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

[Cup-cenarion-circle (Cup)]

@Yesuna-wyrmrest-accord

extra ways to micromanage a guild won’t give that guild any of those things.

Or, y’know, it could. Depending on the guild and the permissions and the officers and members. Thus the repeated appeals for a return to personalization and customization, because guilds aren’t a “one size fits all” endeavor.

As has been shown numerous times in the thread. It’s not really about making or breaking guilds, it is about freedom of choice, preference, and ease of use and management. And returning this level of functionality to the playerbase doesn’t impede anyone who likes things as they are and could with minimal effort recreate the conditions.

[Druunah-ravencrest (Druunah)]

@Yesuna-wyrmrest-accord

Guild permissions do not make a guild nor would they break a good guild

These Gm’s beg to differ:

@Xiata-bloodhoof

I guess they figure an officer should be someone you trust with these sorts of things.

@Loendor-smolderthorn

Trust is fine, but why would all the officers need to be able to edit guild info or change the MOTD. Some of these things are ADMIN things not officer things. Either way… why is it up to them? What’s wrong with giving Guild Leaders the flexibility to do things as they want?

@Verdre-silvermoon

Having the permissions separated let guilds have officers at various levels. It also was a way to show trust for being a good officer.

“You’ve been with us awhile, I’m giving you more guild privileges. You now get access to this and this.”

@Meowzie-grizzly-hills

Now in my alt bank, I’m going to have to demote everyone to protect myself.

@Nolanthus-wyrmrest-accord

With any REAL guild, there needs to be many layers of permissions to protect the integrity, security and structure of the guild. And 5 ranks wasn’t even enough.

@Joolia-malfurion

Having different levels of permissions for different people is important. My guild doesn’t want or need 15 officers at the same level of permission, but it’s sure nice to have some social officers/people who can invite to guild/craft consumables. With “all or nothing” permissions, that’s going to go away so that there are not a million officers with full permissions.

@Dobbì-thrall

being allowed to toggle permissions on and off and limit guild withdrawls and guild repairs is essential to running a smooth guild.

There seems to be confusions with those that are not a functioning GM.

you join RedDolphin, you can access guild tab 1 and 2 with a daily withdrawl limit of 1 item and no guild repairs thats about it.

rank 2 you can withdrawl 4 items, you can ginvite users and can see the food/flask raider tabs but you cannot withdrawl from them.

rank 3 hidden officer rank for non raiding friends that can gkick if no one is online

rank 4 alt raider rank can withdrawl from raider tab as well as all previous privledges minor daily gold guild repair

rank 5 main raider can withdrawl more from raider tabs, larger guild repair

rank 6 officer, can see and withdrawl from officer and gm tab and has higher withdrawl privileges can edit motd and all that jazz and can kick users

rank 7 CoGm rank - all access

rank 8 GM

it isnt always about who you trust its about what said group of ppl actually need.

@Mathrenas-moon-guard

In an effort to give players more interactivity between their friends, their guilds, their actual communities , we have jumped back to the Stone Age of communications. In an effort to compete with interactive mediums such as Discord, they have removed so much that makes a community a community.

Not every situation warrants a blanket of interactivity.

Off the top of my head I can think of:

• Guild Leader
• Co-Founder
• Officer
• Community Officer
• Class Officer
• Veteran Member
• Member
• Guest
• Trial
• Out of Character rank
• Temporary Silenced
  A Class Officer, who’s sole role inside a guild is to provide incite to those of the same class as them and help them strive to be better at their role, does not deserve nor need the same privileges as an actual Officer. A Guest isn’t the same as a Trial, nor the same as an Out of Character rank. A Guild Leader and a Co-Founder should have roughly the same privileges, without being on the same level as another officer.

This change is terrible. There is no sugar-coating, tip-toeing, no amount of light-weight treading that will let you know that this is a bad change to a feature that keeps guilds being guilds.

Not every guild is for every person. Not every guild should conform to every person and not every person should conform to every guild.

People don’t need their hands held where this is concerned. People want to be able to form a family online, to interact with, to play with, and if someone disrupts that… They don’t need to be there.

