Biggest risk they have is GMs deciding to gdisband their guilds and stop buying their product.
However they know they have a captive audiance that won't do this. Many guilds were created early in the game's history and are run by some of the older players who basically created communities and friend networks on their own through hard work and determination.
The opinions and needs of guilds and guildmasters should have value in this game since its main goal is to be mmo, not a solo player game. Even with communities you will need players that are willing to sacrifice game time to create and administer events. You can not do this with a simplistic interface and no permanent foundation.
Communities should be another in set of tools for guilds and guildmasters not something that will supplant them.
As my own experience has shown me when you pick up pugs and give them a community link you do not always get the best of the crop. Point in fact with how toxic lfr has made pugging you have to deal with people who won't go to voice, won't eat or buff themselves,who never even think about actually sticking around for more the two wipes. So yeah unless they plan on giving a reward for not doing bad behaviors in groups, communities will be something that will constantly cause issues for those that plan events.
Without strong GMs and officers, players who have experience building groups and dealing with the misfits in them communities will fail.
The community system seems to want to mimic Discord, however Discord has a guild structure to it, you can assign roles or ranks with different abilities like a guild and give specific people channel permissions, you can mute both voice and channel chat on multiple levels. If anything the implementation of communities barely scratches the surface of what controls you would need to mimic it. Not to mention the fact that you are basically copying another companies intellectual property.
In any case the permissions changes made to the interface should be reverted.
Guildmasters shouldn't have to work with an incomplete interface when we had a very effective and well implemented one in the original guild control panel.
Previously I have pointed out errors/bugs in the implementation of the community ui and the permission changes in this thread, I have also pointed out how ranks are harmed in previous posts, I even explained how communities are created and channels that previously existed do not merge into them. I explained how the community ui differs greatly from the original controls, I also explained how communities could be used for illegal or detrimental actions on the part of the users since they are not an organized system connected to a group but rather one own by individuals like a channel, and now I have explained how the community ui itself harms the game and actually could be a point of contention between Blizzard and Discord.
Blizzard you have all this information in your hands now, I understand you want to improve your product and do things in your way, but as consumers of your product we do not want to see any harm come to it so please try to consider this thread and the advice given.
Please revert the permission changes and consider the Community UI panel and how its being implemented why the need for it and would making stronger links to guild be a smarter route or should you be completely separating the two.
Also as some have said the fact that Loot Master, and Guild Rewards, and Perks that we had earned as guilds have now gone it seems that more and more guild associated features and benefits are going away. Is there truly no more place for guilds in the World of Warcraft are you truly trying to remove them and remove the benefits that they bring to the game?