.
I tend to mind my own business in the game, and it is no skin off my nose what guild you are in. That is your choice, and I will honor that. Where I start to get edgy is when someone from without my guild starts telling us how we have to play the game. This venue will not permit me to say what I really think, but minding one's own business is not a bad thing, in OR out of the game.
If you're not growing your dying ! And in a free market the strong survive and the weak get absorbed or die out ! YiMin
Black Dragon Legion on Luclin has .. crap I can't remember if it was 5307 or 5703.. toons.. and 4 years ago, we removed anyone who had not been logged on for more than 5 years.
How would it positively affect a different guild if a large guild were to purge long Inactive players?
It would make uber guilds think twice about adding anyone and everyone without a guild tag. Choices would have opportunity cost. Some would purge, others would not.