@Minusthemoon-thrall

Yep. It’s crazy to think in a game focused on military and war fails to allow different ranks of officers. It’s a concept so solidly based in culture that only a Conehead could believe it isn’t needed.

It’s only generals and soldiers now. No sergeants, lieutenants, etc… Makes 0 sense.

@Tixi-moon-guard

Why change what isn’t broken?

@Markahn-wyrmrest-accord

Making events is now a nightmare. And for a guild that thrives on making multiple events a week, this is a problem. If you want to keep your fancy new guild tab, that’s one thing, but please restore permissions to how they worked before. I can’t think of a single good reason why this needed to be changed. Who was this for? Who has it helped?

@Markahn-wyrmrest-accord

Just because one does experience the issue doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’ve never been too bothered about the permissions surrounding notes–maybe I’ve just gotten used to asking an officer to update it for me? But it is still another example of taking away options for no visible benefit that I can see.

@Zaranthosdk-icecrown

I would like to see the guild UI improved and updated removing options or just lumping them all together for one rank isn’t an improvement.

@Mcgrammar-caelestrasz

I am a guild master of 5 years and i am $%^#ing furious at these changes…

I structured all my guild ranks around different and very customised permissions and now i am not able to do ANYTHING! people are either officers with all the power in the world or plebs with none. There is NO inbetween anymore and this is NOT something any guild master would EVER ask for.

@Sara-wyrmrest-accord

I really love my guild. I’ve worked very hard to recruit people that I think mesh well together and would actually enjoy their time with one another. We’re small, drama free, and people spend their time giving back what the guild has given to them. But, there are issues with how guilds are currently set up and I genuinely feel that Blizzard needs to take another look at them. Giving officers near complete control over everything by checkbox default and not allowing the guild master to dictate what that control happens to be is asking for trouble from less scrupulous people who will take advantage of things. And this doesn’t even take into consideration that I might want to give an extra permission or two to some of our longest standing veteran members who contribute a ton to the guild. To give them extra permission, I have to also tick the officer checkbox which, again, gives them about 90% control of the guild and its activities. It makes no sense that I can give someone the rank of officer but take away officer privileges and give a veteran rank those officer privileges without them actually being a designated officer. It’s an either-or situation that shouldn’t exist, especially when I have no say over what the privileges are. I have officers already. Not everyone needs to be one and they all certainly don’t need as much access as they do.

@Silme-maelstrom

This is the longest thread I’ve ever seen without a single post defending what Blizzard did.

@Absolootly-thrall

This is a logistical nightmare for me, a guild master. My guild does not have officers. Ranks are sorted by what people enjoy doing in the game, and most have equal permissions, and that included changing guild notes for themselves because I REQUIRE all alts to have a guild note stating their main’s name.

Now, instead of allowing them to do it themselves, because I am not always online, I have to do it. (I do have two people I gave permissions now, but it still shouldn’t be this way) In the communities tab, it’s not letting me change guild notes of people who are offline, or people who recently joined/logged in. Sometimes, I can’t click a person’s name to update it for over thirty minutes! Everyone else can be clicked except them.

Luckily, /guildroster is a work-around that is keeping me sane.

Not having officers makes it easier on us to be drama free. Splitting permissions amongst varying ranks accordingly was easy, and worked well before.

There are 533 character in my guild across 215 individual accounts. I’m not giving all of them access to officer permissions just so they can change guild notes. Out of every person I’ve talked to in my guild and friends list, not a single person likes communities or the UI that comes with them.

@Brahmina-khadgar

Though this change is really only being seen from a guild management level, I feel it impacts the entire player base just as much as the flight fiasco (perhaps more so). This has the potential of completely breaking guilds. With guilds gone, group finder and the Communities feature will be the only way to access grouped content. Very, very bad idea in an MMO, Blizz

@Côhêêd-stormrage

This Has Halted & Prevented Creative Guild Design. As Well As Basic Guild Policing Functions.

@Silchás-illidan

One size does not fit all situations

@Zappeyboi-thrall

I seriously don’t get why people are arguing against more choice.

People like you are why Blizzard has watered so much of this game down man. Come on. Allow people to play the way they want. Why do you - and Blizzard - insist on defining how people have fun? Just because your guild operated a certain way doesn’t mean other guilds do.

