In voting for mild dislike of this idea, my main reasoning was Kim's point:That change would be essentially making a completely new mud
There are some things that make Darke, well... Darke. Guilds are one of them in my opinion. I don't think a guild system would necessacerily need to be scrapped to keep the idea of cross-the-board balance alive though. All guilds do draw from the same pool of skills and spells, but some have access to abilities others don't. What might need to happen is a valuation system for individual skills, and then a limit on the value of what each guild is allowed to have.
Just to put in place a value system would be a massive undertaking, obviously, but the framework would then be forever available when considering additions, subtractions, and changes. If an effect that moves a player adds X value to a guild that scales by a factor of Y for every step away from level Z, adds M value for every factor that makes it easier to accomplish, subtracts N for every factor that makes it harder to accomplish, and ... well, you get the idea. Essentially it would be huge in terms of man hours just to categorize, then obscene to accurately rank, and just plain silly to think would ever occur.
I'm something of an optimist though.
