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

Venjin-bronzebeard · December 6, 2019, 3:27am

Confession: due to complications in RL I haven’t been able to log on to check things out.

But…

I noticed the guild finder functions again…

Venjin-bronzebeard · December 6, 2019, 3:33am

Wait a sec…

The guild finder has functions we asked for…

It allowed me to invite somebody OFFLINE!

Hallelujah!

Lucyclawless-durotan · December 6, 2019, 3:20pm

They sacked over 800 employees Feb 2019. Most of them were in the customer service areas of their products but they also sacked designers, developers and people who they deemed were excess to the operation. A couple of them were friends of mine, luckily they live in a region that is rich with new prospects and plenty of time on their hands.

Lucyclawless-durotan · December 6, 2019, 3:24pm

If we aren’t going to repair the Guild UI, can we at least update the Guild achievements system? Is there any way we can add AotC Guild edition? There’s normal raid achieves and there’s Mythic raid achieves but nothing that recognizes that a guild has managed heroic together, which is the step in between the two. It kinda tells us that you’re either Mythic or you’re normal… We are way past Normal in every sense of the meaning.

Fumel-arathor · December 7, 2019, 5:06am

Talking about improving guild tracking items, I really liked the “guild activity” points they used to have. It made me feel like I was contributing to my guilds even if I wasn’t raiding or doing other things with them. I guess since they took out the gold-making thing (which definitely got abused), the activity tracking wasn’t important.

I still wish there were more things that small guilds could do for rewards, even if it takes them longer than it would take a large guild.

Fumel-arathor · December 8, 2019, 4:40am

Okay, it’s late. I’m having trouble thinking of another way to say what we’ve been saying all along. So, I won’t bother this time.

We need granular permissions so we can manage our guilds as we see fit. Ion already acknowledged this was a genuine issue and they’re working on a fix. What I want to know now is:
How much longer before we see what sort of “fix” they’ve come up with?

Are we going to have to wait until Shadowlands launches??? Please, no. I’ve gotten new recruits, and I need separated permissions now, not a year from now.

Fumel-arathor · December 9, 2019, 4:31am

Another day goes by with no changes to guild permissions. /sigh

Not that I would ever expect changes to anything on a Sunday. Still, I didn’t expect to have our guild permissions screwed up to begin with. Got another applicant tonight. Guild is growing, but the controls are stuck. Is it really that hard to separate them out again?

Venjin-bronzebeard · December 9, 2019, 6:54pm

Dear Bliz,

We have trust issues in our guild pertaining to officers. Its a long story that I’ve already explained.

Revert the permissions, preferably this Tuesday, or at least tell us when it’s happening.

Yesuna-wyrmrest-accord · December 9, 2019, 6:57pm

If you can’t trust someone why would you keep them in your guild, yet alone give them any sort of permission that would even allow them to do something as trivial as invite players?

Fumel-arathor · December 9, 2019, 10:12pm

Inviting other players is already a separated permission. There are a whole pile of other permissions still lumped under “is officer”. As a Guild Master, you can already see this fact, so I’m not sure why you even brought up inviting others as a permission for officers.

As for trusting people, there are all levels of trust. I have several new members in my guild, all of whom have been behaving very well. Some of them have also been extremely generous in donations to the guild bank. But I don’t know any of them.

Since I don’t know them, I can’t trust them with ALL the permissions listed under “is officer”. If I had separate permissions, I could assign a few to members who express an interest in helping manage the guild and see how well they do. You DON’T build trust by blindly giving someone the ability to do anything and everything and then see what they do.

Fumel-arathor · December 9, 2019, 10:15pm

This post is a great explanation of what we’re talking about:

Angosia:

I’m going to argue against Blizzard in the case of the guild control changes but not in the context most are presently doing.

As Blizzard’s security staff knows, when doing role-based access control permissions (and/or profiles), the principle of “Least Privilege” applies. This, in lay terms, means “Only what permissions are required to do the necessary tasks for that job role”.