A lot of the larger guilds have different permissions they want people to be able to do themselves. Like setting notes. But they don’t want them to be able to do any other “officer” things.

@Zèldâ-borean-tundra

give us the old UI or let us have a customizable one that has no restrictions.

@Foghas-moon-guard

Yeah, as a GM this is pretty dangerous especially when I previously had layered officer positions. I don’t necessarily want junior officers to be able to kick people and delete events, set MotD, ect… I really do hope they give us options like the old UI!

@Celardor-doomhammer

Been a GM since 2009 and I think this change is horrible. Removing granular permissions is just kneecapping what we can do with ranks.

@Takoda-kul-tiras

I’m also a GM, and I strongly disagree with merging permissions into a single box. In my guild, we have a lot of altoholics. We use the public note to mark alts and keep track of who is who. But now, to give people the ability to mark their own alts, I have to give them permission to do everything else? That’s bonkers.

Blizzard: if you want us to self-regulate and run our own guilds, you have to give us the tools to do it. Otherwise, don’t be surprised when we expect you to do the policing for us.

@Omniscient-maelstrom

Guild masters need as much control as you can give us and then some. I’m sure the devs have guilds. Don’t they know what GMs go through?

@Kalagrim-hyjal

The catch-all Officer permission is very disruptive to existing guild structures. For example, my guild has 3 ranks of “officers”, veterans who have the majority of officer privileges but arent allowed to remove people from the guild, and Elders which are former officers that are allowed to use officer chat but do not have other officer related powers.

@ßeans-frostmourne

Normally I’m in the “Lol get over it and adapt” camp

But this seems like a pretty dumb change tbh

@Hathlo-wyrmrest-accord

The issue here is that this change has happened to guilds that have been around and structured since the beginning, and it’s forcing leadership to make decisions against how their groups have been structured. This is causing divides, because players that aren’t trusted with the whole array of what is now “is officer” permission, now get all permissions or no permissions.

The change to guild structure was undocumented, and unannounced. We should be getting empowered to make more choice, not less, and Blizzard should be telling us in advance when major guild structure changes are occurring.

@Tarayn-medivh

This guild permissions thing however will ruin structures people have had for a decade at times for absolutely zero benefit. NOBODY is saying, "Thanks, Blizz. Being able to just check ‘is officer’ has made my life so much better!

@Galladen-dalaran

I’m trying to wrap my head around why anyone felt this would be an improvement and all I can think of is “Make it easier to use”. The kind of people who make apt guild leaders don’t need an easier to use interface.

@Constantìne-dathremar

How can they not see they’ve made a mistake? I haven’t seen one post anywhere from someone that supports this change which is unusual for these forums as there’s usually people on both sides of the debate.

We’re not going anywhere Blizz, stop ignoring us!

@Ðirt-garona

Guild Information - There is just no excuse at all why I should have to choose between having no officers, or giving people the power to mess with this feature that they have no real reason to mess with.

@Ðirt-garona

As I said, I’m lucky to have officers I [think] I can trust as we’ve been in this game and guild together 5+ years now. While I don’t foresee myself running into any actual “problems”, it’s still ridiculous, incredibly limiting, and unacceptable that I’m forced to allow my officers way too much power and hope they don’t abuse it, or just not have officers. It’s more unacceptable that I cannot give my non-officer me

@Oleandra-medivh

While the officer permissions themselves aren’t a major issue for my guild (I guess my GL happens to select officers in the exact, specific manner you think she should), they very much are for guilds which have graduated officer ranks, or where the guildleader does not want their officers having some of these specific permissions. Or where they want some of their non-officer members to have some! Those guilds are not wrong to run themselves in the manner which works best for them .

@Oleandra-medivh

You don’t get to decide how much guildleaders trust their individual officers and members, Blizz.

@Angosia-whisperwind

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

@Æthelwulf-aerie-peak

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.

The above remarks / quotes mostly all came from early on in this thread back in 2018 (I only got as far as post number 472 if anyone’s interested) therefore not all issues may still be precisely pertinent, but the core issue remains. (ie: fix the permissions)

There are plenty more excellent comments that go into even more detailed explanations as to why removing granular permissions was a bad idea, and how it effects guilds both “strong” and otherwise.

