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Yes, bosses were the faster way of getting the items, but both bosses and general farming spots required a party to farm. And parties fought each other all the time, so you'd want a guild to support you if you were losing vs another party. This usually just led to any high-top lvl party being in some guild, which would then war against other guilds.
We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.
I'll leave this to James because my L2 experience is way too different from his (private vs official servers). What I can say of my experience is that across the years I've gathered a ton of friends, who were all happy to play with me on a new server under my leadership. And I was using that exact system. They trusted my judgement and never left the guild due to a gear argument. There could be other personal arguments or people just stopped playing the game, but I cannot recall a single leave over a gear dispute.
If I had the same situation of "my favorite game gets amazing updates super often and none of them go wildly against the general preferences of the players", I'd also play that same exact game for years and years with the same people. But alas, L2 was not that. I might've experienced that had I played the game since the release of its official servers back in 2004, but I was too young and poor to do that. Which is exactly why I'd assume James had a different experience.
p.s. a small clarification on the "who gets the item" thing. If there's, say, player A with tier4 gear and player B with tier5 and their guild manages to drop a tier6 item that fits them both - the item goes to player B and his tier5 gear goes to player A. The tier4 item would either go down the line or left for any newcomers, or just sold on the market (or broken into crystals for crafting).
That tier6 item would let player B help out player A in future pvp fights, which would make A's farm faster and more reliable. This system works on the logic of "you're only as strong as your weakest link". The strong links do their best to support the weakest links, because it's in their own interest.
