Testing Guild Invites for Opposite Faction Characters

In Development Embers of Neltharion PTR Discussion
#1

The ability to invite opposing faction players to a guild is available for testing on the Embers of Nelthation (10.1) PTR.

Here are a few things we’d like to bring attention to for this test:

  • We hope to bring this feature to the game in the Embers of Neltharion update but depending on the extent of issues uncovered during public testing, we may need to delay it in order to provide the best possible experience. We’re enabling a “work in progress” version of the functionality at the outset of this PTR to give us the most possible time to identify and address issues.
  • This is a focused implementation, aimed at allowing players who have been enjoying Cross-Faction Instances the ability to join the same guild as their opposite-faction friends and benefit from conveniences like shared chat and guild repairs.
  • Guilds are still affiliated with either the Horde or the Alliance, depending on the faction of the guild leader. Guild achievements and guild vendors, for example, will still reflect the guild’s primary faction. Opposite faction members may benefit from unlocked shared perks but may be unable to contribute to certain achievements (e.g. we would not expect Alliance members of a Horde guild to be able to contribute progress towards the “Alliance Slayer” guild achievement).
  • There is a current known bug where you are unable to send mail to opposing faction guildmates. This will be fixed in a future update.
  • Please use this forum thread to share your feedback/issues experienced on joining opposite-faction guilds, chat, etc.

This is our first step of potentially several in publicly testing this long-awaited feature, so keep an eye out for updates and we look forward to reading your experiences in this thread throughout the PTR cycle.

7 Likes
Dragonflight Embers of Neltharion PTR Development Notes
#3

I have not seen any information on whether this will Include, or Exclude the ability for cross realm guilds. Can you give a solid “Yes/No” on that question?

6 Likes
#4

Seeing as we can kill same faction players in rated content, merc mode, and free-for-all wpvp areas, it may as well count towards the guild achieve.

#5

Where does this leave cross faction language barriers?

4 Likes
#6

Perhaps we tested too early, but a group of us attempted the feature on Lycanthoth. We starting with a Horde guild. Attempts to invite directly or apply to the guild from Alliance didn’t work. Direct invites using the command line gave could not invite from opposing faction. Attempting to apply from the Alliance character to the Horde guild gave a could not submit error.

2 Likes
#7

Additionally, there were no settings that I could find that would change this.

1 Like
#8

It has always seems odd to me that Jaina can talk to Thrall/Baine but i can’t speak the same language as opposing factions

8 Likes
#9

Please increase the size of guild vaults too. I main ally and the guild bank is always full. I have a horde guild and that guild bank is always full. I plan to bring our horde friends into the ally guild but I don’t want to just sell off everything they have deposited. It would be nice to move the items from the horde bank over to the ally bank.

4 Likes
#10

Could we please also get an increase to the number of people allowed in a guild-almost double it? Having both factions in a guild that is already full and now wanting to invite horde friends is a bit tricky.

7 Likes
#12

If we’re allowing both factions in one guild, the amount of members a guild can have (1000) should atleast be doubled if not more.

Same thing for In-Game Communities. Popular ones or big guilds quickly go up to 1000 members, and in the case of communities, people try to fix that by just making “(community name) Group 2”. That really shouldn’t be a thing.

I think bumping Guilds to 3000 and communities to 5000 would be good.

5 Likes
#13

This would be much easier to test if you also allowed Guild Masters to auto copy their guild over to the PTR, it isn’t implemented or happening with my character. Basically to test this for you I have to step through a hoop to recreate my guild on the PTR when my main already has a guild.

4 Likes
#14

if this goes through consider allowing grouped Horde/Allie’s to queue random bgs + skirms cross faction. When merc mode is enabled this still isn’t available.

4 Likes
#15

Please please please please, let us do queued content with opposing faction. Specifically random bgs. Rated Bgs are harder to find and harder to get in to. Its far harder to get you and a friend into a rated bg where a random bg is just easier in all regards. PLEASE! its like only allowing mythic raiding cross faction. you can only play together if you are going try hard, but cant do the more relaxed content

9 Likes
#16

Cross-faction guilds do not work in 10.1.0 PTR. I created an Alliance guild Haven-Benedictus, but a horde friend, Drakxy-Benedictus, both friends in cross-faction “Haven Testers” community, cannot join the guild. I used the /ginvite command as the GM of my guild to invite my horde friend, but it did not work.
Error msg:“You can’t invite players from the opposing faction”

2 Likes
#17

If you’re going to be moving forward with the work involved to update guilds to make them cross faction, especially if you’re removing the original /groster, can you PLEASE fix all the bugs related to the guild roster currently:

  • Being unable to sort in more than one column (/groster you can sort both by rank AND by name, the “new” roster will only sort using one column.
  • The new roster does not sort correctly anyway.
  • Some characters show up incorrectly in the roster - in live we have the issue of some members showing with no information at all other than their name; we have random characters who can’t possibly exist in our roster (for example I transferred realm with one character and renamed it … that renamed character is in the guild, however, sometimes it also shows my original character, with the original name, still on the original realm, and online).
  • Whenever a roster change happens (someone logs on or off, etc), any “sort” rearranges itself - so it is a major struggle to find anyone mid-roster. This also affects guild calendar events.
  • When a roster change is made, for example someone joins, or a public note is changed, it often takes an extended period of time before it shows on the roster.

