I’ve just come across this:
and wanted to comment on it. Although it’s great that (finally!!) someone on the community council has raised the issue of guilds, and brought some issues and suggestions to the fore, there’s a lot more that could have been mentioned on that thread, plus there is at least one image/reference that is out of date (that referring to the guild finder … the image there is for the old one and also the comments relating to this are also based on the old guild finder).
I also discovered this thread that has been ongoing for well over 5 years:
One of the main problems I’ve experienced, having run the same guild for well over a decade, and having spoken to other guild leaders both new and old, is that a lot of problems stem from Blizzard shoe-horning the guild interface into the new (at the time) communities interface.
From rewatching “that” interview (linked in that second thread, above), I can see how it happened … as happens with a lot of things at Blizzard these days - they wanted to give more options by providing Communities, have them integrate more closely with the Battlenet stuff, then integrate the guild interface with that. However, it’s almost like they ran out of time/energy/ideas - just shoved the guild stuff in there and thought “yup, that’ll do for now” … and then never went back.
Then whenever they’ve made updates after that, they’ve often had unexpected consequences for guilds but again, because most guild leaders are a hardy bunch, we’ve complained sure, but we’ve also sucked it up, found workaround, addons, etc. The only recent backlash that Blizzard responded to was when they removed the /guildroster which completely broke one of our workarounds to something they broke even further back in time.
The thing is … we shouldn’t HAVE to “suck it up” … WoW is supposed to be a game that promotes community values and playing together as a group, yet for too many years they’ve chipped away at what guilds are and have. Not even just leaving us to it, but making it harder and harder to fulfil that role.
I’d love to be able to have more control back of my guild and it’s permissions - to be able to pick which ranks could add events to the calendar, which ranks, if any, could edit public notes and all of the various other options.
It is nice to have addons that help me manage my guild, such as GRM, but some of the things that addon allows me to do should be BASIC guild management stuff that should already be available by default.
It is nice to have an addon such as LOIHCal that allows me to organise my raid groups so I can see at a glance how many healers, tanks, melee and ranged we have (rather than just a list of characters) and be able to invite all those accepted to a group (rather than just invite everyone who indicated they might like to turn up). But this stuff should be DEFAULT calendar interface. How many raid leaders just count the number of characters signed and say “yup, that’ll do”? None … that’s how many. They need to know who are the tanks, etc.
I do like the guild finder option … but the interface doesn’t work properly. I can type an advert … but the person on the other end can’t see it all. People can apply to my guild via the guild finder … but if I accept them and they never accept … that application remains “stuck” on the guild finder pretty much forever. There is no invite-decay - so in theory someone I accepted years ago could just one day accept and turn up. We are not the type of guild that accepts members randomly or without restrictions in place - essentially this scenario means random strangers can just turn up when they want.
The columns on the guild interface don’t even work properly - some can’t be sorted.
Speaking of which, we transferred our guild from a dead realm (which is a whole different topic) a couple of years ago. One of the “features” for a guild transfer was the option for guild members from the old guild to be able to “follow” the guild to the new realm - if they transferred their character to the new realm they automatically rejoined the guild on the new realm.
Unfortunately this doesn’t work as it should. As long as our guild was the last guild they were in, however long ago, characters can rejoin our guild with no restrictions or time limit. They may have been kicked from our guild years before our transfer, yet if they had not joined another in that time, they could simply pop back up in the new guild on the new realm, no questions asked. And because the guild log is bugged and basically does what it wants, most of the time unless you had the GRM addon, you wouldn’t even notice it had happened.
Speaking of kicking guild members - there should be the ability to toggle the option to make any guild kicks account-wide. If you’re removing a member for bad behaviour, they’re not going to improve that behaviour just because they’re on a different character - you want ALL of their characters gone, and their access to the guild gone on their whole account, not just the one or two characters you might know about. Following on from this, there should also be the opinion to block that account from rejoining.
Another thing that has been asked for, for many years, linked to this, is being able to /ignore an account. Again … that random pally in a pug that is being obnoxious … you don’t want to just ignore that character - you want to not play with that PERSON again.
The guild roster itself doesn’t work as it should. For example it won’t stay still! I can no longer use the guild roster to deal with promotions, because I can not set it to be sorted, and REMAIN sorted - as soon as something changes, it randomly re-sorts.
The guild vault log isn’t long enough. Back in the day I could do a proper search/sort on the Armories for the guild vault. I understand them removing that - I’m guessing it was too hard to keep going and probably used a lot of resources (plus, half the time the Armories are broken) … but at least give the log in-game more options and a longer length to look through.
The /who command is broken. It was mentioned a little on that community council post - but unless you’re very lucky, you cannot /who the guild and get any sort of reasonable response. The results are broken - showing half or less of the results it should. Most of the time if you try to /who a specific character, you’re going to get no result.
Most of these, and more, are problems that Blizzard themselves broke. They worked, and then they didn’t. Either intentionally or unintentionally. And once they were broken, Blizzard just left us to it.
Unfortunately myself and some of the other guild leaders I’ve spoken to, have gotten to the stage now where we fear Blizzard “fixing” anything to do with guilds - because we’re worried they’ll make things even worse.
And if we can’t trust them to fix things they’ve broken, how can we trust that they’ll be able to improve things?
There’s loads of improvements we’d love. From Guild Halls (sooo many ideas for these!) to just improving the calendar, to bringing back proper guild achievements and benefits, to raising the guild cap.
And it is so frustrating. Because we’re feeling like less than an afterthought, even though a lot of us feel like we’re helping maintain Blizzard’s own player-base. I know plenty of people who would have quit WoW a long time ago if they weren’t in a guild.
So come on Blizzard … show guilds and guild leaders a little bit of love, after leaving us out in the cold for so long. We must be about due by now, surely?
) as a reply, but then decided it would be better as a seperate thread. I did however link that thread in my first post which, I guess, is what prompted the OP of the Community Council thread to add the links to both.