I launched my guild on Shadowlands with the game. We started as a Republic guild then added an Imperial guild a few months later so that we could keep the players in the family. Post 4.0, I have just let the guilds wither. There is nothing for us to do.

It is no secret that guilds have been largely ignored by Bioware. The new features released a few months ago were nice but I cannot even begin to explain how screwed up guild ship management continues to be. Assigning keys is a nightmare and you cannot even sort the names alphabetically. Hell, it would be nice if key management could be tied to rank so that veteran members just got a silver key when promoted.

When guild ships were first announced, it was great. My guild farmed 230 million credits in the 6 months ahead of the launch. We bought the ships day one and then spent the next year conquesting until we had both completely unlocked. We finished unlocking it prior to 4.0 and I can safely say that my guilds have the best looking ships per faction on the server.

Post 4.0, there is nothing for us to do as a guild. We have won every planet and unlocked every room. We have completed all the raids. Our leadership was largely burned out by conquest and recruiting has been a nightmare since Kotfe.

Why has Kotfe been a nightmare for us? It is because it is difficult to find decent players that want to contribute. We have no trouble teaching raids or content but most players just want the guild xp etc. The few who may want to progress have no desire to put in the time to learn. They want it handed to them.

You have to recruit 10 times the numbers in 4.0 era to find 1-2 decent players and even the decent ones have no desire to lead or contribute.

I cannot find decent players or folks that want to progress in the guild. I cannot replace my burned out officers with people who will reinvigorate the guilds.

Personally, I do not like Kotfe and I have zero desire to spend the 20-30 hours per week needed to rebuild.

Kotfe has been a guild slayer.

The least Bioware could do to help guilds would have been to expand non-operation activities. New decks like an operations hangar deck for our flagship, fleet vendors we could unlock etc would have given us something to work for but we have nothing and the guilds are twisting in the wind.

I know some folks like Kotfe but 4.0 has killed group play in SWTOR.

I'm on Shadowlands too, and while the guilds I've been officers in have never been very large, they are mostly dead at this point. I'm one of the few people who kept trying to do group stuff with people and actively recruited, and even so people don't stick around. Additionally, as soon as I have to take a few weeks for a break because of work, the struggling guild dies by the time I get back.

The guild I'm currently in has basically four other players that are on ever and we are just the remnants of the original group that left to make the new guild. And none of them really play anymore. This is really frustrating after having worked so hard to pay for the guild ship and they leave because there isn't anything to tie the group together without spending so much time trying to make something out of what is left of group content in the game. Really makes me miss the days when I could find people in flash points and ops that were genuinely interested in learning the game and participating in guild activities.

I am currently in two Guilds. One is moderate sized. The other though we have so many people, (over 350 active accounts) that we recently started telling current members they can't invite alts because of all the new people we get. On average I would say we have about 4 new recruits every week or so.

RP is a major factor. Plus conquest groups. Heroics. Holding RP events every week. Doing OPS. All these things make for happy members, and keep our numbers very high.

What do you offer your Guild?

well, our metrics show that when our players log into the game, they are not in groups - so we decided to go solo route as it appears that is what players want more than anything.

Would not surprise me one bit lol. That's how poorly I believe they read metrics.

Would not surprise me one bit lol. That's how poorly I believe they read metrics.

I'm telling ya, it's because we Americans refuse to learn the metric system, it's our own fault we can't read metrics.

I'm telling ya, it's because we Americans refuse to learn the metric system, it's our own fault we can't read metrics.

Reading are hard!!! Need pictures more!!!

I'm telling ya, it's because we Americans refuse to learn the metric system, it's our own fault we can't read metrics.

...../ponder.....

I own my 2 guilds on the Ebon Hawk. They are 0 obligation guilds, solo, anyone can join, no rules except dont spam guild chat every 2 seconds with expletives, have a guild flagship on both (Which i payed 73 million out of my own credits, my 2nd in command and co founder funded the rest for the imp and pub ships). They are smallish but have the exp boost at 10%

Overall I love my guilds.

I am currently in two Guilds. One is moderate sized. The other though we have so many people, (over 350 active accounts) that we recently started telling current members they can't invite alts because of all the new people we get. On average I would say we have about 4 new recruits every week or so.

