Be careful if you take a break - you could lose your Guild

All,

After filling up my HOM I decided to play Rift for a while till GW2 comes out. I have a Guild that has my three accounts in it and let an old Guildie hang out there too even though the guild is "inactive". He rarely logs on but it is nice to have a Guild Hall when he does log in. He was an Officer as were my other accounts.

After two months I logged into the game only to find that Anet had demoted my account and promoted his account to Guild Leader. So they basically stole my Guild Hall from me. Luckily I was able to get in touch with him via an email address from three years ago and he was kind enough to log in and give me my Guild back. Otherwise I would have been hosed.

Anet support said this is an "automatic" process and they have no way to reverse it - so one of your officers could steal and sell your Guild and Hall if you take a break. Nice eh? Gotta love a company that says that botting, hacking and stealing are bad, but then use a bot to automatically hack an account to steal your Guild. Sweet hypocrisy at its finest.

So, be warned - if you have a guild hall and are a GL and are just sort of in "maintenance mode" until GW2, make sure you demote all your officers to members or they can steal your guild with the help of Anet.

I do understand their rationale - If a GL goes inactive an officer can be promoted to run the guild and not lose the hall - but you would think their bot would be smart enough to see that there were only five members in the guild (three of mine and two of his) and everyone was inactive. If it isn't smart enough, I am sure there are some bot programmers out there in China who can help them figure it out.

Cheers

./Tall

It just transfers the guild to the oldest officer in the guild so it wouldn't go lost due to inactivity. That's not really hacking into your account, it's very automatic. At least that's how I remember it.

YOU should be careful and learn to READ before you rant.

Heard of Wiki?

Automatic succession

If a guild leader has not logged in to the game for 60 days, they will be automatically demoted and replaced by the officer with earliest join date (according to the status window).

Maybe next time inform yourself before you go off half-cocked moaning about aspects of the game you should have known already.

Guilds weren't created for players to make personal halls out of. Fine if you want to use it that way, but the mechanics need to support active guilds, and helping them recover the leader spot for someone who actually logs on.

I was trying to warn others of this "feature". Forgive me (and others) for not having the time to memorize the wiki pages and know everything there is to know about the game.

In the beginning when people were playing GW's Guilds were active and a GL going inactive was a big deal. Now, there are very few people playing and many guilds are inactive. So just because I don't log in Anet is going to steal my Guild? And I don't have the right to be upset about that? They don't know if I built it myself, they don't know if I populated it myself, they don't know anything about my situation - so they automatically promote someone who is also inactive - and this makes sense to you people? Seriously? Wait till it happens to you.

God this place is full of Trolls.

Forgive me for trying to inform others who might be in this same situation.

./Tall

This seems like a lot more than a thread intended to "warn" people, given that

1. This kind of situation doesn't surface that frequently
2. In small guilds like what you're describing, the leader probably won't have any problems asking for leadership back
3. You sound angry about it.