Dobrt wrote:You can all argue in circles for as long as you want.
The facts are:
1. At present there is little if any reason to play the game unless you give up and join a guild and become their slave.
2. There is no room for overall game or individule character growth if all there is to do is become a guild bot.
Right there! There's the problem right there. You seem to be under this assumption that joining a guild means you will be bossed around and lose any and all ability to play what you want. That's far from how the game works. Yes, right now with the game just releasing everyone needs to chip in to terraform, gather, etc to get the settlement established, but people already realize this and as a result are by and large willing to chip in, especially since they would have to do the same thing on their own.
If that is your opinion of guilds and how they work, and that you will have no personal freedom or choice, then you need to quit joining those types of guilds. There are a multitude of guilds that are friendly communities of people who spend their playtime talking, joking around, and making the time spent preparing the town go by much faster than if they were to do the same activities on their own to prepare their personal areas. The end result is more work gets done faster and there are more resources and amenities for you to use.
Hell we've had solo players, small groups of friends, and even two group of 8 people join up, one of which does not even speak English, and they do the same thing they've always done and play with each other. Only now they are contributing to a community that will provide food for them, provide all the buildings and profession resources they could ever want, and who will band together and protect each other if we are attacked. The main difference for them now aside from having far more people to talk to is that now they can focus on a profession they want to play without having to take every skill under the sun just to try and maintain their characters on their own.
Now not only can they play the professions and skills they want, they can take them to 100 skill level. They will be able to earn massive amounts of coin selling their wares in the guild trading post when it is established. They won't have to keep looking over their shoulder for a roving band of griefers to ride them down and slaughter them at any moment. All in all, pretty sweet deal.
Guilds in this game are not the problem. The perception, assumption, and sweeping generalization of guilds in this game is the problem.