If all it was about was social guild, ie no buffs, why then limit it at the top end by level at all? I suppose I might be missing something here?
When I was in a noob guild on other servers, it wasn't just social thing, you could ask about something in game and mostly somebody would know answer, I found it quite useful in that way. When you just ask in SZ likely you won't get any response, you need to pm random pple and hope they will bother with you.
Regarding guilds, if you would not mind being innovative, why not introduce multi-guild membership for guild leader(s?) - ie a guild leader would be able to put up another guild and become its 'superleader'. This new guild would be affiliated with the original guild and you could recruit lower level pple into it, making it a sort of selection farm for the main guild (like NHL hockey teams have farms or B teams) - in time you could transfer pple into the parent guild and also demote pple down into the affiliated guild if they didn't perform as you think fit...
To chisel this idea a bit further - since currently guilds can have several leaders and co-leaders, you would need to establish a single super-leader position and maybe also a single super-co-leader position and of these two pple, the super-leader would have the power to establish a secondary guild and become along with his super-co-leader the leaders of that new guild for pple of lower level or whatever selection criteria. This new guild would then have its own leaders (below the two supervisory super and co leader positions) for daily functioning selected from within its members.
You could have more than one such dependent, affiliated guild and its only open up to your fantasy to figure out some rules for the interdependence of this structure (inheritance of some perks from the main mother guild, how would it work in guild wars, etc).
It could be a configuration with one main guild and several affiliated guilds. I think it could greatly enrich mir experience.
