Good day!
First of all, some positive words (I bet you don't hear them too often?). So, I just wanted to say that I am proud to be a player and supporter of Turbine's game(s) for many reasons - but overall, you show you really ARE different than other developers. And simply better than other developers. You're an independent MMO studio with limited funds and marketing power (especially with DDO) and still your bold and good enough to innovate, and be successful with it... against all odds, the old spirit of making computer games lives here and prevails. I just wish people playing here talked about it and noticed it more, as Turbine for me, 25-years old veteran of computer games, is a true phenomenon in gaming industry of today. Congrats, just keep faith and keep up the good work, people!
So now my thoughts what I'd like to see in DDO guild system, as a leader of ~600 character guild and creator of Polish D&D Online Portal. Those will be "minor" things, I guess, but probably really important:
1. Deleting a character by a guild member:
When someone deletes his alt, there's a message "xyz has left the guild". Trust me, this really makes a bad impression on other guild members. And 99% of time it's someone who just wants to make different character and comes back with different name. So I think the message should say: "xyz has deleted his character".
2. Problem with many alts:
There's a BIG problem. We can't know which characters are of whom. That's good and bad at the same time - good thing is that people can keep more privacy. But we seem to have too many inactive members and then it turns out that those are alts of some really active player. List of players grows, and it all gets messy, but deleting inactive alts is creating unnecessary conflicts with their owners. We can't just say which alts are whose...
Suggested solution: Add "comment field" for every character in the guild. Players could write there their names / main alt / etc. This field should be editable only by a player in question and Leader or his Successor, but not officers.
3. Officers have the ability to remove someone from the guild:
This is really controversial. Some guilds, especially as big as ours, need many officers online to keep recruiting. But not every one of them should be able to remove anyone from guild. That happened in our guild several times for no good reason, and it's hard to keep order this way.
Suggested solution: Make a "permission system" for guilds. Fully customizable, like in some other MMO games (I think WoW has it, among other games). If leaders were able to create "rank structure" in their guilds with fully customized permissions for every rank, then guilds would work much better and would be more enjoyable for members.
I think going "D&D way" and making it fully changeable, customizable and flexible would be the best possible solution. Especially that DDO is imho the best when it is played in a guild with many people to party with. So DDO would benefit from well-developed guilds probably better than any other MMO.
That's all for now. I think you already know what we'd like to see improved with everything else .