Guild advancement will be one of the biggest changes made to the World of Warcraft game system when Cataclysm arrives. Guilds will be able to level up and gain talent points, develop guild professions and gain achievements.
Players earn guild experience in a variety of ways, for instance by gaining levels, reputation ranks, boss kills, rated battleground or Arena wins, or profession ranks. Each guild level grants a talent point that can be spent in a guild talent tree which works similarly to character or pet talent trees. Some of the options in this tree include repair cost reduction and increase in looted gold. Guild talents will affect all guild members. To give fair opportunities to both big and small guilds, only the top 20 earners per day in each guild will contribute to guild experience points.
Guild experience will be converted into a special guild currency, which can be used to buy a variety of rewards such as profession plans, recipes and reagents; vanity items (mounts, tabards, etc.), and guild talent respecs. Guild heirlooms can be created with the help of professions and are bound to the guild, which means that if a player leaves a guild, the item will be returned to the guild. Guild items require less reagents, which can be bought with guild currency.
Players will be able to earn achievements as a guild as well. To do so, at least 75% of guild members (for the moment) will need to complete an achievement to make it appear in the guild achievement tab. As players’ guilds complete achievements, players who are offline will be able to read the latest guild news through an RSS feed to the World of Warcraft Armory and get access to profession info and much more. Guild banks will receive a percentage of gold looted from a boss when guild members make boss kills. Also, it will be possible to invite other guilds to various events such as weekly battlegrounds.
(Source)
This is just a part of the information published on blizzards info panels at IgroMir 2009. You can check out other Panels too, like Cataclysm, Starcraft II and complete coverage from that Russian Game Event. Links can be found in the article we published earlier today “IgroMir 2009: Developer Panels”
One thing is certain, the more i know about Cata, the more i look forward to it (drooling in anticipation) 
Hopefully, as more and more stuff is being done by account, not by individual character, that will be the way they determine the achievements. Otherwise someone like me, who has the full 10 characters allowed on a realm, would drag a guild down terribly.
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One thing i dont think they considered either was the amount of alts in a guild. Alot of the people in my guild have multiple lv 80 chars. Do these count toward the 75%?
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I agree with you completely on this Tophet.
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All of these sounds very awesome. But unfortunetly for those of us who run casual guilds, the 75% rule will force us to boot 50% of our truely casual players just to get credit for some acheivments. I would hope that Blizzard takes people like us into consideration and drop the % requirement down. 50% sounds more realistic to me. Anyone else see this as a problem?
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It would be badass if they could link legendary items to guild in a similar manner. Make it so that the item is bound to the player AND the guild, that way you can’t switch it back and forth between guildies, but if you leave the guild you will not be able to take the weapon with you. If a player leaves, then your guild decides who gets it next.
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Definately is going to be great. I’m curious to see if they will have different trees. A “Raiding” tree, or “Leveling” tree even a “Farming or Profession” or “PvP tree”
This kind of stuff gets my imagination going and gets me excited for the expantion.
I also like that there will be items tied to the guild. And when the person leaves or gets kicked from the guild then the item goes back to the guild bank. Very cool and definately solves alot of drama mamma issues.
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Hopefully this will help fix the desire of casual guilds to not gear people because they will just leave to join another guild… it’s hard as hell to get people to work towards new members if the new members have a chance to just walk away….
lovin’ this idea.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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How interesting! I think this should be fun to be able to have another in game function as well as a benefit. I love the idea of the guild benefiting from loots, as anyone who is or has been a Guild Leader knows, it’s hard to encourage true selflessness in the appraoch of tending to the entire members list. I like it, so far.
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