Feedback: Cross-Faction Guilds

Greetings!

With the release of Embers of Neltharion, we have implemented Cross-Faction Guilds.

With this new feature, we’d love to hear what your experience has been like so far. We’ll use this thread for that purpose, and we greatly appreciate any feedback!

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Take note, I do understand that this Cross-faction project needs multiple steps to make it the perfect iteration, as Blizzard developers have shared with us, it is about finding where to make the cut. I am still at my current time, sticking with, “A glorified Community”. Of course, it has its PROS and CONS, as well - we are all different. Warriors, Adventurers, Explorers, and more. I have decided to update this post to make it a little easier.

PROS: Currently, the pros are that we can indeed travel around, and fight under the same name, and color. We are able to communicate in guild chat, and officer chats. There is access to the same tools for all with Guild Vendors, which is a big benefit for many, as well as shared access to guild repairs, the Guild Bank, and the calendar. Currently, this serves the best for organized content guilds as you can easier have your roster there.

HIGH PRIORITY CONS:

  • Too convoluted to invite people making this project unfriendly as social guilds, or towards people wanting not to give out their details to anyone. An issue I experience commonly now, but I circumvent by having an officer on the opposing side to do the invite.

  • Language should be 1/1 in /s /e /y if you are in the same guild, it is currently not. Communication is key, but it is still not a function in the world.

  • Unable to commit to cooperative world gameplay due to restrictions. We should be at least able to assist each other in World Content as a guild, other than just doing damage and watching some of our members drop due to not being able to heal or protect them. And when they fall, you may not even bring them up again.

  • You may not do queued content with guild members if they are not the same faction. We have seen this function with the Mercenary queue system for PvP where a player opts to represent the other faction, and this being able to join their PvP queue - should be doable for PvE too, no?

MID PRIORITY CONS:

  • You may not trade with a guild member in the open world, if they are the opposite faction.

  • Guild Recruitment tool is now completely seperated according to who is looking, no cross-faction.

  • You may not become a passenger of another member’s mount if they aren’t same faction.

  • Unable to view opposite faction guild member’s quest progression.

  • Unable to share content relevant consumeables (Cauldrons, feasts, etc).

  • Unable to promote a member of the opposite faction to become Guild Leader.

LOW PRIORITY CONS:

  • You cannot invite your alts from the other faction due to lack of recruitment tool. You are currently not able to recruit yourself even with two accounts as, I am guessing here, it might be due to the fact that we cannot have ourselves on Real ID?

  • Unable to see other’s Garrisons - this is in connection with events for Roleplay.

  • You cannot add a note or officer’s note on members from the opposing faction.

  • You cannot see the opposing faction’s note on a member.

  • You cannot see the opposing faction’s officer note on a member.

((I have updated this post, some points have been merged, and put into a priority list of my opinion. 11th of June, 2023))

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Perhaps a little early to tell, but so far they’ve already been more useful for our roleplaying communities than, well, ingame Communities. The ease of access to the bank where before there was a Horde bank and Alliance bank made it easier to supply things like Elixir of Tongues, and there’s simply a different (in a good way!) feeling when everyone rocks the same guild tag when they’re out and about.

The restrictions are maybe a little more contrived than they should be; it makes perfect sense that the whole thing be opt-in, as the game’s foundation remains the two factions, and any steps against that are careful. I don’t know if sharing battle net tags is the most appropriate way of “consenting” to opt into this, as many people (myself included, really) aren’t always very eager to share their tags with guildies, for a variety of reasons. It can become exploitable to some extent, and while it can be bypassed with officers of different factions, it still feels as though it shouldn’t be necessary.

The one other improvement I would suggest is regarding guild banks. Like I mentioned, many cross faction guilds previously existed as two guilds, which means there was twice as much bank space. Since they’re now together, maybe this should be looked at to accommodate the new arrivals.

I’m interested to see where the availability of cross faction content goes next, together with the factions. Maybe time to promote some of the historically neutral factions such as the Argent Crusade as liaisons, providing a guild vendor for both factions and some information on how cross faction guilds work? :eyes:

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I wish I could experience it, However I am unable to invite my own characters to my own guild for some reason. I get the error “You can’t invite Players from the opposing faction”. Why not? They are my own characters, on my own separate accounts, while the second highest rank in the guild. Why is this restriction in place or is this a bug?

