I logged into Rift, as I do every so often to collect prizes from the Rift Mobile game, and found something extra in my mail box.
If only it worked that way in real life. I know some leaders who have been inactive for more than 36 days.
In WoW, if your leader hasn’t logged in for 30 (?) days, somebody can take over the leadership spot. In Rift, leadership seems to follow more of the “you touched it last!” spirit of advancement.
So Potshot is out and I am in as the captain of the Batsman of the Calamari. Not that the change means anything at all. I won’t be kicking everybody out and stealing the guild.
This is sort of how I end up being the nominal leader of so many otherwise dead guilds. Longevity.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Hmm. That’s *very* interesting. That almost certainly means that the third missing member of our GW2 guild is now leader of our Rift guild, since that’s where she went back in November.
DAOC had this function right from launch I think. They also used to send you emails every time the leadership changed hands. I kept on getting them for several years after I stopped playing.
It’s a function I kind of like and kind of don’t. Mrs Bhagpuss and I joined a guild on EQ2’s Test server to help it get started (that “need 3 more to help start guild” thing). Mrs Bhagpuss suggested the name. That was our primary guild for over five years and all the original members left in the first couple of months. For years we were the only active members but we were always limited in what we could do by having no active guild leader. The auto-pass function would have been very welcome then.
On the other hand, for the last few years we’ve been making branches of the same guild in every MMO we play and I would be royally pissed off to lose control of any of them.
I’d suggest the best version would be the auto-passing of leadership but NOT of ownership, so that if the guild creator(s) ever returned they would be able to re-take control.
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Guild leadership passing is interesting. DDO lets you designate a successor, and that successor can take control if the leader is gone too long. But, if the successor is gone, too, the guild goes leaderless.
Meridian 59 had you pick a member of the guild to support. The person with the most support was guild leader. You could change your support at any time, and if someone else gained more support than the current leader, that person became leader. I suspect the system was originally put into place to allow coups, but it did also let you keep a guild going even if the leader went MIA due to offline life aggro.
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