We have all seen the daily ritual of new players, many in single figure levels, coming onto global-1 and asking how they can join a forum. This then involves MOD's messaging that guild recruitment is on forum, click guild shield etc, by which time they have received several guild invites anyway. The same happens even if they do not have a guild tag.
I would like to suggest is two things:
1. Players are cannot join a guild until they are level 17.
This means that they have to learn the core skills of the game properly, learn to be more self-sufficient, and not simply become a dormant account sitting in a guild so that the guild members gain free guild coins from them. It means that questions on help chat will be more openly answered making newer players more generally welcomed, rather than the often heard 'why don't you ask in the guild?' hence they would be more likely to stay in the game long term.
2. Players in guilds who are inactive at the start of a guild quest should not count towards the guild coins to be paid to guild members.
The present arrangement encourages guilds to grab players to get as many members as possible. They do not care if those players progress or not, it is merely a case of packing the members in. Why? Simple, the number of guild coins paid out at present depends on guild membership total not the number of active members. So there are guild of 80 to 100 members with large numbers of dead accounts who get a nice pay-out when the few active players complete the guild quest. They may need say 35/50 for the quest to complete but they are then paid guild coins on the basis of 100 members.
What I hope is that by making these two changes we stop the current vicious cycle of new players joining, being dragged into a non-supportive guild, quitting and thus rewarding the very players who led to them quitting.