People have been posting those reasons for nearly two years now.

There are many types of guilds. Raiding, social, Rp, leveling, mixtures of those and more. Not all are trying to be, or need to be “strong guilds” to be of value to players and to this game.

@Cup-cenarion-circle

As has been shown numerous times in the thread. It’s not really about making or breaking guilds, it is about freedom of choice, preference, and ease of use and management.

I hope this helped clear things up a bit for you

Blizzard: The permissions are still broken, and we are still asking for a fix.

[Elenedhel-moon-guard]

So taking things away always makes for betterment?
We are here to play a game, NOT to be indulged in the company’s little ‘life lessons’, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

But, fair enough; let’s see what the rest of my guild has to say about all this.
Flips hair and sips tea, as we wait for the rest of the guild to show up.

…and waits.

…and waits.

In the empty, echoing halls, he waits.

[Ðirt-garona (Ðirt)]

@Yesuna-wyrmrest-accord

extra ways to micromanage a guild won’t give that guild any of those things.

I don’t know about any other GM’s, but personally I find myself having to micromanage more this way.
Before I could set the permissions I wanted my officers to have, and be done with it. Now, since they have access to everything, I often have them asking me if they should or should not do this or that thing, having to explain what to do with/how to use permissions they hadn’t had before, etc.
I mean, I went over everything with them when this horrible change was implemented, but they’re not too great at retaining that knowledge so it still comes up again and again over time.
If they just didn’t have access to these things I hadn’t wanted them to be able to do, I wouldn’t have to keep having these conversations, or fixing things they do when they forget I told them not to do such things.

I’d like to say my guild is still healthy and strong despite this, but it’s not. We’re slowly dying, though not for any reasons related to any of this - we’re on a rotting dead server, suffering the slow demise of people moving to more promising realms.
I’ve worked around this situation just fine though. Not happily, and it’s been far more work for me in the long run. My decision whether we uproot from our current server to carry on or if I just finally give up is hard to make, because of these management issues. I just don’t know if I want to endure this headache any more.

[Yesuna-wyrmrest-accord]

@Elenedhel-moon-guard

But, fair enough; let’s see what the rest of my guild has to say about all this.
Flips hair and sips tea, as we wait for the rest of the guild to show up.

…and waits.

…and waits.

In the empty, echoing halls, he waits.

They all quit playing because the permissions were changed?

[Fumel-arathor (Fumel)]

@Yesuna-wyrmrest-accord

Guild permissions do not make a guild nor would they break a good guild.

Well, my guild isn’t “broken”, so I guess it must be a good one.

You, like Blizz, seem to think all guilds are (or should be) exactly alike. How impertinent of us to want to run our guilds our own way.

[Life-bleeding-hollow]

I’d like to mention how… Busted the community tab is.
You can’t make ranks like you can in a guild, the UI frequently breaks any time you attempt to use any sort of chat addon, and the option to add it to your own chat channel usually doesn’t stick past a single log-in.
It needs entirely fleshed out more.

[Brahmina-khadgar (Brahmina)]

@Life-bleeding-hollow

I’d like to mention how… Busted the community tab is.

Ironic that the Communities feature is what broke the guild permissions.

Ion acknowledged (well over a year ago) that the permissions weren’t working as intended and that they were working on a fix. I wonder if they’ll jump on fixing the Community bugs as fast as they’ve taken care of the Guild problems.

[Life-bleeding-hollow]

So, 12.0 then?

[Brewmistress-trollbane (Brewmistress)]

I fully admit to being absent for the first, you know, four thousand posts in this thread, but I had a question for you guys.
Is the guild calendar event invite thing broken for you guys, too? I tried putting in a bug report, there was no response, but as the GM of my guild, I can’t invite specific members of my guild to a ‘guild’ event because i can’t invite ‘community members’.
But i can make a general event, and invite whoever I want! Maybe communities are the way to go, since guilds don’t work! /s

Also, as a newly promoted gm, these guild permissions are absolutely disgusting, and they make me sad. I’m sorry you guys, who are far more dedicated than I, have suffered for so long.

