The longer I play World of Warcraft, the more confused I get about its social aspects. What exactly *is* a guild in this game? I think the problem is that nobody really knows, and everybody has a different idea, often incompatible with that of his guild mates.
My personal idea of a guild is the guild as a voluntary assembly of players with the goal of playing together. Playing together with people you know has both social advantages, you feel more at ease with friends than with strangers, and game advantages, you can achieve goals together which you would be unable to reach alone. As there are many different goals to pursue in a MMORPG, in my opinion a guild should consider everybodies goals as equally important. Guild mates should spend a maximum possible time playing together, with people taking turns in proposing what to do next, receiving help from the guild to achieve their goals today, and then being willing to do something that helps somebody else tomorrow.
Unfortunately I found that in reality guilds don't work like that in WoW. A typical guild only has about 10% of people willing to help somebody when there is nothing for them to be gained. A real guild is not about mutual help, it is about following a path that leads from level 1 to 60, and them via smaller dungeons to Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and whatever Blizzard builds behind that. This path is the lowest common denominator. People hop on a guild which is at a suitable stage on that path for them. They play with guild mates only when there is an event that suits their personal goals. And if the guild doesn't advance the path as fast as the players ambitions, the player just hops off again, and joins the next guild further along the path.
When I'm online with my level 60 character, I often get requests to help some complete stranger doing an elite quest or even running him through a dungeon. And most of the time I tell them that I would do that for a guild mate, but not for a stranger, and suggest he asks his guild to help him. But on any server where a good number of people have reached level 60, guilds don't help their own low level guild mates any more. Leveling up to 60 is considered as something you should do solo, as is getting equipment, earning money, and doing quests. Many guilds don't even have low level characters any more, you may only apply if you are level 60, and have all the necessary prerequisites to go raiding. The top guilds even require things like Onyxia's key, which is impossible to solo, so they are basically requiring you to have gotten all the prerequisites with another guild and then switch.
In the extreme the guild then becomes mono-functional, most often a pure raiding guild. The guild does not help the players any more, unless they happen to have exactly the same goal as everybody else, killing the next boss in the raid circuit. The player becomes a servant of the guild. If his performance isn't adequate, if he has the wrong class, wrong talent build, or his raid attendance record isn't squeaky clean, he gets kicked out of the guild. I've seen a guild websites with rules which threatened members with dismissal if they went on holiday for more than 1 week.
On new servers guilds often invite lots of people at first, establish some sort of average advancement speed, and kick out the players falling behind. On the high end, people leveling up faster than the average just leave the guild on their own and join a faster guild. On the new server that opened last Thursday, I joined a guild on Friday, and Saturday I observed the guild master kicking out everybody who hadn't been online since 2 days. Guild membership becomes as disposable as a Kleenex, there is no more loyalty from the member towards his guild, nor from the guild towards a member.
Now if you look at years of discussion about the longevity of MMORPGs, a widely held theory was that games should force people to play together, thus overcoming a natural reluctance to make social bonds. Then when the players had become friends, they would stay in the game for a much longer time, regardless of content, with the social ties holding them much longer than the interest in the pure game would. I can't help but think that the Kleenex guild system which develops in WoW is counterproductive to that. Whether you are in a guild that is advancing faster than you and either kicks you out or just ignores you without helping you, or whether you make friends just to lose them a bit later when they move to a bigger guild, the disposable guild system isn't likely to tie you to the game with social bonds. And if you play the guild-hopping game, sooner or later you burn out, because having to keep up with your guild mates is mandatory, and thus feels more like work than like play.
Some games already automatically put you in a newbie guild with your level 1 character. If being in a guild is only about being at the same level of development as the others, and keeping up with them, we might soon see a new system: You will be automatically guilded in the newbie guild at level 1, will automatically leave that guild at level 10 and automatically join the level 10 to 19 guild, and so on to level 60 and beyond. Who needs friends when they only slow you down on your inevitable path towards phat loot? Sad days indeed.
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