Details about guild master transfer?

I've seen this before in these forums, and my guild has been dead for a long time now, so I thought I'd ticket a GM to see if they could transfer guild master to this character. This was the response I got:

"Thank you for taking the time to report this situation. We have investigated this and evaluated the status of yourself and the members of your guild. Unfortunately at given the circumstances [sic] we are not able to promote your character to the leader of the guild at this time."

Details about the guild:
- GM has been offline for 6 months and likely doesn't play anymore
- The only officer was online 1 month ago (guild rank 1)
- This character and my paladin (Aegea) are two of the four characters that have been online in the last month; the other two are alt status (guild rank 9)
- This character is not an officer, but is the highest ranked character to have come online in the last month (guild rank 3)
- The current rank order is the 6-month-offline GM > 1-month-offline officer (rank 1) > this character (rank 3) > 14 more characters (rank 7 and lower)

I'm just looking for some clarification as to why my request was denied. Is there a minimum rank I have to be in order to be promoted to GM, no matter how long everyone else has been offline? If that's the case, then it'll never happen, because they're not around to promote me. Or is there a minimum amount of time that the highest-ranking members have to be offline (greater than 1 month) for me to be considered?