WarcraftRealms.com

Something that WarcraftRealms does have the data to do is to work out guild histories as well as character histories, for that matter, realm histories with respect to guilds.

I started my first character on a fairly new server, Kul Tiras, and joined one of its first guilds. It fell apart before too long, but what surprised me was that even the big guilds, full of sixties, with web pages and vent servers and all that good stuff, didn't last that much longer than our little early guild. The trend continues: the biggest guilds in terms of XP can burst overnight. Even the oldest, dating from the founding of the server, aren't safe! But new raiding guilds are replacing them all the time. Some are really new guilds as such, formed by splinters from the old raiding guilds. Others were small guilds that have grown over time and coopted members of the old raiding guilds.

I get the impression of WoW servers being a bit like a region in a history text with these great empires rising and falling over time!

If you were interested in this, you could sift the data from a given server and pick out guilds that were among the top five or top three in terms of experience at some point in the server's history, and graph their membership (in terms of XP) over time, perhaps multiple guilds on the same graph.

It's true, no guild is ever truly safe from collapsing. When player transfers opened on my server, we had 4-5 raiding guilds break up when some of their key players left the server - including 2 guilds that had been together since release (Mal'Ganis is one of the oldest servers.) I like your comparison to history, as it does correlate with the rise and fall of empires quite well.

The idea is great, although you'd run into the problem of Cen+ not always getting the correct guild information from blizzard's server, especially in large guilds (3 of my regularly played alts fall off the guild roster here every 2 weeks or so until I have to run a census on each one of them to get them back in.) I still think it's a cool idea for all of us graph junkies

An interesting idea, I'll have to think it over