Priority #1: Deal with “IsOfficer”
My main problem with the “IsOfficer” box is that it doesn’t allow for multiple ranks of officers. To fully resolve this, the permissions MUST be completely unbundled.
That said, if Blizzard is looking for a stop-gap, I propose the following: separate out the “admin” level permissions from the “officer” level permissions. Though this isn’t a complete fix, it will buy time, allowing guilds to function a bit better until Blizzard is able to fully work out the technical kinks of complete unbundling.
IsOfficer:
- Access officer channels
- View and edit officer notes
- Edit public notes
IsAdmin:
- Edit guild info
- Edit MOTD
Other:
- Remove people from voice chat
- Delete other people’s guild events
- Delete other people’s chat messages
The “Other” category are those that I moved from Officer to Admin and back several times and then decided, yeah, I’m not really the person to decide this. Those three are things that my guild doesn’t really have much reason to use. We use Discord, so there’s no need to kick people from in-game voice chat. We have moved away from using the in-game calendar, so there’s no need to delete events. And deleting other people’s chat messages is something that all my officers would just leave to me anyway. So if any of you guys have ideas about where those three should go, I’m all ears. Or any other suggestions for how to improve this stop-gap suggestion.
Ofc, it’s very possible that Blizzard may find that it will simply be easier to unbundle like we all want rather than create yet another checkbox that will be hated. But my goal with this suggestion is to allow guilds to go from a “one-size-fits-none” structure to an optional 2-3 pre-set leadership ranks. It’s not ideal, and it’s not a permanent fix. But it would be a small step in the right direction.
For me at least, this would give me enough to work with that I can start recruitment again. (Because yes, I have suspended recruitment completely for the last 9 months. We’ve been surviving on a revolving door of people returning from a break and people bringing their friends and family into our raids. A guild that doesn’t have 12 years worth of social connections probably wouldn’t still have enough people for a raid group.)
Priority #2: Recruitment
Speaking of recruitment, the in-game tools are hot garbage. There are no short cuts that will really work for fixing guild recruitment. The in-game tool needs a complete ground-up redesign. That said, I do understand that level of design is probably needing resources that are only available when creating a new expansion.
Even though the in-game guild finder is horrible, it is still the way that most of our new recruits find us. Historically, we’ve had some people join through friends or family. We’ve had very little success recruiting via channels like general or trade (before it was cross-server), and marginal success recruiting by whispering unguilded people.
Based on my experiences, I believe fixing the guild finder will be a HUGE benefit to the game as a whole, and will very likely go a long way to addressing the general animosity towards guilds that exists in the pug world. If people have the ability to find a good guild, then they are much more likely to participate in (and enjoy) the social side of an MMORPG. If they just find dead guild after dead guild after toxic guild, well then frankly, I don’t blame them a bit for being burned out.
To that end, I propose the following. (Also, as I previously stated, I have not tried to recruit for 9 months, so if some of this has already been changed, please let me know. I like guild updates!)
Stop-gaps:
Please make guild listings expire after 30 days. I cannot stress this enough. If I still need people, I can relist easily enough. (It would be super helpful if the postmaster could remind me that the listing has timed out too.) This will help people who are searching for a guild to find guilds that were recently active, and also make it so they don’t have to sift through nearly as many guilds. No one wants to join a guild that is still searching for a main tank for Dragon Soul.
Provide better scheduling info. The “Availability” section is largely useless. Please delete the check boxes and instead tie it to “Guild Interests.” For each box I check in that section, open up a blank field where I can type in our schedule. For example, if I have the boxes checked for “Raiding” and “Dungeons,” let me type in our raiding schedule, and our m+ schedule. When a prospective new member is viewing the listing, they could see something like: “Dungeons – M+ cache runs Wednesday evenings and as needed” “Raids – Friday and Saturday 7PM-9PM server.” This way, people can know up front if our schedule is going to work with their work/school schedule.
This would free up the comment box at the bottom for me to put in basic info like what to expect from the guild’s culture, our rules and expectations etc. It’s super important that people know these things up front so they can determine if the guild is a good fit for how they want to play the game. As it currently sits, they have to talk to me to find out if they are even interested because there isn’t enough room in the guild finder to determine on a very basic level if it will even work.
Indicator if the person who sent a request to join is online or offline. So, ideally, the end goal is to be able to send an invite to people who are offline (via the mail or whatever) so they can accept it when they log in next. But if that is too cumbersome in the short term, please at least add a way that I can tell by looking at the request if they are online. The last time I tried to recruit via the in-game tool, I had to search the who list to see if the person was online. If online, I could whisper them to ask if they still wanted to join. (I consider popping an unexpected invite randomly in their faces to be quite rude, so I always whisper first.) If offline, I would send them a letter in the mail. A button to auto-port their name into the mail field would be very handy as well. (Especially for those characters with funky letters.)
