The new Guild UI and Permissions...yikes

Not for anything meaningful (Was originally going to answer “Never” but “character limit”)

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I’m sorry to hear this. I hope the kids are doing okay. I had a pet cat die on my birthday when I was younger. It was not a good birthday. (RIP Shermie - the cat who ate her weight in cheese every year. I’ll eat a piece of cheese today in your honor.)

On a more cheery note, I too am heartened by how many are hanging out in this thread waiting for news. You guys are all awesome! I’m so glad that we can fight for our guilds together.

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/hug

and 10 characters.

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Wouldn’t it be nice, if they would listen,
Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long?
And wouldn’t it be nice to have our guilds back,
With the rank permissions where they belong?
We’ve given ideas to make it so much better,
To fix the issue until now and forever.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could wake up,
and our guilds all worked just how we want.
And after having done all of our dailies,
We go and do some raids with all our friends.

The happy times are just a memory,
and this thread just seems to be so never-ending…

Oh wouldn’t it be nice…

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Checking in again to make sure my voice is heard. Everyone contributing to this discussion needs to keep doing so. So far we’ve been ignored, or at the very least not engaged with in a constructive dialogue.

As of now, I haven’t assigned anyone in our guild with the “Is Officer” check box since there are certain permissions I will not assign, regardless of rank. As a result of this, nobody in the guild has access to any of those eight privileges since they’re all lumped together in a one-size-fits-all definition of “an officer,” as defined by some Activision Blizzard employee.

Please give us the individual permission customization we had prior to patch 8.0. That’s all I’m asking for. That’s the most simple, starting recommendation.

For further recommendations to help guild management, add a complete log/record system for the guild bank so the guild master can keep track of cumulative records on gold deposits, gold repairs, gold withdraws, item deposits, and item withdraws. If WoW developers can create and maintain a statistics tab with all kinds of totally useless information for my character, they can add a simple feature that lets me keep track of guild bank records. That would actually help guilds and their leaders manage things like donations rather than have to make Google sheets and such.

Please address this problem. This thread began on July 17, 2018. We’re now at April 22, 2019. That doesn’t reflect well on Activision Blizzard.

Many other recommendations to help guilds have already been provided in this thread. This information can be gleaned from some eager, hard-working interns and would make a good Summer project. Get to work now. You have what you need, and the “discussion” has already occurred. Read it, and pass the information along to the next group of people who need to make the correction. Failure to do so will just further the stereotypes of poor communication and the apparent growing disregard for the gaming community at Activision Blizzard.

I will continue to check in here until the change is made. Everyone else needs to do so, too.

Wretchedmist
GM of Obsidian Spur
2004 Horde launch guild

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…what’s wrong with the existing one?
what information isn’t the current log providing?

Most of it. Like, I’m not trying to be flippant. But it only has a few lines to record the history. I’ve never counted, but maybe 20 or so. If the event you’re looking for happened before those most recent withdrawls, you’re out of luck on the logs.

It’s currently possible to withdraw as much gold as you can from the guild, and then deposit small amounts back in to flood the log. Normal activity such as repair withdrawls in a larger guild can also push the gold theft far enough back in the logs that the GM can’t see it. Activity such as moving items from tab to tab can also push things back far enough to drop off the logs.

So yes, the logs need to go back farther. It can be hard to tell the difference between someone trying to be clever and hide something vs someone who’s just trying to be helpful. I end up relying more on my instincts than on the logs tbh.

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Exactly this.

Extended logs would be a great addition in my opinion as a long time Guild Leader.

Extend All the logs of who took what or how much gold is withdrawn from the GB.

Without extreme diligence in a very active guild, with a very active guild bank, it can be difficult at best to spot someone taking gold or items they should not be taking. Although it apparently isn’t as big a thing as it once was, it was not uncommon, and is still not unheard of, for people to remove higher end items and sell them on the auction house for personal profit. (Or give them to alts or friends etc…) As stated, in a very active guild with a very active bank, spotting someone with “sticky fingers” can be problematic with the currently limited logs.

Blizzard: We need more guild features like this not less.

And the guild permissions are still broken.

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is this function no longer available via armory?

