Not even going to lie, I'm completely fine with the idea of guild alliances. At this point in SoT's lifecycle, and even if it goes against core values, it'd be fun to actually be able to sail with other guild ships, even if locked to one other ship.

@lleorb In my experience guilds worked best when there was a clear goal and competition between guilds. To further encourage this I think additions like the Guild Vault you suggested would be excellent. Also tying guilds to a specific activity or trading company/faction would be awesome. When initially revealed guilds were even presented with the core 4's papers, so there was probably even some kind of plan for that at some point. Also a guild shop would be an interesting way of encouraging further guild play, however I doubt they want to have to make a bunch of distinct cosmetics for another shop. To further expand on my experiences and ideas about guilds I will cover what does and doesn't work with the current guild system, smaller improvements and changes to the guild system, and more out there ideas/reworks.

Currently guilds are too limited in scope. They allow people to work towards distinction 10, use the guild emissary, and offer an improved way to join other people's boats, but they do very little to make people feel like a true "guild" all working together. Basically every guild relies on outside programs like discord to feel like a guild, which is fine, but not ideal. Outside of the guild level and the emissary ledger there is nothing for guilds to work together on, and even then you can only interact with at most 3 other people at a time. Despite these limitations though the best guilds in the community can be quite well known and intriguing. For example, in hourglass there's a lot of overlap between people and guilds, meaning the best players often times will fight the same guilds and create their own "feuds" between them. This is really where guilds thrive. When the community can come together and be further reinforced by guilds it can create a magical kind of feeling in SoT.

Reinforcing where guilds succeed by providing more common goals and guild to guild interactions would be ideal. Given the limitations of SoT it is unlikely we will ever see separate guild servers or guild competitions like so many desire, so this section will be focused on what they can do.

First of all, a lot of the apps that guilds rely on to operate should just be implemented into the game. I don't mean put discord directly into the game, but adding a basic chat, LFGuild (with applications), and announcement section would really help bring players together. Recruiting people from the seas works great, but it's difficult to bring them into any outside structures of guilds, making it hard to really make a community. Just adding this kind of stuff into the game would really help simplify the process. They could even include expanded features like polls to add more functionality for guild leaders. While I understand Rare's reluctance to add chat features directly into the game, it's just gotta happen. Guilds are severely restricted without that kind of thing

The next idea I had was expanding guild to guild competition. The first and simplest step towards this would be making the guild ledger truly special. Supposing they are already going to implement LFG features like above, they should give the top 500 or so guilds a special honor within that system. While this can encourage issues like cheating, it'd really help to make certain guilds "legendary". Perhaps you could even make it so when viewing the guild in game there is some form of special indicator, like the top 500 players in Splatoon getting a special graphic under their character when the game is first starting. This would help push people to seek the highest ledger positions possible, something that was quite popular on S10's release but has died out significantly.

Following this idea of inspiring inter guild competition, it'd be interesting to see guilds complete in a way outside of the ledger. These could be sorted into different divisions to inspire fair competition and working towards the top. These divisions could be based on a variety of factors to get small sets of guilds to compete with each other. For example, you could sort guilds by members, activity, region/stamp, and "focus" (as in TCs or activities. I'll come back to this) to get a small group of guilds that will be likely to have interactions on the seas and be competitive with each other. This could be especially cool for stuff like hourglass, where the 15-30 best HG guilds could compete for the podium positions, often times fighting each other due to the consideration of focus, region/stamp, and activity. Divisions below this top part would be like HG (or whatever other activity) D2, 3, 4... You could give special titles or honors to the D1 guild winners. Similar to how the SoTShot titles work, they could even upgrade with successive triumph. This kind of division system is inspired by Trackmania CotD, where the very top players are all put into the same level of competition. This also allows for very easy cheat mitigation, in comparison with the ledger. You can simply just scan through the top few divisions for any irregularities and since cheaters would be put in the top divisions (if cheating stupidly) it would be obvious. It could even aid in cheat detection.

To expand further on the idea of guild focuses, you could offer specific slots for players to participate in these focuses. For example, you could offer one slot for the basic trading companies (OoS, GH, Merchant, HC), one for the 2 (soon^tm 3 factions) Athena, Reapers, and DB (perhaps unlocked with PL. Also these would include the HG counterparts), and one for specific activities (alliances, steals, WEs, etc). This would stop different guilds from competing with a players attention (a common issue with guilds right now) and provide a more structured system for players to follow. It'd also make LFGuilding much simpler because you could simply sort for a specific activity you participate in. The game could offer quests for the players to complete, earning them guild reputation, rep, renown, whatever other stuff is out there nowadays (lol). Completing all the quests for a specific month or whatever could possibly give them another trinket reward, similar to how ledgers work. This would really make it a lot simpler for like minded players to get together and work on stuff as a group and it'd allow the division system talked about above to be very doable.

Some more unrealistic cool ideas that could be implemented but likely never will be include guild hideouts/starting area (for before entering a session), guild servers, and guild battles. All cool ideas, I just don't think it could ever happen due to the limitations on servers and $$$ for separate server level stuff (RIP Arena).

@lleorb As a former top level guild owner (like top 100 for the entirety of S10), I agree. I mean I had a whole network of guild leaders feeding me information about who was and wasn't participating and I would remove people I deemed to not be doing enough. Point is, not having something like that makes it more inconvenient for people that are seeking to be competitive, and doesn't really prevent anything. It'd be a great feature to add, especially if they take the route of making things more competitive (like they should). Other than my personal guilt, nobody really had problems being kicked out of my guild since they knew there was a specific goal to be as good as possible, and were able to recognize they were not up to standard. And if a guild does become toxic, people can simply just leave and make another one, so why should it be a priority to avoid that at all costs?