See title. Guild Hall upkeep costs are basically a pointless outdated crown sink which punish guilds for getting upgrades. Punch already exists, and he's a bottomless hungering void for crowns already. We don't need much more than him.
Why sink literal millions into wildly expensive Hall upgrades, if they just burden you with an additional constant weekly bleed of crowns? The upfront costs are already punishing enough.
Removing upkeep costs would encourage guilds to spend money expanding and decorating their halls, without needing to worry about wasting resources on perpetual financial bleedout. It would also encourage individual users with personal halls to expand and upgrade them according to their tastes and needs.
The upkeep cost is basically a relic of bygone times and if we're in the process of modernizing and updating the game it would nice to just see it zeroed out and axed outright. We don't need to punish users and communities for investing money into their guilds like that.
I agree with your suggestion but not so much your reasoning. I do think it's an outdated mechanic but it worked because the player base used to be a healthy size. You could reasonably find enough people willing to donate weekly (else they get the boot) back in 2012. Nowadays I think it's mainly a pointless mechanic because we just have no one to even invite to guilds in the first place, or at least no one we know will actually stick around let alone be willing to give the guild 2.5kcrs a week. If you didn't have upkeep, you'd probably have a thousand different guilds of like 2-5 people fighting each other for recruits because there was no cost beyond the initial creation.
Regardless, yeah I think we'd be better off without upkeep at this point. There aren't enough people to make the system work nor are we in a position to know we might ever have enough.