In this context, I am not comfortable granting a person who I did not designate an officer to have all officer permissions. Nor do I necessarily want to grant an officer all of the current permissions. In my guild hierarchy, the structure only allows 3 people to invite to the guild AND remove from the guild even though we may have a separate structure for officers.

(This is to combat the notion that 1 person is the benevolent dictator {i.e. GM}. We have a council of 3 Founders. If 2 disagree, I act as the tie-breaker as the “GM”. Generally speaking, we don’t disagree, but we can.)

I have a separate tier of “officers” in the context that most guilds use them today. These do my guild recruiting, raid leading, and class officer roles that most guilds have today. However, I do not grant them the ability to remove individuals from the guild nor would I.

This is a way of decentralizing power but also not providing a scenario where officers might disagree and act against each other intentionally or otherwise. They should be able to discuss this as a group and make the recommendation to the Founders. As a rule, I tend to let the two Founders handle those disputes (we really don’t see any, but that’s why the structure is there). I know both of the other Founders in person and I trust both implicitly, so it is a simple phone call or text from either of them to get my opinion if a tie should result.

In this context, as a person who has drafted security policies in a past architect role and as a current Operations Manager role, I am disinclined to give ranks permissions that I do not want them to have. It was granularly set in this fashion for a very good reason - and it is a technical control to help ensure that officers in my guild can’t act on a whim.

While my vetting process is actually pretty good, it isn’t perfect as nothing can be perfect. You’re removing my ability to set practical guild permissions for the sake of simplifying the experience. I don’t mind if there’s a “simple” mode for folks who don’t want to manage it, but give me an “advanced” mode so that folks who want to manage those things can.

Fumel-arathor · December 9, 2019, 10:19pm

Here’s another post that does a superior job explaining the Principle of Least Privilege:

Æthelwulf:

I would like to expound on this topic and actually focus in on the principle stated in the second paragraph. Specifically the Principle of Least Privilege. There are literally enough volumes on this concept to fill libraries to overflowing.

The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) is the standard of Information Security that is adhered to by most if not all corporations (both public and private) government agencies (whether Global Federal State or Local in scope). It is the heart and soul of profile or role based security systems.

At its heart PoLP maintains that you only give the least permissions to a role that is necessary for that role to perform its function. You then assign users to that specific role so that should you need to change the scope of the role and the users in that role you do it once and each member then has the role’s scope adjusted.

It saves the administrator time and effort in having to track down all the users of a role. He simply need only change the permissions assigned to that role.

Likewise if a user must be removed from a role there is no need to change the other users permissions you simply remove that person from the role. This can save enormously valuable time if the user is found to be a bad actor. You remove that users role from them while not disturbing the operations of others and prevent the bad actor from causing damage to you system.

Then there is the implied concept of granularity in the PoLP. Invoking PoLP allows the administrator to clearly define a role by assigning certain permissions to that role and not others.

A guild raid leader might need more access to guild bank resources and or guild reward systems for loot from bosses than a Class Officer might need. Similarly a Production Fire Team might need read access to Production Servers but probably should not be given write or modify permissions. A Production DBA who is the DB Owner might need read write and modify but certainly should not have sa privileges on a DB he does not own and likely should not have remote access OS Level permissions to a Production server.

By compromising this system intentionally, by flagging all of the above roles as simply Officer, you invite disaster.

You invite the accidental or incidental promotion of a bad actor to a level that has access to the guild bank and can then rob that guild blind. Then you have GL’s sending in tickets for recovery of items and demanding (rightfully so since you put them in that position by lumping all Officer roles under one set of permissions) that they be reimbursed for the items.

Then you start getting false reports from gl’s that think they can ‘game’ the system by filing false tickets and getting items they never had. This creates FAR more work for your GM’s than you had previously slowing down the system AND making you hire more of them to handle the unexpected volume.

