The new Guild UI and Permissions...yikes (Part 1)

[Fumel-arathor (Fumel)]

Here is another post of me quoting someone. If the forums hadn’t gone weird when they switched over, I could go directly to the quoted post, but I can’t do that with any of the posts I quoted before the changeover. Just shows how long this thread has been going on.

Continuing my read-through, looking for other folks’ suggestions on guild improvements. This post from page42 offers suggestions about the guild bank tab (in addition to wanting the permissions reverted):

07/30/2018 09:24 PMPosted by Wretchedmist

Posting here again to express my disdain with the changes. I’ve already made a few posts. I’ve been the guild master of Obsidian Spur since TBC and have been an officer in the guild since Vanilla.

To summarize:

(1) Revert the guild system permissions back to the way it was, allowing guild masters to assign permissions individually.

(2) Add a complete log/record system for the guild bank so the guild master (and perhaps officers) can keep track of cumulative records on gold deposits, repairs, withdraws, item deposits, and item withdraws. You know, stuff that will actually help guild masters and their chosen leadership manage their guild. If you can keep a statistics tab with all kinds of totally useless information for my character dating back to the start of the stats system, you can add a simple feature that lets me keep track of a few total guild bank records.

(3) Guild masters will determine what it means to be an “officer” in their respective guilds, not some Blizzard employee(s). I don’t need clumsy, one-size-fits-all, top-down interventions imposed upon our community. Give us customization, let us manage at the local level, and then get the Hell out. Let us do our business.

It’s a simple UI change but it’s a giant thorn in my side since patch 8.0. Please address this sooner than later and start by simply reverting the permissions system.

I realize some of these posts might be sounding repetitive. I’m guessing it’s probably because most people want pretty much the same things for their guilds. The good part about that is it shouldn’t be hard to figure out which suggestions to follow.

[Dlaciabia-sisters-of-elune (Dlaciabia)]

Soon, Fumel will quote himself quoting himself, and the Quoteception will start to gather mass until it turns into a singularity. The forums will collapse into a black hole from which nothing can escape, not even light or good ideas. We’ll only be able to see it by the light being bent around the event horizon, a “shell” made of High Elf and Welfare Epics threads.

Some theorize that if you could pass through the singularity, you’d come out in another time, or forum. Try to get out if you start seeing the stars blur, Fumel. We wouldn’t want you stuck in a 1995 AOL chatroom.

[Brahmina-khadgar (Brahmina)]

The forums will collapse into a black hole from which nothing can escape, not even light or good ideas.

I think we’re already there.

I mean, a ton of great ideas have been presented in this thread alone, and nothing’s come of them. We can’t get any answers or action on our issue here, even though Ion said they were working on it. Blizzard has blown off or ignored scores of feedback on other topics and issues that should have been acted upon. The forums being a black hole is the best explanation for what’s been going on the last few years.

[Alfgerdhr-moon-guard]

a “shell” made of High Elf and Welfare Epics threads.

…which will auroclose again and again.
Like now!
(Bold is mine)

[Bloodraptor-echo-isles (Bloodraptor)]

That’s really stupid. Lumping in so many privileges into a single check box? who is the idiot who cooked that up? I’d fire that guy and revert that mess!

Make it so you can pick and choose permissions in a more detailed way again.

[Rainyheals-zuljin]

I have been trying for a while to come up with a witty comeback for this issue…but there sadly isn’t one. As a former guild leader, this is horrifying to me. I don’t understand how someone at Blizzard looked at a drawing board for idea’s and pointed at this and said “YES! This is the one we want!”

[Fumel-arathor (Fumel)]

I don’t understand how someone at Blizzard looked at a drawing board for idea’s and pointed at this and said “YES! This is the one we want!”

To be fair, the problem has to do with the integration of guilds and communities. No one set out to screw up the guilds, it just was collateral damage. Because it’s entwined with the communities feature, it’s a lot harder to unravel than it would have been if they’d simply made the change outright.

Even so, it shouldn’t take more than a year to fix–unless, of course, one isn’t really trying to fix it. Hence the reason everyone who’s still hanging onto this thread is feeling a tad miffed that Ion can claim with a perfectly straight face that they’re aware of the issue and are working to fix it. Then again, he is a lawyer.