Priority #3: Guild Perks
The guild perks are outdated to say the least. We haven’t gotten new pets/mounts/shirts or really anything at all in a very long time. I’ve seen a lot of people voicing the opinion that “there’s no point to being in a guild.” While I disagree with that opinion, I can understand where they are coming from. There is no real tangible benefit to your character’s growth to be gained from being in a guild. The big exception to that is mythic raiding.
For a guild like mine, the benefit is largely a social one, and like we previously discussed, most players have a very difficult time find a guild with the current guild finder that actually provides social benefits. I suspect that a large portion of the player base has already given up on finding those social benefits, so it will be necessary to entice them back into guilds via other means.
Cashflow:
These “challenges” haven’t been updated in forever. The dungeon challenges in particular are almost never completed in my guild, and as far as I can tell, they don’t work. Or at least they don’t work properly. They don’t complete for seemingly random reasons. It completes for timewalking, and that’s about it. Why would it matter if I’m on a 120 helping a couple of guildies level through normals?
It’s also super weird to have a “dungeons” category separate from a “M+” category. Why is there a cashflow perk for rated BG, but not for arenas? And why is there only one raid boss kill available when the whole point of most raid guilds is to kill several raid bosses every week? Doesn’t it make more sense to have several smaller raid perks instead of one big one? Wouldn’t it make sense to incorporate newer content like world quests, islands, and warfronts into this feature as well?
I get not wanting cashflow to be op, or to simply line the pockets of a greedy soulless GM. But really, why DOES it go into cash in the gvault? Why doesn’t it go into a separate repair fund that is inaccessible to everyone (including the GM) except through repairs? Why doesn’t it pay out partially into a guild’s repair fund, and partially into the pockets of those members that helped complete the challenge?
Even better, let me tie a cross-server community to my guild so that those on other servers can tap into (and contribute to) that repair fund and participate in gchat.
Reputation:
This is a largely untapped area of potential where guilds are concerned. There are a few different directions that this could go, so I’ll explore some different ideas.
Reputation boosts as a guild perk. I think this is something that could be added as a passive bonus for being in a guild without being op. It would be helpful for those that enjoy farming reputations or paragon caches without being too strong. It could also be massively beneficial for those who just want to finish that darn pathfinder. It could work as a flat bonus (like the human racial), but personally, I think that is fairly boring. I would prefer to add the idea of warforging rep as a guild perk. You could get a little green fwoosh when it procs, and your log shows you earned X bonus rep.
Guild reputation as a paragon rep. I’ve been in the same guild for 10 years. Guild reputation has been completely useless for basically forever. Why not add it as a paragon rep? When you fill your guild reputation bar, it could give you a cache with some gold, random consumables or profession items, and also automatically deposit some items/gold into the guild vault.
Consumables unlocked for guild rep. These could be low cost rewards for having a certain amount of guild rep. Some things could be just a small boost meant to replace more expensive consumables like flasks and pre-pots in situations where they aren’t really needed, like a 2% damage flask while in the open world (usable while leveling or for world quests). Maybe a flask that increases run speed by 20% while in old raid content for transmog farming, or a potion that only works in dungeons that provides a small splash to single target attacks. Other things could be just for fun – such as a potion that turns you into a random dinosaur. Or a confused class potion that “borrows” a spell from a random guildie in your group for 2 minutes (similar to the old druid symbiosis spell).
Mounts and Pets:
This is the obvious gimme for guild rewards. We haven’t had new mounts or pets in ages. I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to do something like a balloon with the guild crest.
Other ideas for guild content:
Guild treasure hunt – talk to an NPC to start the hunt, solve riddles as a team, search the area to find a chest.
Guild warmode missions – this could be used to encourage guild groups into the same area for some guild vs guild warmode.
Guild based side-story scenarios – rather than focusing on me as a player, why not create some scenarios designed to be played as a guild group to forward the guild’s reputation in the world.
Conclusion:
I prioritized things this way because I need to have officers more or less on track before I can really bring in new people. The core I have now is quite drama free and low maintenance. Adding new people always brings the risk of changing that balance, and requiring some moderation from officers. Once I have officers again, I can bring in new people, but lack good tools to do so. Once we have recruitment tools, people will need a reason to join a guild.
But I’m tired now, and hungry to the point where I’m not really thinking straight anymore. I’m sure there are some better ideas out there, and I’m curious to see what you guys think.
/hug
inviting while offline, 
