Ethan the epic

Because there's very little things to assassinate, if i world leader wants someone dead they make an assassin char, kill the person, and then pk it. And for those that actually wish to make interesting rp and hire an actual assassin,  there's not that many. And also because of Defender Default, and PvP default, they could easily choose pvp since who wants to deal with some "Edge Lord" 

An assassin can be rped right if you develop your char to that point in a non edgy fashion. Unfortunately that's not what many people on lotc think. Also a guild actually does make assassins more likely to keep on assassinating. As since its organized and such in a system where you can receive more contracts. And if its a Robin Hood type guild such as The Deadly Sins who kill the corrupt, you'll be getting LOADS of people to kill. And i know, because TavernLich rped an assassin before and told me all about it. 

So I hope that answers your question :D
 

They always advertise themselves... So they get eliminated lol

I agree with Matt, I play a criminal char that's an all around bandit/hired thug, so every now and then my char does get paid to kill, kidnap and/or torture people, but I always do it with a group of people that I know are decent rpers and pvpers at the same time in case things go wrong, the point I'm trying to get to is that assassin guilds exclude their rp to a single type of crime, making it a bit harder to find rp, whereas other criminal guilds do all around criminal rp, meaning that even when they're not being paid by an outside party to kidnap a noble as a warning, they can do other things like torching shops that refuse paying 'protection' minas, or rob and ransom people. And the Dark Brotherhood was a thing on lotc for a while, it was pretty succesful and it remained a secret both ooc and rply to me for quite a while. One other thing assassin guild's have got against them is that back in Aegis to early Anthos you needed a VA (Villain Application) to be able to kill people unprovoked, so most people couldn't actually go out and kill someone they disliked, and would most likely hire an assassin becuase they weren't actually allowed to kill said person, even if they had wronged them which was one of the things I liked about VAs, made it so that not everyone and their mother was some heartless murderer.