We were asked for feedback. We’ve given it ten times over. We were asked to prioritize our desires. We’ve done that as well: the priority is to separate the permissions. Now we’re just being ignored, but I, for one, am not going to stop nagging until either the permissions are fixed or the thread is closed. The fact that the thread hasn’t been closed gives me hopes that they’re actually working on it and there will be a fix. Sometime.

Meanwhile, I keep posting, risking the space/time continuum to keep this thread alive.

[Rainyheals-zuljin]

Meanwhile, I keep posting, risking the space/time continuum to keep this thread alive.

You sound like more of a mage than a rogue, do I sense a split personality?

In all seriousness though I agree with you. But you have to admit there is some design flaw in that oversight.

[Anguisette-whisperwind]

And we used to be able to have like, 9-10 guild ranks. Which was useful in hybrid guilds, which probably don’t exist anymore anyway. Love how they’re killing the functionality bite by bite.

[Fumel-arathor (Fumel)]

This time I dug back and actually found the post I want to quote. It’s one of the most detailed and precise post offered in this thread, and seems to be exactly the type of feedback Ion asked for:

Okay, where to begin here.

I have read all 43 pages of this post. Yes, all 43 of them (at least that’s how many pages there were when I started writing this).

Like the many of the people that have posted in here I’m a Guild Leader. I’ve also been an Officer in one guild or another over the years.

I’m going to do my best to summarize this long thread as best as I can so anyone just coming to the thread can read maybe one page and not… well 43 (so far). I will also be adding my two cents here as well, if it even matters.

For starters, I must say I’m extremely disappointed in only seeing one blue post on this, and it was to inform those actively on this, that the thread has been extended. This is disheartening to say the least.

If there is nothing that can be done about this change then at least have the back bone to tell us. Or at least that you made a mistake.

To say that you can’t change it back because it got lumped in with the Communities, is a load of you know what. There is nothing stopping you from keeping the Guild Leaders privileges as they were and placing it in the Communities GUI to stream line it. That would have been a QoL, not this mess we have now. However, as with all corporations it’s up to the suites, and in that regard we are screwed… thanks.

For years Guild Leaders have been able to modify and give privileges to whatever rank in the guild.

Case in point:

Officer Chat and Officer Notes:
You could give anyone this privilege. RP guilds use if for RP or for Non-RP conversation. My guild uses it during raid to discuss strategies, problematic teammates, or just vent when things aren’t going well. In short conversations that should remain in the Officer Core.

Why is this an issue?
This does not allow a separation in chat for RP guilds. This is important as these players for the most part need to stay in character. However, there are times where they may need to drop character for a question, concern or whatever else may have you.

In Non-RP guilds, you may have a tiered Officer/Leadership Core. I’m one of these guilds. I have essentially two Officer ranks; Officer and Class Leads.

My Officers have roles/jobs in the guild. It’s not just a rank to make people feel special. My Officers oversee Raids, PvP (in guild arena tournaments) events, Manage the Guild Vault, and so on.

My Class Leads are more the “Public facing” officers; they help with recruitment, and assist members of the guild with rotations and so forth.

My Officers have access to the Officer Chat and my Class Leads do not. However, my class leads have access to the Officer Notes, this is to allow them to keep track of whether or not someone needs to be promoted or if someone needs help.

Now I’m not able to do that without giving them full privileges when they don’t need it.

Public Note:
In the new UI, only “Officers” have access to this. This one I do not understand at all. A player in an RP guild may put something about their character. In my case players would mark their Alts with their Main characters name, ilvl, spec, or professions.

Now because of this only I or my Officers can do this. I have a roster of 255 characters and growing. This makes this a nightmare for me because anyone in my guild can invite players. The only exception to this is Recruits “New Members” and Casuals (in sort lurkers). So if I or an Officer isn’t on, a player would just be able to update this note and inform us if they were a Main or Alt, and we could promote accordingly.

This makes managing my roster take twice as long as it did before.

Access to Guild Chat:
This is kind of a silly one, in the sense of “Why would your guild members not have access to your guild’s chat?”

Well in some cases, although rarer these days, is if someone gets hacked. Still happens, just not as often. Guild members would demote this person to a rank that would put this person on mute more or less without having to kick them from the guild. Some guilds also use ranks like this as a “time out” or just for giggles.

