I think that’s his point; that players don’t really need guilds outside of the most difficult endgame progression, and that alone isn’t enough.
But I think what OP doesn’t understand is that, regardless of whether or not players need guilds, it’s not really going to change anything about how players play the game. Players who want to go solo are going to go solo, and the players who want to be in a guild are going to be in a guild. Making it so that the game is centered around being in a community is only going to alienate those who aren’t, and potentially move them to other games where their time is better rewarded.
WoW was a game that pioneered itself on being a game where you didn’t need to be in some community in order to enjoy it. Everquest and FFXI were games that required you to have some sort of group with you at all times. Otherwise, playing the game was literally impossible. WoW was meant to be an antithesis to that; that even though the option existed, you didn’t necessarily need a community to get the full enjoyment of simply playing the game. To say that players should need guilds is a complete misunderstanding of why WoW was successful to begin with. There was group content, but you never needed a guild to clear it. The way WoW is designed today is because of two things:
- There’s a demand in the market for more rewarding content without the time sink of needing to coordinate a group to get it done. People don’t want to spend hours of their free time just trying to clear dungeons anymore.
- It’s merely a natural progression of the way the game used to be. WoW was a game that prided itself on being an MMO where you didn’t necessarily need the MMO aspects all of the time. Where the game is today is not because of a complete derailing of the game’s original design.
Above all, I think it’s important to note that the game today is the way it is because players wanted it to be that way. Despite all of the quality of life improvements WoW brought to the genre, it still suffered in a lot of ways: Zones with group quests/content being effectively dead after expansions, thus making it impossible to do a good chunk of content in most zones, a difficulty in finding players the same level as you in order to run dungeons, and most importantly, not being able to spend a lot of time in the game doing the things you wanted to do because you had to find a group to do it.
I think a guild should make some things easier on the player, and they do. However, they shouldn’t need one.