This seems to boil down to "purpose equals active PvP". Granted, I know very little of the other guilds but within the game world they seem to have their place. The biggest "problem" is that some guilds are more lifestyle oriented than 'I kill your character with my character' oriented. Still, that is very good IMO.The real problem about asrals is that they have absolutely no purpose in the world. Like with other guilds like the druids, shao-lin (and maybe rangers), they seem to have no active goal they can pursue, or at least none that matters in any way. So I think it's much more interesting to ask why we have guilds without purpose. It seems to me like first comes lore, from which comes reasons and then comes guilds not the other way around. I think for example the shao-lin has some new "post-construction" kind of goal set, but since it does not really stem from any lore or history it's mostly useless and doesn't really affect anything that much. The asrals only incentive to live is to defend against more insects (at least what I can see), but that is very passive and re-active type of play. They do not seem to have any agenda that they can push on others or any kind of every-day goal that they can achive. Same thing with druids, which seem to be almost completely de-coupled from the world and have no purpose, except maybe one, which in that case I think is kind of counter-productive to the game world. I'll leave the rangers out since I'm not that updated, but it seems to me like they are perhaps not the most active goal-seeking either. Although I might be wrong because it seems they have started to set some restrictions, but I'm still not sure about the goals. Anyway, these guilds are kind of "max freedom for the individual" which make them very, very boring, but it seems to attract players who want the best of both worlds, if it isn't for the cool skills or weapons/armours/miracles.
Which pretty much leaves the crusaders, taniels, thieves, order and sathos. The thieves are kind of special, the order is kind of dead.. which leaves like 3 guilds with an active purpose. It's kind of narrow, but it is at least possible to pursue.
I think the real solution is to seriously cut back on some guilds that don't work and have no purpose, especially with a playerbase that only supports at max 2-3 occupational guilds. Furthermore, merge the crusaders and taniel guilds, it's not such a big difference anyway. In a simple world, you could have only one guild as "establishment", the middle folk in between and those who chose to be evil/outlaws.
New guilds should be added on the basis of lore and history with reason, purpose and economic background not like new armour sets.
Anyway, the problem is not about the asral guild in particular, it just happen to be one out of more dead ends.
It would be nice to know now that some guilds apparently have nor serve any purpose, what of the guilds that do have lofty goals to dream of?
I can only speak of the Shao-Lin as my only char resides there. What does one expect a small number of monks to do, actually? During the Geas ages they have been more active or less so when dealing with the world depending on attendance and current leadership. Little by little there are ideas put out there within the game and OOC also. But in the end, as I see the shao-lin they are about a group of people trying to live their own way of life outside the "more regular folks". As far as other "goals" go, they go a long way alongside with the Taniel and Crusader agenda(yes, talking about fighting and stuff) but that is the stuff for IC debates given the ride is not that smooth at all.