I didn't take offense in your critique, Sangwa. I only wished you had explained yourself right away instead of butchering the guild without leaving anything positive. But don't worry about it.
I'll try to explain myself aswell now, by going through parts of your critique and saying a few words. So, here goes.
It's a guild with a very common Philosophy ('Do unto others as You would have others do unto You') practised by plenty of guilds (on purpose or not). That's what I consider lack of depth. It's not really something hard to come up with, or to put into motion and neither can it make you spend more than one minute thinking about it.
The "Symbolism packed" comment was because the guild name and most of the ranks are not self explanatory. This obviously had a reason, one I couldn't look into since your structure dioesn't mentio much in that regard.
The philosophy 'Do unto others...' is only a general rule explaining our morality. See, we want members who know how to behave themselves, following the moralities most civilized human beings are being told by birth. You're right, it's nothing that takes more than a couple of minutes to come up with, in fact, it was clear from the very first second on, since I do not want to have a guild, following any other maxims, than this one. In other words, I want a guild, that has friendly and helpful members, and nothing else. This is the only maxim I would want to lead a guild with, and I wouldn't change it, just because some other guilds are following the same maxim. I am rather leader of a guild with a common philosophy, than with a very uncommon philosophy I can't identify with at all.
As for the lack of depth, the reason for why the story is rather vague and not that much connected to the guild itself, is that I didn't want to chew for the guilds' members. I'd rather join a guild, in which not everything is pre-designed from the beginning on. This leaves a rather huge possibility for the members to actually be part of the guilds' background, and to have a certain impact on how it evolves, story-wise. The story I posted above, is just the general story on how it began, my break with Elemental Light. The real story is yet to come, and to be written by our members and my humble self. However, since I didn't want to pre-design everything from the beginning on, and to have a general background from which the real story can tie on, the story above is the result. The story to come will be made up by the guilds' members, achieved by internal and external roleplay.
Assuming a non erosive/ non environment changing stance makes your guild usually centered around itself and the resources it wants to get, pushing it away from the rest of the players. Besides, looking for people to be synergic with is much like recruiting to make friends. This is done by many guilds and those guilds aren't often great role playing material.
Correct, the guild is indeed centred about itself. To accomplish our goals, we try to 'awaken' people, which basically means we assimilate and indoctrinate them, roughly simplified. This method can be associated with religious institutions or cults in RL. At least of the ones in present times. The christian church had their crusades in the middle age, but today, the accomplishment of their goals is not anymore linked with violence, but with the method of gathering followers and indoctrinating them with their philosophy. And you can say the church is pretty much self-centred aswell. However, being centred about itself, doesn't mean the guild will seperate itself from other people or guilds. We do want to take part in social interactions with other people, yet without wanting to be drawn into things, the guild doesn't stand for. If for example a guild we have social relations with, suddenly gets problems with another guild, we don't want to be forced to take action. It's one thing with allied guilds, where actively helping is to be considered, but everything else we don't want to be drawn into, since it's their stuff and we don't want to be bothered with it. Another reason for why we think that way, is like you mentioned, the will to guarantee security to our members. We don't want them having to take sides in a conflict, they have nothing to do with at all.
To sum it up:
1) The guild has not much background yet, because we want to leave much space for our members to evolve it by internal and external roleplay.
2) The guild being self centred and neutral is a defense mechanism to protect our members, but this doesn't mean we won't have social bonds with anyone outside the guild.
3) Our philosophy and our rules are how they are, because I have seen many guilds without any moralic maxims. All we want is to guarantee a friendly interaction with other people, IC and OOC. Are we really to be blamed for that?
4) We don't want to change the outside, by taking action against unlawfully acting people or guilds, we want to accomplish our goals by 'educating' people. And with eduacting i mean making them believe in our philosophy, from which we think is the only right one.
I hope I managed to explain a few things that were unclear in the first post. Constructive critique is always welcome, but I think it's understandable that we try to defend the overall idea we have spent some thoughts on. Again, I do not take offence in your critique Sangwa, so I hope you don't mind me defending myself either.
And thanks to Parallo and Duraza for their comments.
~~Rongar
