Several years ago, most of you remember, creating a new character and logging on would have you so flooded with guild invites that you had to turn off guild invites so that you could level.
A month or so ago, I created a new toon on a new realm for something to do. I made sure to turn on guild invites, because I was hoping to do some pvp while leveling and would want some people to queue with. No guild invites.
So I checked out the guild finder and scrolled for almost 20 minutes. Nearly every guild that was listed as leveling, pvp, or even casual raiding had no players online. I applied to some guilds, and left that open as well. I tried this every day for a several days. Every guild recruiting on forums was looking for weekly raiders and required registering on other websites- all too annoying for just having a dude I wanted to casually play on and do some pvp once in a while.
The point is- guilds have gone completely stagnant and are desperately in need of fixing, lest the social aspect of WoW die forever.
So here in a couple common sense ideas that may solve the problem.
------
1. Allow anyone to create a guild, and make it a more obvious feature to new players.
Say you reach level 10, and get a new quest that is to join a guild. It gives you two ways to turn it in, either by joining a guild on the guild finder, or creating your own. Create your own guild? Sure, why not. Maybe that random noob has a magnetic personality, and could keep other noobs interested in the game as they are recruited.
It's also time to end the charter. No noob trying to create a guild is going to be able to find 10 players in Stormwind to sign anything. It was annoying but possible several years ago when people were everywhere, but sounds like a massive pain in the ass to do now. Honestly, this has stopped me from trying to just make a new guild and recruit people for it to just hang out.
2. Delist Inactive Guilds
Should be self evident. Just remove guilds from the guild finder if the character that listed it hasn't been on in ~30 days, and send mailbox message to the guild officers that they have been delisted. If they are still recruited, it shouldn't be any trouble for the officers to put it back up.
3. Improve Guild Finder Notifications & Member Request
Add an option to send a mail message to a certain guild rank or ranks so that they can be added when a player is online to do so. In addition, have that player automatically added to the guild if they are offline (if that isn't already the case with active requests). It shouldn't be a matter of "getting people at the right time." Such things could be disheartening for a new player that wants to find friends but doesn't really want to go out of their way. Remember, for most of us, it was much easier to find a guild when there were 12 million players, and we had real life friends that played. That was my experience, but it just isn't the case anymore.
4. Make Guild Benefits More Apparent
There are already a lot of good reasons to be in a guild. Maybe add or elaborate on those features with an easier to read and easy to understand list of benefits on the guild panel. Make new player accounts aware of this the first time the join a guild on that account.
For instance, maybe a new player had no idea that they get more experience in a guild, because they wouldn't think to look in their spellbook for passive bonuses. Why would that be in the spellbook? An easy to read list of these things might go a long way.
5. Provide More Passive Benefits for Guild Play That Doesn't Require a High Guild Level
Maybe getting a few percent bonus loot and xp from dungeons, more xp and honor for random BGs and stuff, dependent on what your rep rank with guild is and how many guild members you are queuing with would not on incentivise new players to be more gung-ho about guild play, but also get older players that have had their friends quit have another reason to keep going and find new people to play with.
This should not be dependent on the level of the guild. There are already bonuses for that and in my opinion, guild leveling has only benefitted huge guilds. It should be a feature that attracts people to high level guilds, but largely has just discredited smaller, low level guilds.
6. Provide Physical Benefits to Helping a Low Level Guild Level Up/Get Milestones/Achievements
Maybe there could be little xp bonus/gold bonus for getting the 1000th guild pvp kill, or being in the first guild group to clear a certain dungeon or to win two's in a certain area. There should be a benefit to helping a new guild achieve, large enough to not dissuade veterans from joining a new guild, but small enough to discourage guild drifters who pray on new guilds for bonuses, but have no intention to stay in that guild. This will probably not be full proof, so possibly only allow getting those benefits once a month or something. Just an idea.
7. Allow New Guilds to Claim Old Names
This is probably the most controversial. Allow new guilds to claim old guild names. There would have to be some strict requirement, but if a guild master hasn't logged in a year and no one has claimed the guild, there isn't really any reason for its name to be trapped with inactive players. Just allow new people to claim the name, and give a name change to the next time the GM logs in, or an officer claims the guild.
------
Making it easy and obvious for people to find more people to play with, in my opinion, would be a huge improvement of the game. One of the main reasons I think we reached 12 million in the first place was that it used to be so easy to find a group of people to play with and get to know. Most of us had people in the real world to play with, and so many of the established guilds were formed and leveled immediately after guild leveling was added. I haven't seen many new guilds grow and have found it hard to even find a guild to join.
I know this is a wall of text, and I know the ideas are not perfect, but we've really got to do something about this if we want WoW to stick around and certainly if you want it to grow.
I also know there are lots of guild events and cool ideas people have already come up with but I wanted to stick to smaller, less resource intensive solutions.