if sony wants to slow down guild progression, the solution is to get rid of instancing. If you allow 1000 (unlimited) people through the pipeline daily, your expansion is going to be torn up and beat in a month. Forcing game designers to add artificial road blocks that will frustrate players in order to lengthen the shelf life of their product.

If you allow 60 (or some small number) people through the pipeline daily you create a cockblock players will complain about, but not on the same level they will complain about obviously bugged and impossible content.

Scarce resources > bugged content (purposely blocked content rolled out in stages). Scarce resources encourage player on player competition for resources. Which in turn motivates people to play longer and be on more often in hopes of aquiring that which they want. From sony's point of view this increases their bandwidth costs, but it looks like their solution is discouraging players and not healthy in the long term. Players play less because content is always available to them when they do decide to log on. This creates less player on player interaction which in turn deminishes a person's motivation to log on in the first place.

Some players do have a circle of friends (guild) they can schedule times to hook up and beat content. However with no guild on guild competition no percieved deliniation of who is best, the hockey team vs team like atmosphere of say, velious, is gone. And the few new players to the game have less opportunity to meet up with established guilds since these guilds are often out doing their own thing in private (instanced) zones.

Imo, sony should move away from key quests/trial quests as a means of controlling player content consumption and move to a gear/ability method of controll. IE: New expansion comes out, mob hits for 5k and bounces agro like a bitch. Unbeatable by players in previous expansion top end gear. Have zones in the new expansion that are raidable for substantial (30-50% upgrade) character improvement. Add 1 or 2 new abilities per class that are absolutely needed (ie, warrior gets an improved taunt that works on new super bosses, without this taunt agro is impossible to achieve on boss. Cleric gets a heal specific to new bosses, without this heal damage inflicted by boss is unhealable or heavily mitigated, etc). And then open the expansion up, every zone accessible to anyone with the balls to go there. Like Velious. Anyone on the first day of velious release could go to ToV, the best zone in the game. Didn't mean they could do anything there, they'd get smoked by aary if they went north, and even the best guilds had a helluva time on the yard trash.
Ya i know, ST was keyed, but it was keyed in a way that encouraged guild on guild competition. It would have been nice if there was an alternative ST key quest that was like say doing VP/VT key. But as it was, i liked the ST style keying method.

This post is going on longer than i wanted, bloody tendancy to ramble. But i just think sony's walking down the wrong path. So many artificial cockblocks like no drop nearly everything, recommended/required levels, flags and keys and instancing so things go faster, but then bugging content to slow things back down. Its effecting my decision on moving to EQ2 or not, since i can only surmize they will continue with their restrictive very linear trend in EQ2.