Quote Originally Posted by Xatsh View Post
To comment on the FC issue:

Free Companies in this game honestly do not function as guilds. They function as chat channels. There is honestly no guild content in FFXIV, literally 0.

The problem in Free companies is if you are attempting to building anything besides a social casual guild it is destined to fail, simply due to the game makes it impossible to really build a guild. FFXIV is one of the only AAA mmo games where this is the case.

Statics are the anti-guild honestly, a click within a guild almost always destabilizes the greater guild as people only want to do things with their group of people thus leaving out huge chunks of the guild making members not in statics leave. I had to kick a whole static of 8 ppl out of my guild in HW due to them wanting to Sell clears at a discount to the guild instead of helping them, because they did not want to "Carry PPL"..... This crap is the problem.

You do not have that feeling of a guild in ffxiv. It is I am in X static. Thing is I cannot blame the shift to static mentality, the game forces you to prioritize statics over guilds. The game actually punishes you for attempting to do endgame as a guild. Aka loot penalties for helping guild members clear content. In my guild even when it had 80 ppl in it... most static groups made their own discords and hung out there. So with 30-40 ppl online 6-7 would be on the guild discord while 20-25 would be on private discords. <= this is toxic as hell to the guild btw.

Guilds in mmos have always been the backbone of your social circle, what made mmos different then another online game. yes you can socialize in DF and such but it is not even close to the same as doing content with your guild.

Free Companies in FFXIV die or fail to actually grow because there is nothing for them to build on. They are not needed in this game. Honestly in the mmo world... FFXIV has the absolute worst guild system and guild support I have ever seen. At least from my experience from mmos I have been a guild leader in or officer in. EQ, WoW, FFXI, FFXIV, Archeage, RO, Aion.
I can agree to that in general, though I think it's interesting you exclude social guilds from those guilds that are destined to fail. As for the loot penalty, it is probably to prevent people from selling loot runs while content is new.