Yeah, and I moved servers a few times to follow some friends only to have those guilds slowly break up along with said friends quitting the game.
So I went back to my Alliance characters on Proudmoore and leveled them up and then slapped them into my own private guild. My gaming life is quieter and easier like that.
I also moved a few Horde characters to Thrall. I try to do some light guild stuff on 1 or 2 of them for fun.
Joining a guild after getting a random spam invite is never inadvertent. The player has the option of declining.
This is true. Not long ago I logged into characters I hadnât played in a few years. They were still in guilds, and almost all the guilds were dead. This tells me that the officers left first, so there was no one left to kick my characters.
Iâve only been in two active social guilds, one back in BC that fell apart because of officer drama when Wrath came out, and one in MoP that actually was pretty good that I completed AotC Garrosh and Challenge Modes with. Then everyone I know stopped playing in WoD.
After I resubbed a few months ago, I only just last week got an invite from a spam invite guild with a name that I didnât hate, and decided to join it for the hearthstone cooldown perk. A week ago I had joined a similar guild on my alt that I was levelling through Shadowlands with. Both guilds, upon joining, were entirely dead, with no one chatting in gchat or otherwise doing content with each other. This seems quite different from the MoP or even Legion days when even spam invite guilds were actually quite socially active. Maybe the playerbase is just different these days but it feels a little isolating.
The few guilds Iâve been in that werenât dead actually had people talking in chat and one that had voice chat but the drama was thick. Got so toxic that it was disturbing so I left and never joined another guild.
Lol I join guilds but itâs always the same thing, I pug 90% of the time, when I do raid itâs only 1-2 nights and after raid the guilds silent. Even if tons are on, no one talks no one socializes, no oneâs doing stuff together.
It feels pointless⌠everything I do doesnât involve a guild because itâs just easier to pug heroic or 20+ keysâŚ
I hate it tooâŚI miss when guilds where the way to get this stuff done. 
Havenât had much luck in terms of guilds. I joined one a few years back that was great, but it slowly died out because the GM had some issues.
Every single one Iâve tried to join since has either been dead or people refuse to speak and have their own little clique and talk amongst themselves IG or in Discord.
In my experience there are few guilds that run old content, mount/transmog farm, etc. Most are very raid oriented (understandable) and very much so give off the vibe of âHey, you can fill a slot on raid nights, but otherwise piss offâ
Good guilds donât recruit in general/trade chat.
Never have.
1st thing I tell people asking me how to find a good guild is: never join a guild advertising in trade chat.
Never.
we dont trade chat spam, but we do recruit, mostly by grouping with people and meeting people. we do have a guildfinder up and we have posted recruitment ads in server forums and discords. we are not looking to grow too big too fast. we like it better that way.
we dont care about being the biggest guild or about hardcore anything really, but we have people that like doing pretty much everything
The in-game guild finder is the most worthless tool Blizzard has ever implemented. It logs guilds that are dead, no longer exist, or have moved servers. There has been no update to its mechanic since its implementation, and there likely never will be. That would require Blizard putting forth effort, and we all know how much they despise doing that.
One thing that turns people off from joining a guild is the awful guild names guild leaders come up with. I guess trying to make a guild name that the system accepts (not taken) can be frustrating to guild leaders. But omg some of the guild names out there are just terrible. Just imagine the worst name you could call a guild and guaranteed thereâs a guild out there with that name. People donât want to be associated with a ridiculously named guild.
I made my own guild so I donât have to suffer racist diatribes and conversations about economics from people that barely graduated high school.
I have several of my own guilds that i inherited over the years and do have one toon in an active guild.
So where do âgoodâ guilds recruit?
So way way back in 2004 I joined WoW with a group of 7 friends. Until 2010 we were in a couple of great guilds and had a lot of fun raiding; grouping together; doing World Bosses etc. Everyone was HAPPY to have found WoW and to be playing it. In 2010 my friends decided as a group to leave WoW but I stayed solo in WoW. It took a long time to find a good guild âŚEulogyâŚThrall. I played with them for 1.5 expansions until for real life reasons the GM disbanded. Since then I have been in a variety of Elite guilds who unfortunately neglected to use the words " We want Elite only" in their statement. Instead they recruit whoever hoping players are Elite. The are rude ; they yell ; they insult EVEN within their own guild. A few years ago having seen too much of this behaviour I decided to not raid and instead just play solo pugging M+. Currently I am in a guild with my 515 main and two alts that I realm transferred to this guild based on what was said to me. Mistake again listening to ppl sell their guild. Once again the GM is a hardcore Mythic raider advertising his guild as midcore. I told them I had not been raiding two of the Awakened expansions⌠so I got to see Normal once only and then went to Heroic with them. Really? Yes. Over my head? Yes. Unfortunately I need to learn Normal before I jump into Heroic and once in Heroic I have to learn those encounters as well. Since I missed raiding on those two expansions I definitely do not know the encounters unlike the rest of the raid. So I stuggle to keep up in Heroic. Was also told that everyone does M+ all the time. Well sadly not the case. I pug almost everything. So the state of guilds is this: Discord is everything to them . They post non stop about whatever but actively there are never more than a handful âŚif that⌠of people in WoW. So once again what do i doâŚthat is the question.
Guilds are not required to casually run through lfr and under content.
Yeah bot dungeons are nice and all but they arent perfect.
Guilds are there for people who wants to run organized content without dealing with random people.
Guilds offer organization and make the raid loot drip eventually fall to your side.
Higher content is usually ran first in guilds then in pugs and some content is never seen by pugs for the most part.
Mythic raids usually just kill first 3-4 bosses in a raid by the end of the last two months of a season.
They are helpful towards other content too but at a Lesser degree. Having multiple mplus teams make guilds super useful to run keys and then raids.
The idea of a guild is playing with players who participate in the same activities you do. Some will have more expectations then others. There are many kinds and types of guilds, but itâs up to you to find what youâre looking for.
If you canât find the guild you are looking for, create a guild and make the way it to be.
You can join or create a community as well if you wish not to participate or run a guild.