Darth Hater

We are indeed phasing out the Sith and Republic Guild Hall forums. While they played an important part of the community and will be missed, there are reasons for this.

First and foremost is the fact that the official The Old Republic forums shouldn't be used as any primary forum for any guild; that sort of thing should be done off-site, whether it be through a third-party site or the guild's own website. Those sorts of sites offer guild members a greater system of control over their own forums than we could ever offer.

There was also the issue of how the Guild Hall recruiting sections fit in with our Rules of Conduct. As you mentioned, guilds would keep their threads bumped in order to ensure that people saw them. However, most of the time these "bumps" contained no content and were created just to keep the thread at the top of the first page. This is obviously a violation of our Rules of Conduct, as the forums would be a mess if we allowed users to keep threads at the top of the page for the sake of views. Constant bumping, friction between guilds, attacks, hijacking threads, and other related issues made the Guild Hall quite time consuming for the moderator team and problematic for the users, judging by the amount of reports we receive from this section about behavior that breaks our Rules of Conduct.

We want users to find the best guilds possible that match their gameplay styles, and the Guild Hall forums simply weren't able to do that. The new system allows a concise format for finding guilds, meaning that players no longer have to sort through lengthy intros or discussions simply to understand a guild's core values. Their post in the Recruiting threads should sum up the guilds, and all guilds are encourages to create their own website where they can offer further information to users as well as build their own community. The Guild Hall was always meant to allow users to find and discuss guilds; but it was never meant to become home to off-topic threads for every guild. This new system allows users to easily find three different types of guilds (Sith, Empire, and Undecided), and allows users to determine what guild works best for them through a simple and comprehensive format that describes the guilds.

Obviously, this is all a trial and we are willing to make tweaks to it. But we believe that this new system allows promotion of guilds and ease of use without the problematic issues that were associated with the old system. I know I'll miss the bustle and activity of guild discussion threads, but at the end of the day, those threads are better suited off at a guild's own website or third party service where the guild members have greater control over the moderation, rules, members, and content. That is something that we feel makes guild websites a better fit for off-topic guild chat than our Guild Hall forum, allowing users who visit this section to concentrate on the act of finding and joining a guild.

For reference, the Sith and Empire sections will be disappearing in a week's time; we've left them open in case anyone needs information from that section. If you need something that requires moderator assistance, please feel free to contact a member of the Community Team, as we'll be glad to assist. Joanne will have a sticky up shortly that explains the changes we've made to this section.

• Guild Changes Are Here


• Sith Empire Guild Recruitment


• Guild Recruitment for the Undecided


• Galactic Republic Guild Recruitment