Zombie Guilds

Guilds and Brawling are a way of life in the Splinterlands. The Duelling arenas on Mount Mox represent the highest form of combat for would-be champions.

However, the development process for Guilds is unlike the rest of the game. We can't just start a guild, and buy your way to the top tier. The only way to become a Top Tier Guild, is to battle. And Win. For a very long time... You need to earn merits and build a personal gladius collection. Gladius are portable. But you also need to build your guild up. That takes DEC, and crowns from winning.

For a long time, the DEC contribution was not portable. Now, thanks to the recent Guild Power update, guild contributions benefit the guild, but if circumstances change, your contributions aren't entirely locked in a guild.

But we still have a problem.

The Problem is Crowns belong to the Guild Owner

For a long time, many people felt that the DEC contribution was the most valuable part of the guild. This was especially the case back when the Lodge bonus was the only economic benefit. But we are past that now, and Guild Power has a huge impact to reduce disincentive for guild member contributions.

But crowns remain a real problem. The guild earns crowns together. No single player guild will earn enough crowns to grow meaningfully. But we loyally give all those crowns to the Guild leader and sometimes that backfires and the guild leader disappears...

Just how big is this problem?

Just for context, there are 2015 guilds right now.
I scanned each guild and checked their leader's battle history with https://api2.splinterlands.com/battle/history2?player=LEADER...

Would you like to guess how many of those guilds have a guild leader that has exactly zero games in their public battle history? The answer, I found, was 1221 - that's over 60%...

You might think it's because there are so many abandoned zombie L1 guilds - and yes, there's a lot of them. But only 626 guilds have a guild rating below 300, so that's only a part of the story.

Focusing on top 300 active Guilds

So instead, let's just focus on the top 300 guilds alone, there are 70 guilds where the guild owner isn't battling, brawling or botting.
These are high performing, active guilds... ones that we see brawling every week, and they don't want to leave their guildmates & friends, and neither do they want to give up the thousands of crowns they have accumulated together.
Some of them have a Guild Bank as an owner. But many have owners that left without warning and haven't returned. Or sold all their assets and burned their gladius. Here's the list of guilds in the top 300 with leaders who haven't seen battle in recent history:

Possible Solutions always get stuck in quicksand

Whenever people debate this particular situation, people quickly align on one of two sides... either
1. they give the community guild example, where everyone participates equally, or
2. they use the sponsored guild example, where a guild leader has paid all the DEC and risks having his guild taken from him.

Obviously these two situations are extremes, but they illustrate that the current system has a problem.

A Potential Solution: the "Guild Layer Cake"

I'm proposing that a potential solution could involve a simple layered guild structure, where a guild members can choose to create a new guild (without probationary period) that optionally sits on top of the original guild.
- Both guilds participate together in the brawl as a team.
- Crown and GP contributions are combined for building level purposes.
- Players can move between the guild layers without probation.
- Crowns are distributed proportionately to the guilds based on the brawl participation
- The leader can remove his guild from the collection at any time, or both leaders can merge the guilds. Merging the guilds back would effectively "burn" one of them.
- This structure creates a single-brawl guild alliance structure...

So if a guild leader leaves the game, or disappears for 6 months... the rest of the guild can pivot to a related guild and keep progressing.

I like this idea for merging small guilds too... allowing smaller guilds to be competitive with older established guilds might be attractive for the game as a whole, and also make guilds an asset that can be built and sold easier. But it might need some additional thought about whether it could become exploitable.

Your thoughts?

Let me know what you think about the concept of a layered guild to deal with these issues, and also whether you can see opportunities or risks from merging guilds?