Juicy stuff I had to say so Mikva doesn't have a heart attack about missing out on his screenshots:
1) I agree with the guild limit.
2) I do not agree with applying the guild limit on a whim with what appears to be no forward thinking whatsoever.
3) Applying the guild limit on a whim broke several legitimate functions that joining many guilds provided, listed below:
A) Friend guilds - It was nice being able to join a friend's guild just to show "hey I'm good friends with this person". I was in a bunch of them - sure I didn't wear them a lot but it was a nice touch to the social part of the game.
Solution: allow people to view friends of friends and add an option for players to publicly show their friends list.
B) Novelty guilds - I like wearing random ass tags for no other reason than because the guild name's funny or something. I was in a bunch of these for the same reason - It's a nice touch to the social part.
This is probably the least important of my complaints and doesn't really need a solution.
C) Towering - Currently It's annoying for leaders to manage guilds to be able to reliably tower without multiple guilds. Imposing this limit potentially forces guild leaders into a towering guild + 1-4 floater guilds, taking up spaces they could use for other legitimate reasons. That being said, I'm sure developers have changes coming either to fundamental tower mechanics or to the guild system to deal with this, but until they were in place this limit is making towering more difficult.
Solution: make towering more focused on how good guilds are at pking (e.g. towers open at certain set times and capturing one gets it for your guild until the next capture time) and not how many players they can field every 24 hours.
D) Guild Spar Practice - GS practice with a large group of people was very easy previously. Go to belle, grab a tag, queue up as 5. Someone leaves or enough people for another team show up? Recruit another, start a new team. Takes literally 10 seconds. Now there's going to be more time shuffling guild tags around the limit to get the teams people want than there is actually practicing GS. Don't bother making the excuse that you should only be sparring with your GST team during belle/pub practice - anyone saying there's no benefit to practicing with and against a wide array of different people is all sorts of wrong.
Solution: commands to set temporary tags in belle/pub that are removed after leaving the room.
Right there is 4 things that this guild limit screws with off the top of my head after thinking for literally 30 seconds. Two of those things are major pieces of functionality in the game for their respective communities currently. I'm going to reiterate: I agree with a guild limit. But applying the guild limit without thinking about the functionality It's going to end up limiting is just bad game design. I'm sure there was a reason for doing this - there's always a justifiable reason - but developers need to be balancing ALL the pros and cons (edit to clarify: when major changes like an imposed guild limit are being made) and not just focusing on one specific problem or feature.
edit: Added potential solutions to each of these, since I'm doing a lot of complaining and not much suggesting.