Here’s a nice post (still in October) regarding player agency and how it relates to managing a guild:

Blizz, can you please just fix this permissions mess and stop with the “we need more feedback” nonsense? You know what needs to be done. If there are technical or resource issues making it take longer than expected, why don’t you just tell us so? It’s not a matter of National Security. Stop futzing around and do it already.

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You were trolling this thread (unsuccessfully) several months ago.

Bored with BfA again?

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the armory used to have comprehensive guild bank log, which could be accessed by guild leaders… how is it “trolling” to ask if it still exists?

it stands to reason that the ingame logs will always have limitations.

What sort of data holding capacity would be required on Blizzards end, to store every action of every guild bank for months?
(even mail gets deleted after 30 days)

Speaking for myself, this was a feature (if it exists, or ever existed) I was not aware of.

As someone mentioned in a recent post, the fact that Blizzard relies so heavily on outside sources for features that could, and likely often should be in-game features, is questionable policy at best.

Agreed. However, as they exist now, they are nearly useless to a very active or even moderately active guild as previously explained.

As far as I know, no one said months. All that was said was that the logs need to go further back.

However, the following came to my mind when extended logs were first mentioned:

All the way back in Wrath I had an addon. (I apologize, but the name escapes me. Although it makes me think of an answering machine…)

I actually didn’t use it very frequently, but what this addon did was save my chats.

All of my chats.

Every whisper, every message I received while afk, etc…etc…and it saved them for ???

I don’t know how long.

I can say, that I know I installed said addon sometime near the start of Wrath. Later, when the xpac was dying down a couple of years later, I was messing about with some of my addons including this chat addon. To my surprise, I discovered chat messages from months earlier, and even some from way back at the start of Wrath.

If an addon can do that much, surely Blizzard can give us some sort of guild-bank log that is more than a very limited 20-25 lines long. If your 20-25 “log-lines” gets filled up in an hour or two (that could very easily happen) how is a Guild Leader going to tell if someone is taking items they should not be taking?

Ex: Member X removes item B from the guild bank at 6am to mail to an alt that will then sell it on the auction house. The Guild Leader logs on at 9am and reviews the bank logs. The guild logs only show the last 1 1/2 hours because the guild log’s 25 line limit was filled by other members using the bank legitimately and thus the record of the “theft” is effectively erased.

If I mail an alt some items, said items are returned to me if the alt does not retrieve them from their mailbox after 30 days. They then sit in my own mailbox for another 30 days. If I do not retrieve them at the end of that 30 days, then they are deleted.

Maybe it all depends on how you look at it. /shrug

In any case, 30 - 60 days covered by guild logs, in my opinion would be much more than enough to better keep tract of items and gold in the guild bank. For me personally, I’d be fine with a weekly 5-7 day log of guild bank activity.

I am sure individual opinions will vary.

My apologies. However, you were perceived as a troll here previously.

For better or worse, your current intentions / motives may be scrutinized.

In any event, guild logs aren’t what this thread is about.

The majority of posters here seem to simply want the guild permissions restored to them.

I agree.

Improving guild logs, adding guild halls, and all the other added featured discussed here that we might like to see probably take a back seat by comparison

Please fix the guild permission Blizz

Thank you

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Monthly check in…

Guilds are still broke, and we still keep losing all guild features every time battle.net hiccups…

Still being ignored by Blizz… so, I guess everything is still the same…

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As far as I can tell (as a guild leader) there is nothing in armory for guilds that relates to the bank. The guild pages are still the old armory (as in the armory just prior to this latest version, not the oldest version). Most of the time it tries to send me back to WoW’s “new home” when I attempt to look something up.

Edit: Wait. You’re a guild master, too. You could have bloody well looked this up yourself, Mr. How-is-it-trolling-to-ask-a-question. :angry:

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the addon was storing the info on your computer, not on Blizzards servers.

this is a “shadow guild”… not an actual guild with guild functions.

Meh.

Moot point as far as I am concerned.

Regardless, Blizzard can and does store tons of mostly meaningless information / “stats” on our toons among other things. Check out your achievement tab in-game and check out all the generally useless cr*p associated with it. Like how many times your character has died, used the /hug emote, or maybe even how often you’ve eaten take out southern fried murloc.

But of course they could not possibly make the guild log just a tiny bit more user friendly and provide just a bit more detail and go beyond the meager 25 lines of info.

Right.