I don’t mind loosing this option but I can see why it was used.

These are the biggest ones for me honestly, and seem to be the biggest gripe among other Guild Leaders.

Other Options Removed:

Adding and Removing Guild Events
Edit Guild Info
Edit Guild Message of the Day

The latter of the two I don’t mind overseeing or having my Officers look over this. However, I can see where other Guild Leaders would want those strictly as a Guild Leader responsibility.

Other issues that have come up is that the new UI does not exactly show “Last Online” very well. There has also been rumor that this may be removed. Please, do NOT remove this.

Everyone here who is a Guild Leader or Officer, or has been in the past, knows that keeping an active roster is a healthy roster.

I just want to say that you can still access this for now by typing /groster or /guildroster. This will bring up the older roster format and you can sort players as you would have in the past. Thanks be to whomever for at least that much.

Final Thoughts:

Any “Serious” Guild Leader will tell you that running and maintaining a guild takes real work. It’s not something that you just slap together and boom you have a guild. Some people do that, but most do not. I spend hours out of my week doing just this. Specially right now when recruitment is at it’s best with returning players, guilds that have “retired” to put politely, and many other factors.

We spend real time thinking about what we want out of our guilds, and what we want our members to be able to get out of it. We, promote people and give them roles to assist us. We give opportunities to our members to grow and opportunities to excel with in these small communities.

We as Guild Leaders know that an active roster is a healthy one. I’ve stated this much already. What this means is that we are constantly making sure that there is stuff for our members to do, participate in and keep them active. This means we keep them subbed, or at least spending money. This means the pocket books of Blizzard. (I know we are not supposed to call the company out but in this case it can’t be helped.)

Why do we do this? Why do we essentially work for a company that we don’t get paid by? There are many reasons, one is because we love the game, (mostly). Another, is because we have built a community of people that many of us would consider friends.

Why would you make our “jobs” more difficult? Please explain this to me.

I can understand the idea of Communities. For years I’ve said that the community in WoW is nothing like it used to be, and guilds have done their best to fill this niche as much as possible. The Communities has a lot of promise depending on how the gaming community utilizes it. At the same time you are essentially making cross server guilds.

I am completely okay with this idea, and I’m surprised that this hasn’t started earlier.

However, if this is the actual case, your guild leaders still need the freedom to create the communities they wish as they see fit.

What happened to, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?

This change was made with no preamble, no way for the Guild Leaders to adjust appropriately. All this means is there is an addon developer out there that is going to figure out how to give us this control back. To that person, I say thank you, cause I already know nothing is going to be done with this by Blizzard themselves.

I can only hope to be proven wrong.

All I can add is my own personal plea: Fix the permissions, Blizz.

[Fumel-arathor (Fumel)]

I’m still doing my read-through. I’m only up to November. Most of the posts are describing why we need the permissions separated. I’m not sure if I need to quote those any more. I mean, Ion did say they understood the problem, and then he asked for more feedback, especially if it’s specific feedback. So here’s a bit of specific feedback about the guild permissions:

ALSO, this has most likely been brought up, but can we get the permission back to allow members to create guild events. That was a big part of permissions, attainable only by certain ranks, and now everybody and their goldfish can create a guildwide event, if they are in the guild. its a mess.

Honestly, I don’t know if we’ve been given this specific permission back or not. I probably should check before I post, but I’m feeling like Blizzard. I want this to go “live” now. I can always fix it “later”.

[Blupaw-kiljaeden (Blupaw)]

That’s awesome that this issue is still seeing support from the community.
But, at the same time, it’s terrible that the community hasn’t even been dignified with a response to this nerf of functionality.

[Alfgerdhr-moon-guard]

13 months and nothing.
I’d say we have our response.

[Venjin-bronzebeard (Venjin)]

I managed to detect and remove a go****mn lump from my body and recover from surgery faster than they have moved to fix this issue.

Holy eff.

[Brahmina-khadgar (Brahmina)]

I managed to detect and remove a go****mn lump from my body and recover from surgery

Is it okay for me to say I’m glad you did this faster than Blizz? I mean, it seems like a bigger priority to me. And I’m very happy that you’ve recovered.

But, Blizz? Venjin is better now, so you don’t have to hold off on fixing the permissions while he recovers, k?

