Regarding the April 28th Livestream Q&A question "Will the meta for guilds be smaller guilds..."

One of the biggest deterrents against "a bunch of small guilds" tactic that I see is mass pvp. In my experience it is veeery difficult to correctly control a mass of hundreds of people (let alone over a thousand). If the "meta" for big guilds is to just split their members into 40-man guilds and then put those into an alliance (4 guilds, so 160 members), any content/encounter that requires more than that amount of people would lead to potential friendly fire during pvp.

Another, smaller, deterrent is guild politics. Huge guilds will most likely already have some form of hierarchy within their ranks, so people at lower lvls will be getting way less resources/gear/etc. Leveling up guilds and getting skills (or bonuses or whatever) will most likely require quite a lot of work. And those at the top of the hierarchy will most likely be the ones who work the most (which is why they're at the top). So the overall guild leadership will prioritize the sub-guilds with highest lvls of progress, which will create an even bigger disparity between the members.

So in the end you'll have a snowball that turns into an avalanche, where only the ones at the top reap the biggest rewards (or even any). And the remaining hundreds of people are barely getting by. This, in turn, lets any opposing small guild pretty much destroy all those sub-guilds in pvp, because they'd have a much better power distribution and concentration per member. The elite sub-guilds can't be in all places at all times, so the overall huge guild will lose out in more places if they go down the "several small guilds" route.

Imo those are the biggest counters to the potential meta. And they don't even consider any design decisions in terms of guild bonuses and their differences between small and big guilds.

Also, if castles give other bonuses outside of just money and a flying mount - all those hundreds of people would miss out on those bonuses, because only one 40-man guild would be benefiting. Which goes back to the political deterrent.

Now none of this means that no one can succeed with a bunch of small guilds in an alliance, but I do think Intrepid can counter that meta through some good and balanced design, on top of the default reasons I laid out.

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I'm not saying that it'll be exactly like this, but L2's open worldness led to a ton of people having subpar gear, when compared to the elites of their guild (usually just one party per a few dozen people). You'd have an alliance of ~200-300 people and out of those there'd be maybe ~30 people in tier T4 gear, while the majority were in T2-3, with T3 people sometimes in not full sets even.

There's only so many mobs in the world that provide you with the proper materials for crafting. You'd need to hold down a location 24/7 for, probably, several weeks just to ensure that you have enough of those particular mats for your entire huge guild. And doing that requires a ton of resources and time. And if you spend too much in one place - other guilds will farm up other mats that you might need for smth else.

In other words, just as you said, you'd gotta be very good at logistics to execute the scheme correctly. And Intrepid could always just distribute the required mats across the world in such a way that a single huge guild just can't logistic their way out of spreading themselves super thin. And at that point and small local guild can put up a fight against them, so for the huge guild it'd become a slow death by a thousand cuts.