 

RP is a major factor. Plus conquest groups. Heroics. Holding RP events every week. Doing OPS. All these things make for happy members, and keep our numbers very high.

 

What do you offer your Guild?

We used to have large pvp teams (10-16 on at any given time), operations 5 per week per faction (SM, HM), Conquest, Flashpoint teams....

We ran active events (scavenger hunts, datacron runs, speed ops and flashpoint events, gree, rakghoul etc)

We now do nothing except for a few ops per week. We have lost more than 200 accounts due to people leaving because of no new content (they do not consider Kotfe enough content to stay).

The remaining officer no longer recruit because you cannot find people to be active in chat, teamspeak, or wish to run existing group content.

For us, Kotfe has been a game killer. It exposed the flaws in the game while killing any guild content by not providing ANY new content that would require people to want/need a guild.

For us, Kotfe has been a game killer. It exposed the flaws in the game while killing any guild content by not providing ANY new content that would require people to want/need a guild.

Interesting you say that...I ran a couple lowbie WZ's last night on a newly created Imp toon...for my second WZ, I was the only player in a guild out of the 10 of us who entered/quit the WZ.

Interesting you say that...I ran a couple lowbie WZ's last night on a newly created Imp toon...for my second WZ, I was the only player in a guild out of the 10 of us who entered/quit the WZ.

There are a lot of long term players that also have been burned by guilds. While I'm very dedicated to my Imperial guild, my Republic characters are in whichever guilds they end up in so if a character ends up not in a guild- it's not a big issue as a leveling character will get spammed invites anyway. I'd honestly love to find a guild Republic side on Harbinger that's into RP just because I'd like to try it out but at the end of the day, my plate is full contributing to one guild heavily without caring about all my characters being in a guild.

Although some tried to bury and turn this post into a joke, I will not be so disrespectful.

Guild ships are a huge waste of space, the only purpose they really serve is help with moving guild members around, and roleplay. Other then that they lack purpose.

A introduction to what open space battles between guild ships, where guild members must keep their ships repaired and combat effective during a battle? This would be purpose. How be it a grand idea that will never see the light of day. I think the op hit on something he mentioned vendors to unlock and use? You conquer planet after planet and then what? This to me is the same thing that killed the faction illum world pvp zone, other then the huge lag issue, and the crater the devs turned it into with the gree event. Now say they had added special rep vendors, to be unlocked, and then you could buy unique gear by participation in said zone? That would have been purpose. So yea I agree with the op they really do need to start looking at what can we do to get people wanting to do things with their guild ships.

As far as officers go op thats nothing new. Let a old gamer break it down for you. You either pick up young kids who will restore the umph your looking for, but at the same time abuse any power they are given over others. Your other choice is to pick up what I would call the throne people. People who say they want to do the job, and are willing to do the job, but instead just sit on thier throne doing as little as possible. In the meantime they enjoy all the perks. The last and rare is experienced players that can do the job, and will do the job. The only draw back with this group is they are mostly adults and have real lives/work , which prevents them from doing the job fully.

So my suggestion pick up some young pups with your burnt out crew over looking their actions.

Interesting you say that...I ran a couple lowbie WZ's last night on a newly created Imp toon...for my second WZ, I was the only player in a guild out of the 10 of us who entered/quit the WZ.

I don't see a point to enter a guild with a DvL character which 1 day later i'd just delete.

I like healing FPs. I got into a guild with my op because I happend to pug with the GM and two guildmates and they liked my skills. It seems to be fairly populated (30-50) people on at time though sadly I haven't run too many FPs with them.

Other than that, I have zero interesting in the gear treadmill, even less in the conquest grind or PVP. KOTFE hasn't changed that. And I don't think it's the cause of the decline OP mentions either. The true cause of it is that people just don't want to grind anymore.

I don't see a point to enter a guild with a DvL character which 1 day later i'd just delete.

I understand that...I just seriously must be under estimating just how many people will be creating/deleting toons. I won't...I have plenty of room for more.

Galaxy Knights is a great pub side Harbinger guild I've joined in recent weeks. They are just hitting their mid stride cause everything is fresh to them and the management is incredibly generous. How generous do you say? I casually joined on their World Boss event and at the end one of them handed me a million credits! I've played this game in different guilds since launch and have never seen anything like that before, ever.

