So many points being made, but to be honest not very good ones.

First, you can't have balance at all when said 60 fighter gets to 60 in 1/10th the playing time another guild does. That's your first problem. Forget him swaggering ona bout 'being able to hit me' you can't be hit because you have gotten so much exp so ridiculouslly fast that your dodge and wield are so ridiculously high that yeah, normal guilds can't compete with that. Resist stun is as everyone has mentioned a problem, but by far not the biggest problem this mud faces.

I'm sure there's plenty of people here who have mudded 15+ years by this point. If you've gone anywhere but just darke darke darke you should already know the downfall of 99% of most muds at this point is simply the type of posts we're seeing here.

" Don't nerf my guild, make everyone else stronger"
" Expand the high end areas and content so we can all get bigger"
etc etc etc...all very very bad bad bad points that don't even come close to addressing the core issues of balance.

You can't just 'bring everyone up' to the strong guild. First of all, as most people would agree, not every guild should fight exactly the same. Some guilds are stronger at the highest levels but weaker at mids, some take a shit load longer but have higher payoff at the end (theoretically though in practice it's quite the opposite too complex for this particular thread)

adding more and more exp will do absolutely nothing but excentuate the already apparent balance problems you have. Those who earn exp faster than others, will earn more exp, at a greater rate, faster than others, thus widening the gaps and problems.

The game simply wasn't designed for players to run around with 300+ wield, it was never designed for that kind of player trounsing around mocking anything but top ends of all crit tables. That dynamic at it's very core is broke.
Bottom line is you're always goign to here arguments like this because the very people that flock to the unbalanced guilds will whine that their guilds are getting balanced. It's the same logic that really dicates the utter unfairness, after having increased the exp since july to go about now and re-decrease it. P-wipes are almost a necessity after gigantic balance changes, and frankly you're all fooling yourself if you ever thing this mud will pull itself out of the doldrums of empty muddeddness without some serious serious gameplay changes.

The rest don't want change, because regardless of how broke something is it's 'you're broke' and you're comfortable with it. And then there's the others who play 1 guild their entire decade of mudding and really cant' relate at all to balance in general and shouldn't be involved in the conversation at all (sorry, it's just true, but those people never recognize it in themselves)

You can ramble on for years on I think this shoudl be changed or that, or this or stun should be such and it doesn't really mean anything it's 500 different people coming up with 10,000 different ideas of waht they think in their little mudding world needs to change to help their gameplay.

What you need is 1 commited admin with the knowledge and willingness to make drastic changes, regardless of their popularity, but those changes can't be made without an overall agenda/gameplan. Ergo, a big big research project resuliting in very specific goals designed out before any actual changes are even considered or implemented.

Example:
You have to define each guild's actual role, their expected difficulty levels, at each stage of progression, and their expected power plateaus and at what levels, based upon their usefulness in the grand scheme of darke. Then once you have that outlined for each and every guild you have to figure out just how utterly far away you are in current game from the balance design, and then you start slowly implementing those changes until you reach the feel you are looking for.

Then after about a year of doing that, you do a P-Wipe. It's a very complex and difficult process and my honest opinion tells me that if it hasn't happened after 12 years here it never will. It should, but it probably won't. So yeah I could sit here for hours giving you random suggestions that may or may not have any more merrit than any other random person that sits here, but this hasn't and never will address the core issue:

Darke as a whole lacks gameplay depth and balance. It needs to be addressed from the top-down if you ever want to play on a serious mud with more than 5-15 players again. Maybe none of us do? and that's just how it's going to be.