Speaking of the calendar - that also needs a re-write as currently it is buggy (see above) and is not fit for purpose. We cannot assign roles to people, add notes when signing up, and the mass invite invites even those who haven’t actually been accepted to the event.

Finally … obviously there needs to be some work on the guild finder interface - both to enable the ability for guilds to select whether or not they’re accepting cross faction and to have a search for cross faction. Whilst that is happening, please fix that:

  • The guild interface for guild applications via guild finder has no option to “take back” an invite. We’ve had people sent an invite, who have then deleted the character, moved realm, or we simply no longer want to invite them … and they still show in the list and, in the latter case, still retain the invite so they could join months or even years later.

  • It does not sort properly.

All of the above will require some sort of tweaking in order to enable cross-faction guilds - so while you’re doing that, can you please actually make sure they work properly, rather than just shoehorn another “feature” into something that is already failing?

5 Likes
#18

The number of members a guild can have (1000) should at least be doubled. In all the time you’ve increased the number of alts you’ve never increased the size of guilds. Now you’re adding the ability to recruit the opposite faction? Please tell me you’ve already realized the number allowed has to go up.

2 Likes
#19

I finally got a horde char invited into my alliance Haven-Benedictus guild (in 10.1.0 PTR)! I had to use a second wow account and make the horde char a BattleNet friend of someone in the guild who could do a guild invite (my alliance GM char). I did a /ginvite command from my alliance Katorah-Benedictus GM char to my BNet friend, horde Drakxy-Benedictus, which worked! If I tried to to add the horde char as just a Friend by name, Drakxy-Benedictus, then I got an error message “Player not found”. So I could only add a horde char as a friend by using their BNet tag. Only BNet Cross-Faction friends can be invited to a guild at present. This is very limited and needs to be expanded to ordinary Cross-Faction Friends, Cross-Faction Community friends and eventually any Cross-Faction char.

3 Likes
#20

An enhancement is needed to be able to mark a guild as Cross-Faction (like a Cross-Faction Community does now in Retail).
The Guild Finder then needs to be able to search for Cross-Faction Guilds and allow any Cross-Faction player to apply through the Guild Application/Recruitment process to join a searchable Cross-Faction guild (like Cross-Faction Community applications and Guild applications do now).

2 Likes
#21

Due to the restrictions imposed by some achievements, etc, certainly there should be the option by both guilds themselves and by those looking for guilds to be able to select whether or not they’re going cross-faction. Guilds should be able to select to remain single-faction and be marked as such on the guild finder.

There should also be an additional column in the guild-side of the guild finder applications interface to show faction. As currently this interface needs an update anyway (some of the columns refuse to sort and the column showing status of joined/approved, etc simply doesn’t have it’s own column to sort with at all - it’s just all mushed in with the Note column), this shouldn’t be a problem.

There should also be a toggle on the calendar so that, if you want, you can select only to invite characters on your faction, to ensure you don’t accidentally invite someone from the opposing faction. As the calendar needs a rework anyway, this could be built in at the time. It should also show faction against those signed up.

The guild roster (which also needs a rework due to the multiple bugs), will also need an extra column to show faction.

And I’m going to just assume here that the current process of only being able to invite bnet friends is just because it’s in testing.

#22

This is great but. Please open communication already. There’s no way that it would be as difficult as the guild implementation. It’s such an easy W that would take you so little work.

The way this is implemented, it only helps those who are already in established cross faction situations.

Your official answer to how an alliance player finds a horde guild is “well just look outside the game”. That’s awful. Not as awful as sticking with Alliance since 2004, but I wasn’t going to pay to solve a problem that Blizzard artificially creates, a problem that most of the playerbase thinks shouldn’t exist.

We already get matched with same faction in PVP, and you don’t force us to automatically block each other after the match to prevent bad manners. So why do we think that is necessary for Ally vs Horde, exactly?

I know how to /ignore someone being a dingus. I don’t need Blizzard making those decisions for me, stop acting like you’re our parents, it’s really frickin weird. I’ve played this game for almost 20 years now, and not once have I ever appreciated this “net nanny” attitude. Give me the tools to moderate my own chat experience, don’t moderate it for me. Thanks.

PS: I actually love having language options in game. But in every in game cutscene and cinematic ever, Everyone understands the “common” language. Orcish, Elvish, Dwarvish are always represented as separate languages by saying something like “Oh there’s no common phrase for this, the orcish term is mak’gora!”. So don’t remove those. Just give everyone common by default. If there’s some angry orc who doesn’t want to talk to alliance players, let them set their language to orcish and RP away to their heart’s content.

5 Likes