To the OP: I too have kept and old Shadowlands guild going since launch. They did the full gambit of content. When it worked best we did 16m ops and the mumble conversations were hilarious and entertaining. Conquest put a strain on us and 4.0 things finally went silent except for a couple of scheduled raids during the week.

From being on the different servers my personal opinion is that you need the largest possible base of players to do thing. You see people don't mind doing the older content if it is at least new to some folks. I got a wave of nostalgia as my toon attained 'unlucky/lucky' on Corellia WB but you are only going to get that on the highest populated servers.

While I'm pretty sure nobody who can make any changes will read this thread the one sweeping change they could do is consolidate the 'Light' populated servers. This would at least get the people together who still play. This is what the GSF'ers have done in North America. We've all pretty much migrated over to Harbinger for frequent galactic starfighter pops.

I don't see a point to enter a guild with a DvL character which 1 day later i'd just delete.

I've joined guilds on disposable characters. I used to even tell them when they invited me. Now I don't really bother.

10% is nothing to sneer at. Every little bit helps.

Not sure what you all are doing wrong...but.

The guild I am in on shadowlands has 300 active members, with 40-60 on most anytime.

Revans-Legacy.com

If you are in leadership then Lead!

It is not all the doom and gloom some report it to be.

Find a new guild and go have fun.

I am a social person who is online quite a bit, but guilds make me feel a little trapped to a server, and considering that I have over sixty characters that I swap around through (seven of them for the event, one DvL was a re-roll of a freshly rolled character a couple days befre the event was announced) on five servers... I can quit making new characters whenever I want! Right after i finish making this one. And that. And the other one... I don't have a problem! That's why I don't join guilds (did join one, but it fizzled out and I really wanted to hop back to another server I was leveling characters on)

But OP, I understand your sentiment and really wish BW/EA would do more to encourage more for guilds. Heck, I'd think it'd be nice if guilds were cross faction, then you could tell if one of your officers is online on an Imp/Pub alt, or offline/on an unguilded alt. And then have guild population limits upped for that reason.

I do wonder if part of the guilds dying is also because of Conquest, larger guilds are more likely to have more people doing more stuff and getting more conquest points faster than smaller guilds (I know there are a lot of small conquest guilds, but I'm just thinking in terms of numbers and non-conquesters/less-than-active characters to conquesters to active players ratios like a math problem). This led to the great forum battle of small guilds dying because people wanted to conquer stuff and joining bigger guilds and the bigger guilds getting bigger and seemingly always conquering the planets...

I have the posts here and as the GM of 2 guilds on Shadowlands I can understand how you can feel that 4.0 may have been bad for guilds. In our case, it actually increased guild activity for us--the Star Fortresses after Chapter 9 were a great boost for group activity as we all strove to get crystals for improved armor. It made gearing up more fun so we could put together our raid groups. While I haven't really recruited much lately, primarily due to the summer months here in the US (overall game population seems to be down but that's okay--people have real lives to live and this is the season for doing that) I am going to do some next week. Another plus that 4.0 gave us was doing small group content that was fun to do, Tactical Flashpoints. We could get 2 groups together and switch off between groups to plunder the galaxy while enjoying the company of our fellow guild mates.

As a Guild Master, I have seen many other guilds fall apart due to poor or disinterested leadership. The leadership is what makes a guild run-you have to lead not only in word but by example. I'm on every night to see my guild mates, to offer them assistance if they need it, and to answer any questions they may have. I think the biggest plus we have going for us is our TeamSpeak server. Again I'm on every night to chat and make the game fun with a lot of humor. You might say I'm more of a "people person" than a hard-core endgamer, and you'd be right. While the end game content is challenging for most in our guilds, we're more laid back about it so we don't lose the element of having fun instead of getting stressed out or upset about not being able to properly complete an Ops on HM.

Now we have the Dark vs Light Event, and I can tell you--this is just the distraction we needed! About 9 of us are running this event together and we're having a blast with it. It started me back to crafting again (which I had quit doing when 4.0 first rolled out) and it's given me my first ever 550 crafting achievement last night on a DvL toon. Again we're on our TS channel laughing and comparing notes and adventures, and I always stand ready to stop what I'm doing to lend a hand for back up if needed by another guild mate. Bottom Line: A Guild is what the Leadership Makes It To Be! Have Fun, Be Creative, Be Inclusive!