So, you’re not an actual Guild Leader with real concerns for your real guild mates? I wonder why you’re here?

Yeah that^

As I stated last time, this thread isn’t about guild bank logs anyway. It was merely a suggestion (and I still think a d**n good one) made by someone who has made several good suggestions relating to guilds and their functions.

I for one am done feeding trolls.

Well…not Venjin.

He writes cool songs, and I hear he likes cookies… :cookie::cookie:

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Um. All guilds have guild functions. At least, they have whatever functions Blizz decides to allow. True, if you want more than the basic bank page, you have to purchase tabs, but the first page comes with the guild.

And it’s fine if you have a guild just for the hasty hearth, or whatever. But even I, with a guild every bit as useless as yours, can see the need not to have almost every permission lumped under a single rank.

No legitimate argument can be made in favor of the current arrangement. If the permissions were separated out again, anyone who wants them all assigned to a single rank can easily do so. You have no standing to tell other guild masters how to run their guilds.

Blizzard doesn’t have to implement any of our other suggestions, but we were asked to provide them. It’s not up to you to say what suggestions players are allowed to make. It’s not up to you to say what data Blizzard can and cannot store on their servers.

You’re welcome to make your own suggestions if you like. You’re also welcome to say how well the current UI, permissions, roster, etc. work for you and your “shadow guild.” Just try to be as specific as possible and list your priorities, because that’s what Ion asked for.

To Blizz: My specific priority is separating the guild permissions again so they can be assigned as needed. My other desires include, in descending order of priority: improvements to the roster, guild recruitment, and guild perks (including guild halls and reputation bonuses). There have been many very specific posts in this thread about each of these if further information is needed.

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okay most text fields in a database hold from 0 to 1024 bytes. Nominal limit is 4000 bytes on SQL Server nvarchar and varchar fields and unlimited on Oracle systems. Big Data Solutions are nearly infinite in their capacity for storage. But assuming SQL Server 2016 as the current standard, and assuming each guild needs to keep track of up to 500 different text based parameters and up to 30 integer or double and single precision parameters and also assuming that there were a maximum of 2 characters per guild and also assuming that there are currently 3.2 million subscribers thats 1*(1.6M * 30 * 8) + 1*(1.6M * 498 * 256) + (1.6M * 2 * 4000) (this third round of math is for the large text fields which is exactly limited under anything less than a varchar(max) or nvarchar(max) which has special considerations as to how its indexed) to a row length of 8086 characters (size of an index page in sql server) per row per table.

The assumption of 2 members per guild isn’t correct of course but for napkin math its close enough to just divide the number of nominal players by two and calculate that way.

The assumption of the number of parameters tracked from a guild standpoint is probably a little over the top but as someone who does this for a living its about what you would expect to see on a public facing application in terms of data fields.

So doing all the math that ends up being 217GB +/- one standard deviation. I could fit all of that guild data on a single 250GB hard drive.

If I were a betting man I’d wager that the North American servers alone have that capacity and then some several thousand times over.

The transaction logs would need about a tenth of that space to store the transactions. Add several hundred GB’s for overhead and maintenance and it still all fits neatly within a TB of fast storage for a days worth of data

Since you rarely (relative to updates and deletes and reads) are inserting you are mostly updating deleting and reading you aren’t significantly adding to the amount of storage needed each day and you would likely not keep the log current for more than say thirty to 90 days and your transaction logs (where all uncommitted data is kept as well as a log of previous transactions from the last known point in time backup under full recovery or simple recovery models)

Knowing this and understanding the amount of disk storage necessary is somewhere between 10 and 100 Gigabytes of on demand fault tolerant storage for the tlogs of the 100TB of permanent storage which you would have DR backups done and checked every month anyway. So yeah keeping a few days of guild data is likely not even a hiccup to the storage devices on the servers

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i play the game.

i wasn’t aware there was a monopoly on who could post where.

you’re right it’s not.

it’s about people asking for things to be changed, and based on one of my posts up there, i’ve managed to point out that people are asking for changes to be made, when they’re not sure how the existing guild UI functions.

…if anything, those are the people you should be calling out as trolls.
not people like myself, who have made many valuable contributions to the thread over its span.

no, it’s an actual shadow guild, with no guild functionality.

the actual guild is now on another server, this is nothing more than Captain Placeholder.