[Altherei-wyrmrest-accord (Altherei)]

Another alpha build, another round of radio silence from Blizzard on an issue they openly addressed and had stated they were committed to handling.

Y’all are lucky I have such good friends I want to keep playing with Blizz, or I’d have peaced out long ago. It’s well past time for an update and I’m hangry so I’m gonna be curt. Some sort of reply is the least you can do after quite literally ignoring this thread for almost another year since your answer. Or however long it’s been.

(Spoiler, the answer is ‘too damn long’.)

[Brahmina-khadgar (Brahmina)]

@Altherei-wyrmrest-accord

Y’all are lucky I have such good friends I want to keep playing with Blizz, or I’d have peaced out long ago.

This is how I’ve been feeling lately myself. I never thought I’d get to the point where I don’t feel like logging in and playing. I always enjoyed all kinds of things in WoW–even fishing. But it doesn’t feel like the same game anymore.

The only reason I’m still subbed is my friends. If I buy Shadowlands, it’ll only be because of my friends. Doesn’t anyone at Blizzard understand anymore how guilds build friendships? Can’t they grasp how important this is to the life and continuity of the game? Don’t they care anymore?

[Takoda-kul-tiras (Takoda)]

@Brewmistress-trollbane

Is the guild calendar event invite thing broken for you guys, too?

My guild used to use the in-game calendar to schedule events. But in the BFA pre-patch, it stopped working properly. People had trouble creating events and signing up. So we switched to using Discord announcements and reactions instead. Pretty sure I submitted bug reports at the time.

Haven’t tried to use it since, and heaven forbid they post…you know…updates…

And welcome to the wonderful world of GMing It’s like herding cats. And with these permissions, it’s like herding cats while glued to the floor. But sometimes cats are very furry and friendly, and they can make you feel really happy.

[Druunah-ravencrest (Druunah)]

As much as I hate repeating myself…

@Druunah-ravencrest

Blizzard: The permissions are still broken, and we are still asking for a fix.

Blizzard.

Now look what you made me do.

[Aerordin-emerald-dream]

4,000 posts. Nothing. No announced plans for Shadowlands. Unreal. Break something and make it worse with Communities and then ignore it after.

[Fumel-arathor (Fumel)]

@Aerordin-emerald-dream

No announced plans for Shadowlands.

There’s still time. They never release all their plans at once. (Yeah, I could be kidding myself.)

I keep hoping people will see something on the Alpha/Beta that restores my faith in Blizz. I certainly wouldn’t complain if they announced they had plans for guild improvements and a fix for the permissions, but seeing is believing. After all, over a year ago Ion said they were working on a fix for this.

[Altherei-wyrmrest-accord (Altherei)]

… When Blizz gives Alliance and Horde high elf options before they answer a thread they committed to addressing.

#FeelsBadMan (But I am excited about the blue eyes. I’m also still salty about this.)

Fix the permissions, Blizz. We’re waiting. Now that you’ve given out high elves it’s our turn C:

[Elisaweta-ravencrest]

lol thats a lie lol ffxiv has kept everything in fact the majority of things come through the game in ffxiv lol final fantasy 14 hasn’t “removed anything outside of screwing up the Ast healer” idk where that even comes from I’ve been playing it since reborn not a single thing removed that was part of the game to start with outside of being anti- 3rd party tools

[Brahmina-khadgar (Brahmina)]

@Altherei-wyrmrest-accord

When Blizz gives Alliance and Horde high elf options before they answer a thread they committed to addressing.

To be fair, making Belf eyes blue and giving Nelves the same coloring options as Belves is much easier than fixing some unintentional screw-up caused by the Communities feature (which was probably rushed to get it live and thus didn’t get all the testing it should have).

But they’ve had an entire expansion to fix this mess, so there’s really no excuse at this point.

[Altherei-wyrmrest-accord (Altherei)]

True, but it doesn’t give me a lot of hope that they can’t even answer us with ‘We’re sorry, it’s taken longer than expected but rest assured we are working on it’. x.x The fix is probably quite an undertaking, but having someone reply to us? I’d settle for that at this point. Just knowing we’re being heard and things are actually being done so it feels less like shouting into the uncaring corporate void.