[Alfgerdhr-moon-guard]

All of that, especially to ol’ Ven as well as this.
13 months ago…
We were looking forward to Season 8 of Got!

(Ok, next!)

[Fumel-arathor (Fumel)]

Here’s some nice, very specific feedback about improving the guild interface:

While we’re on the topic, I’d like to add some more constructive criticism about guild interfaces. This isn’t jumping on the bandwagon for anti-communities (though I’ll reiterate my previous posts shortly and say permissions need to be reinstated and these terrible bugs need fixing), but adding new suggestions to give devs more to think about:

The guild news system is very out-of-date and could use some touching up. It automatically tracks the following:

Tracks:
• Current content epics and legendaries
• Leveling (also automatically stickies these), PvP (some of these are automatically stickied) and reputation achievements
• Guild boss kills (automatically stickies end-boss kills)

Now I could be missing something else, but this means that there’s a lot of stuff missing from this list. For example, there’s no tracking of raid, pet battle or many other achievements. There’s no way to turn off the automatic stickying of someone’s alt hitting level 60, and there’s no way to automatically sticky some other things (such as looted legendaries).

Here’s what I’d love, if we had some options for added control:
• Options to auto-sticky types of information, or turn off others
• Ability to show/hide certain types of information (for example, disabling even tracking achievements for hitting level 80, or ability to turn on tracking mount-gain achievements)
• Guild permissions that allow you to choose which ranks can mess with the above controls
• And an extreme: filters that players can personally turn on/off if they want to show/hide certain things in the guild news.

Finally, I believe it was mentioned previously in the thread; it would be a wonderful idea if we could have a way of making the GMotD more in-your-face so that members actually see it (and perhaps an option to disable that if some find it too intrusive). The old, old guild roster actually used to have the GMotD on the same tab as the member list - I’ve never since had people see the GMotD as much as then.

Of course, as much as I’d love to see these ideas implemented, my priority is having the permissions fixed.

[Rainyheals-zuljin]

Glad your health is improving.

Hopefully this gets sorted eventually…one can hope

The Squid Of Hope Is With You

[Fumel-arathor (Fumel)]

Here is an interesting post from back in November. There is some very specific feedback about the difference between communication and dialog, as well as relevant commentary about the permissions.

Dear Blizzard,

“There is still good in you, I can feel it.” --Luke Skywalker

Unfortunately, the perception of Morhaime’s legacy and Brack’s rise to power is forever tarnished with things in such a state.
We’ve been saying all along that there is a lack of communication–there is not. There is a lack of meaningful dialogue.

Ion is communicating himself all over the place, telling us how excited he is for upcoming content–brushing aside most of our legitimate concerns as he tries to pat himself on the back. Like a true politician, he talks through all of the Q&A sessions and still says absolutely nothing.

I’m excited about some of the upcoming changes (mostly from the technical side–how the Hell does a wildly successful game like WoW still only run on one CPU core?), and I’m stoked to see where the story goes… but it’s not enough to remain successful if the broken state of things are not addressed–and if we continue to feel ignored.

Blizzard, my guild is still broken. I again, had to pass on an opportunity to grow my guild because you took away my ability to manage personnel and assets effectively. I had an acquaintance come back to play (gone since BC). I cannot recruit without restoration of granular permissions–there’s no incentive for anyone to join.

#PerceptionIsParamount in any public-facing business model–and Blizzard, I’m feeling pretty ignored, and I’m not alone.

Perception:

Blizzcon 2018 made one thing abundantly clear

Blizzard | Player-base… #OutOfTouch

Want proof of that, Blizzard? Just ask any devoted Diablo fan right now.

I’ve been holding out hope that we’ll get some major guild improvements in the next expansion, but it’s extremely off-putting to think we won’t get any changes until then. Blizz, please, for the sake of your game, fix the permissions.

[Takoda-kul-tiras (Takoda)]

An Incomplete List of Things I Have More of Than Permission Options:

1. S.P.A.R.E. Crates

2. Manapearls

3. Essences

4. Soundless kills

5. Deaths in Eternal Palace

6. Greater Cauldrons

7. Famine Evaluator And Snack Tables

8. 8.2 Mythic + Dungeons completed

9. 430+ gear

10. Azerite levels