But lets turn the tables just for an instance. What if tomorrow you came in to work and all of the permissions for all of the data in your corporation were set to a single role. Could you be expected to continue business as usual? No? Then you have your answer for GL’s too.

Venjin-bronzebeard · December 10, 2019, 1:43am

What Fumel Said

Tachya-moon-guard · December 10, 2019, 2:51am

Ironic isn’t it, that after all these years, we’ve now reached the point where EverQuest, of all things, does guild management better than World of Warcraft.

Fumel-arathor · December 10, 2019, 9:57pm

My guild is still growing. Two new members joined last night–invited by one of my other new members who has invite permissions. The inviting member was worried I’d be mad about them inviting their friends. I had to reassure them I wouldn’t have given them the permission if I hadn’t wanted folks to invite their friends.

It’s nice to be able to reward members with some trust and permissions, but other than giving them guild repairs and bank privileges (on top of invites), there’s little else I can do.

We seriously need this issue fixed. It’s been way over a year. Just because we’ve managed to get by as things are doesn’t make this change acceptable. Duct tape, shoe string, and spit aren’t a substitute for actual repairs.

Altherei-wyrmrest-accord · December 13, 2019, 1:31am

Hi Blizz, all we want for Christmas is our granular permissions back. <3

Fumel-arathor · December 15, 2019, 5:24am

Sorry, I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t been checking in on the forums. I have been checking on on the permissions though, and nothing has changed. Not that I expect any changes without at least a maintenance day. I think it would be terribly ironic, though, if they could do an overnight fix and just haven’t bothered.

My guild is doing okay, but I was still looking through the permissions and ranks tonight seeing if there was some other rank I could make with a few more permissions that I could use for my most helpful members. No such luck. I’ve done all I can do besides making them a full-blown officer, and I’m just not going to do that.

Fumel-arathor · December 16, 2019, 3:36am

Seems like interest in getting any changes done here is dwindling to a trickle. I hope it’s not because people have quit playing.

Ion said they were working on a fix. I don’t want to think he was lying, but it’s getting hard not to doubt. Maybe in his mind “working on” isn’t the same as actually solving the issue. That’s a terrible thought to have, but it’s hard to believe otherwise.

I used to trust that Blizzard would do the best they could to deliver a high quality game. Now I feel like they’re just barely delivering any sort of game.

Yesuna-wyrmrest-accord · December 16, 2019, 3:46am

I don’t believe it would be because players have stopped playing, there haven’t been insanely drastic changes to the expansion from the beginning so many of the players that would have quit would have already quit. But that’s cannot be proven since nobody knows the numbers.

I believe that most players have accepted the permissions. The game has both large and small guilds who are very successful, these guild masters have learned to adapt to the changes and have worked around them and made do with changes and progression of the game and design. Looking through this thread there are a number of guild masters who have some very small guilds, many of them aren’t even active, and for some reason they cannot adapt to the changes. And no, masses of players didn’t up and quit the game due to these changes.

I’ve seen a number of players make comments about their guild having severe issues hanging in there due to these permissions being changed, I don’t believe that is really the case. Permissions aren’t the backbone of a guild, a strong officer and GM core is the backbone of a guild. If a guild lacks a strong core and backbone then it’s destined to fall.

These permissions shouldn’t cause a guild to lose focus, nor cause a guild to fall apart.

Brahmina-khadgar · December 16, 2019, 4:08am

Did I (Fumel) say that? No.

Which is built by allowing the GM to assign ranks and permissions in a manner that fits their own guild, not by having a one-size-fits-all solution.

And I don’t believe players make up things just to complain. Some guilds are doing just fine under the current permissions (Che’s guild, for instance). Some guilds are getting on by relying on other methods.

But what difference does either of those things make to the fact that having all the permissions lumped together is a lousy design–and one we didn’t have to deal with until Blizzard screwed things up? Ion even said the change wasn’t intended, and they’re trying to fix it. You really ought to quit trying to defend the indefensible.