Well, back from the dead so to speak. I'd been burnt out with writing and bloging for awhile so took some time off from all of the typing.

First on my list of musings is the current guild system and what effect it has on my characters and the world at large. The guild system is a bit complicated so I'll just summarize it if possible. There are two bars that makes up the important aspects of the guild. One is your personal bar that starts out with a neutral setting and runs to exalted. The other is the guild bar that starts at level one and runs to level 25.

Your bar gets filled when you complete quests, well mainly quests. There are some other activities that most likely would also give you points, but those would relate to your guild buddies doing these together as a group I believe. Since I solo 90% of the time I never found out exactly. When you fill this bar up you move to the next rung on the ladder. This also opens personal items that you can purchase depending on certain requirements as well.

The guild bar gets filled by completing quests, doing guild activities with your buddies, such as instances, raids and battlegrounds among other things. The points awarded are varied depending on the outcome of what you are doing at the moment. When the bar is filled you get a benefit that applies to all guild members. As I said there are 25 levels so you can get quite a number of helpful things.

There are more things that make up what you see, but these two bars are very important with everything else as a side feature. My comments relate to these two bars which really have a negative effect or more like a negative outcome when it comes to playing.

My first example has to do with a small guild of 25 players that I was currently in when I was leveling my Worgen Druid, Egmund. This guild was very inactive with most players not showing up for days on end. I kept a close eye on when anyone had shown up, or had recently played, which was to say none other then the guild leader. Let me say that I leveled my personal bar to honored, but the guild bar never reached level 2 during my stay with this guild.

Currently I'm in a guild with 77 members who have reached level 8 on the guild bar. Guess what? My personal bar is neutral as my points don't carry over. How does one increase the bars performance when your character is capped at 85 and you mainly solo? Dailies is the answer and any missed high end quests. Do you know, I hate doing dailies as it's just one big grind mill.

What makes this troubling is the understanding that this type of system favors bigger active guilds who can crunch the numbers faster then smaller guilds ever could. I know, others would say that this is the way things are and just live with it, but if your one of those players that are in a Mom and Pop guild with a close knit group, then you'll know what I'm talking about.

Over all I feel that Blizzard should consider some additional alternatives that would keep a player from having to decide between staying in a small guild and missing out, or joining a guild that has achieved the benefits by weight of numbers.