"Guilds" were a standard feature in LP-MUDs, the first of which predates CF slightly. (The only other MUD I played considerably was Genesis, the first LP MUD). As a result, the lion's share of LP MUDs have guilds.

The major difference was while guilds gave you powers, they were the ONLY source of your powers, as LP MUDS traditionally are a classless system. You had three tiers of guilds though - racial, layman, and occupational, and it was the occupational guild that gave you most of your RP ideology and friends the way our cabal system does.

Guilds were raidable, but there was no power loss. Raiding would just disable your shops, trainers, access to different parts of your guildhall, etc, and most raids were NPC driven with scripted events.

Anyways, just some trivia. It was not necessarily any better or worse than CF, but different. Yet it had the same effect of keeping its players engaged socially in the game way more than just a typical hack-n-slash MUD.

One way Genesis got its players engaged early was the racial and layman guild systems, which did not have level restrictions and many of which were automated. I don't think CF should necessarily reflect that exactly, but the idea that was brought up with an apprenticeship or something that is an automated first stepping stone into cabal life, is a good idea.

Especially now that we have more RP restrictions on a prospective cabal member. I mean back 10 years ago, not only could you become a knight at level 11, but you could be neutral or be friends with spastic anti-paladins. No one cared of the Entropy member has a million gold in their bank account, and everyone was a lot more loosey-goosey about what was "magic" to a battlerager. I'm glad the bar has been raised, but giving the lower level characters access to more tools and relationships to facilitate their more stringent RP would be a good idea. Like the Village applicant status, an excellent idea. Even forgetting powers, giving applicants access to special shopkeepers, etc, or an aspiring Outlander a wilderness recall from the go, could be helpful.