On Shadowlands also, started the game first week it came out. There were about 8 of us that played at that time, we never formed a guild, just played in groups whenever we could. They have all left the game.

I tried a guild about 3 years ago, and the officers ran the guild like everyone owed them something for being invited into the guild. Needless to say, after two days in the guild (never being invited to run a FP, and the guild leader asking me to donate a million to pay for officer repair bills) I /guildquit.

Since then ran solo. Not anti-guild at all, I have been a member and officer in guilds on other MMOs. Its just that after playing for so many years in MMOs, I now feel that solo is the way to play to avoid drama and trolls. I tried to do standard mode FPs, and getting kicked for not having raid level gear (in a SM FP), or playing a healer and having the 2 DPS whine that I can't keep them alive along with the tank when they pull agro or pull a second group, well I just reached my limit.

I occasionally group for event areas (4 man during Rak) or the H2s. Now if I want to do the DvL, I am going to have to step up and run the non-solo FPs in tactical, hoping that I get a group that is ok with the occasional question on the bosses. I will be checking out some of the videos online to try an learn some of the boss tactics, but I fully expect to be kicked from several when they find out I have not run the FP yet. I purposefully do not do HM or pickup OPs, I see those as something a guild will walk its members through, and as non-guilded I have no problem with this. If I do not run something due to my choice, I do not deserve the rewards someone who has run it has earned.

Guilds have their place, and games need to make guilds attractive to join. The guild benefits in a game like EQ2 where astounding, and this game needs to show guilds some attention. I know that in an MMO you should be interacting with other players, and a guild is one of the best places for that. It is just that SWTOR has not paid this aspect enough attention. I recommend everyone at least try a guild once to see if they find one they like. There are some good ones out there (from what I read here), and I am sure at some point, in this game or another, I will join a guild again.

For those TL; DNR - try a guild, you may like it. If not, enjoy the game your way, so long as that does not interfere with someone else's enjoyment of the game.

I have the posts here and as the GM of 2 guilds on Shadowlands I can understand how you can feel that 4.0 may have been bad for guilds. In our case, it actually increased guild activity for us--the Star Fortresses after Chapter 9 were a great boost for group activity as we all strove to get crystals for improved armor. It made gearing up more fun so we could put together our raid groups. While I haven't really recruited much lately, primarily due to the summer months here in the US (overall game population seems to be down but that's okay--people have real lives to live and this is the season for doing that) I am going to do some next week. Another plus that 4.0 gave us was doing small group content that was fun to do, Tactical Flashpoints. We could get 2 groups together and switch off between groups to plunder the galaxy while enjoying the company of our fellow guild mates.

 

As a Guild Master, I have seen many other guilds fall apart due to poor or disinterested leadership. The leadership is what makes a guild run-you have to lead not only in word but by example. I'm on every night to see my guild mates, to offer them assistance if they need it, and to answer any questions they may have. I think the biggest plus we have going for us is our TeamSpeak server. Again I'm on every night to chat and make the game fun with a lot of humor. You might say I'm more of a "people person" than a hard-core endgamer, and you'd be right. While the end game content is challenging for most in our guilds, we're more laid back about it so we don't lose the element of having fun instead of getting stressed out or upset about not being able to properly complete an Ops on HM.

 

Now we have the Dark vs Light Event, and I can tell you--this is just the distraction we needed! About 9 of us are running this event together and we're having a blast with it. It started me back to crafting again (which I had quit doing when 4.0 first rolled out) and it's given me my first ever 550 crafting achievement last night on a DvL toon. Again we're on our TS channel laughing and comparing notes and adventures, and I always stand ready to stop what I'm doing to lend a hand for back up if needed by another guild mate. Bottom Line: A Guild is what the Leadership Makes It To Be! Have Fun, Be Creative, Be Inclusive!

After almost 5 years of running two of the largest guilds on Shadowlands, I cannot devote 20-30 hours a week any longer. I have a family, a job, and the game no longer offers any content that I have not played....repeatedly. Most of the guild is in the same boat.

Tactical flashpoints? I have played every flashpoint in the game dozens of times.

DvL event? I completed it in less than a week.

Crafting? There is no point. The gear is useless. It literally means nothing and it cannot substitute for gear drops from OPs.

We finished conquest. We have no need of it.

There is nothing left to work for in this game.