Imagine you made a guild since day one, put your heart and soul for years to buy all the guild skills and then suddenly one day you get hit by a truck which put you into a comma. And PearlAbyss handed over your precious guild to some other person who just kicked you out and renamed the guild to his liking! 

This is just one possible scenario, many things can prevent you from logging you in such as a natural disaster, war, accident and more. We are human, not robots damn it! 

People are free to leave a guild at any moment to join another, there's no need for such bullcrap system. 

PearlAbyss, please do not hand over our guild.

Only giving rank to people who you can trust can delay the disaster that might come:/

If you're not there for 2 weeks in a row, you have other issues that are more imporant than a video game guild, or you've stopped playing.

Sure, but OP is also right.  Things can happen.  Here's a solution: Guilds that are "forcefully" handed over (that is, any time the ownership is not transferred by the GM themselves) cannot have their names changed, and maybe other restrictions on the new "acting" GM.  And if the original GM turns up again, say, in the next - pick a period longer than a month (allow the GM to set this) - they automatically regain ownership.  After that amount of time, or if the guild is handed over by the GM, the new GM gains all GM powers. 

So, basically what happens is that the automatic turnover only promotes someone to advisor role, with whatever rights the GM has assigned to that role.  But guilds that already have advisors already have an acting GM, so there's no need.

Meanwhile, yeah, there needs to be a deisgnated succession that works its way through the ranks - advisor, staff, secretary, officers, quartermaster, cannoneer, mission specialist, rank & file - or maybe whatever order the GM sets up.  It's ludicrous that under the current system even new members that have not gained regular membership can take over.

Could also use a balloting system in case of long absences.  There are a lot of potential solutions that are better than what they have implemented.

They added an option to remove other guild members right to succeed a GM via adjusting their authorities aka permissions. Is that not working properly or are you unaware of that feature or is there something else going on?

They removed this option and made that automatic, so you can't chose who might claim the guild master's position 

 You are right wtf 0iq developer moment as per usual one step forward two steps back.

Ye and? If someone made a guild it's their guild and nobody should be able to take it unless they are given the permission which is how it worked after PA added authorities/permissions. Now that option is gone for no good reason. Pepople are free to leave and make their own guilds if they want to and thats all there is to it.

Thats the one great thing about Elder Scrolls Online's guild system, you can be offline for 5+ years come back and you're still the guild leader. All the MMO's that don't follow that same philosophy is just dumb. I'm not too sure but I think ff14 is the same as ESO but SWTOR is like BDO and you can lose guild leader status. It's dumb that real life could throw you a massive curveball causing you to not be able to login for a certain period of time and lose your guild over it when and if you come back. It's the guild leaders guild and if they can't come back for two+ weeks and people get upset over it they can leave and form a new guild or join another, but the guild leader is the GUILD LEADER full stop.

I wanted to say the same but you already said it perfectly. Couldn't agree more