Seems really odd that a person cannot invite their very own characters to a guild. What kind of restriction is that? “Oop, you better have some friends to invite your own characters to your own guild.”

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Alrighty, another thing for the list.

I cheesed it with Alliance alt jumping on the guild recruitment tool, but yeah, I just tested it, you cannot add yourself because… I guess… You don’t have your own Real ID?

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I have seen the Dungeon Diplomat guild achievement pop up in the guild I’m in several times since 10.1 dropped. Today I saw it 3 times while online, and also saw the United Nations guild achievement pop up with one of the Dungeon Diplomats. :slight_smile:

Runningly updating my post.

Just a little more to the list…

Aaaand an update to the main post for better overview…

Adding to this another request to modify the in-game communities to either extend the 1000 character limit or maybe make them account specific.

I agree with many of the points in this thread. The process needs to be streamlined, there’s alot of work to be done yet before this can run how it should.

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Agreeing fully on this one! From 1000 to 1500, or even 2000. Though, a minor thing.

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I wanted to give it a week before giving some feedback here to see what, if any, issues I ran into. So far, the cross-faction guild experience has been totally fine for me. Having to add someone with invite privileges on bnet makes the initial step a little awkward, but everything else felt pretty fluid. The only other issues I’ve had are more cross-faction play than cross-faction guilds, with regards to not being able to trade with guildies outside of instances or instance-queue with them, but I’m sure that’s just a technical hurdle that may change over time.

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yeah this is super annoying, I hope this gets changed soon

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I would love to be able to see cross-faction trade chat (being from a horde-dominated realm), but I understand limitations. Also, being able to trade is probably the biggest most awkward thing to deal with. Besides these two, I really do think cross faction guilds solved a ton of social problems and it’s been going well for us. Every guild seriously looking to recruit had their opportunities majorly expanded with x-faction guilds, and for the health of the game it felt great.

I think I disagree with the mindset where we still feel like we’re horde vs alliance and trying to maintain that core identity of the game, but what we have is workable as a community.

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CFG and Mythic Raiding

This is more likely a mythic raiding specific issue with Cross-Faction Guilds. It would be great if members of the same guild could use cauldrons regardless of the faction outside a raid. Currently in order to make the best use of a cauldron you will need to have people go in and out of the raid instance to pick up flask/pots. This is a huge unnecessary timesink for raiding hours.

Cross-Faction Trade Chat

As brought up earlier here I strongly support this. Esp. if you try to make trades on a horde or alliance heavy server as the opposing faction. You will have a hard-time to find any customers on those toons.

Cheers,

Yumuros

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I agree with the Cauldron but the Trade-Chat eh, not really a priority.

Additional issue: Cross-Faction Guild system does NOT permit you to promote a member of the other faction to Guild Leader, instead the error message is, “Only Battle.net friends can be invited from the opposing faction”

Edit: Checked to be sure if it was limited to account but no, you cannot with anyone.

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I’d wager trade chat should be a priority as you can sent work orders to the opposing faction

But that isn’t really the overall for Cross-Faction Guilds. It is a good thing but there’s other things I would say ranking higher.

Hey there.
I see only a few problems with how this was implemented, mainly the following:

  1. Characters of the opposite faction cannot trade outside dungeons, even if they are in a guild together or in a group together. The limitation to move in a dungeon to trade serves nothing. Only wastes our time.
  2. Cannot invite people to a guild unless you are friends in battlenet. I do not want to be friends in battlenet with every alliance in my guild. I just want to invite their alts. Makes no sense.
  3. In my opinions this devalues the factions and their previous state.

Again my opinion, the last is the worse of the three.
Feelings, atmosphere, storyline are things that make games great. Do not destroy them.
Mixing things like that is good to a point for people to play with friends of the opposite faction, but up to what extend you want to keep mixing things like that? Maybe at the end remove the factions completely?

Thanks for reading.

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