Guilds as the starter of Season 10's super season of content is... not really going well for me due to weird limitations and restrictions that make me feel morally uncomfortable, I don't think many will relate, but I just have to let this out here and hope a Rare devs notes this is something that does happen.
Guild Limit
I usually tend to say that I don't have a lot of friends playing this game, hell, I don't play this game without a crew willing to put me on board (when I'm available), but for some reason...
I've received an overall total of 8 guild invites from several individual friends of different/similar friend groups.
This limit is mentally draining on me because I cannot join all these different guilds, I've joined 2 that turned out to be really small friend groups (which is going into another issue I'll talk about later) but the fact that I have to decline several friends who would have liked me to join their guild- and I haven't even made my OWN, is a serious problem in this system that I do not appreciate for the launch of this feature.
Guild Progression
What happened here, what was the goal?
Legitimately it concerns me how the concept of having multiple people join a player-created team is so limiting, even for people that have massive groups in the first place.
To start: You cannot keep your sanity and progress guilds as a small group. The only 2 guilds I've joined have about 3-5 people in them as of today consisting of a small group of friends my guild owners have invited so far (they are small because those groups consist of a lot of SoT players that have quit), I've only made progress in guilds as a duo sloop doing sea forts and treasuries, and we make so few pixels of progress just to get 1 level increased that it's deflating.
From what I'm gathering, the intention is to have multiple guild members of a large guild set sail and play the game as they normally would, but they have to do it on separate servers sailing for the same guild... why?
Guild/clan systems in other games allow you to have much larger groups of people join a similar game at consistent occurrences. Having a large group of people log on at once in a single game is the finest expression of team work and friend gathering there is- and yet, Sea of Thieves wants to break the mold by not realizing that Guilds as a concept in this game would work best as a glorified alliance server creator.
Why should I sail on a different server for the same guild I'm a part of? What if our group is over the maximum size of people for a galleon, but not enough for an half-efficient duo sloop on another server? How am I going to make progress if I'm playing solo, at the launch of this season where several full crews are out here doing everything much more efficiently than a solo can, and can viably fight for it? The slow guild progression means that I need to do heavily risky activities to make more than a pixel of progress- during the hottest time of the season- at a reasonable pace, which is the same activities I practically finished doing in Season 9 I might add.
"Just invite more people to the guild then!"
Cool, too bad most of my friend groups are tiny, or full of people that have quit the game due to content updates that have been poorly received for them, including sweats/wannabe sweats that appreciated an exploit that barely got patched out correctly, being patched out. I'm in a rock and a hard place because I don't have community like these #BeMorePirate players, Sea of Thieves Partners, or even popular content creators. I'm effectively a nobody in small groups that have kept me sane during the struggles of this game's deteriorating state and I cannot spend hours upon hours doing the same world events I've already fought for just to progress a guild that actively makes me feel like I'm not doing enough, while these guilds I'm a part of are too small to progress quickly and efficiently.
That doesn't even remotely hold a candle to the requirements to reach a single level: an estimated 1.5 Million Gold sold to get past your first guild level. Which is apparently really easy if you just raise up the hourglass, get a decent streak, and lower under your guild to get a ton of progress at once. An option that people still don't want to participate in, just to make more guild progress? Not a fan in the slightest.
Conclusion
Guilds... are a miss so far for me, I wanted to be optimistic about it, but I don't like that this is all that we have until the middle of November and it's being promoted as a big ole update full of content, and it's just way too slow to progress. Without something genuinely new to do, and what we are doing isn't even enough to make meaningful progress as a small group in a guild, alongside most of the guilds I've been invited to are nothing but small, tight-knit groups of friends, this doesn't work, and I genuinely do not like it. I do not want my friends to suffer because of a flawed system that can't even remotely be compatible to the Sea of Thieves player that is a part of groups but not a group organizer.
Maybe we'll get some changes that make guilds feel a little more fun to play, but to be honest, the low game activity in my friend groups isn't really making this Season 10 launch feel worth the trouble.
