Hey all,
First thing:
Just wanted to thank everyone for keeping this post going/on the front page.
Second thing:
Now that we have at least in some small way been acknowledged by blizz id like to try and steer the convo away from grabbing their attention (which we have) and more towards what we actually want from them because i can tell you now there will not be a lot of these moments available too us.
So final thing:
For everyone that is keeping this going (i love you all <3) lets get as much detailed information about actual changes that we want to see from them. Im not just talking about reverting, im talking about really revamping this system and making it what we want it to be!
Totally agree we've at least got some attention here and can focus on getting this changed(thanks, Ythisens!). Just showing up in a blue tracker is going to help.
While the old interface had a lot to be desired, I'd almost prefer we focus on completely reverting for now. For one, the message might get lost. Also, just to be perfectly honest, I don't have a lot of faith in them at the moment to redo the guild control interface in a positive way. Just rather see the old interface back and then move from there.
I am going to keep on bumping this until we get some answers and fixes. This is beyond ridiculous.
This is a mess. Guilds use rank permissions as a gradual rewards system. Now its all or nothing. Someone who is a longstanding valued guild member but not an officer will never get any sort of progression in their guild standing. It also puts all the work on the officers who have to be completely trusted with every permission. No longer can their be any junior officer or recruitment officer, etc. Please fix this.
Unintended consequences have been a theme for a while now. Maybe you should start talking to your MVP's and Streamers and ASK them what impacts these things will have before you change them. Better yet, pay attention to the Beta forums where this issue was already raised and ignored. You've got to change the prevailing attitude of moving forward with plans regardless of consequences and then doing damage control and fixes afterward. Re-engage with your community. This is just such poor leadership, very disappointing.
Over a week and the only blue post we get is we can keep posting here? WTF. That's beyond inexcusable. You're only collecting our irritation at your silence.
PS Not even the community window works now.
26 pages no response though. Clearly shows you their resilience to change or revert the new Guild UI.
Over a week and the only blue post we get is we can keep posting here? WTF. That's beyond inexcusable. You're only collecting our irritation at your silence.
PS Not even the community window works now.
Maybe they want us to keep posting here so they can get as many ideas as possible about what the community actually wants them to change about the guild issues.
I mean, this has been a fantastic thread for it and a wonderful reference point for Blizzard to keep checking in on while they
hopefully fix the issues at hand.
That's just my hope though.
Over a week and the only blue post we get is we can keep posting here? WTF. That's beyond inexcusable. You're only collecting our irritation at your silence.
PS Not even the community window works now.
Maybe they want us to keep posting here so they can get as many ideas as possible about what the community actually wants them to change about the guild issues.
I mean, this has been a fantastic thread for it and a wonderful reference point for Blizzard to keep checking in on while they hopefully fix the issues at hand.
That's just my hope though.
I would be okay with the community thing if they gave us 1. more options for sorting the guild roster. 2. our fine control of permissions back.
I actually quite like the idea of the guild chat being there if you missed something in chat spam.
I like the updated codecs.
I don't like that I have to treat my guild like they're 5 and make events for them and edit their player notes. I can't find inactives easily to kick either.
Over a week and the only blue post we get is we can keep posting here? WTF. That's beyond inexcusable. You're only collecting our irritation at your silence.
PS Not even the community window works now.
They are doing, the old if it falls off page one..then it must be doing fine..and or if we ignore them long enough it will just go away....
Less rank customizations is not a good thing. No option to limit guild chat history is also not a good thing.
Please Blizzard, I beg you, revert these changes. They cause so many more problems than they solve. Forced chat history just guarantees that truly toxic behavior will be forced outside of your ability to monitor. You've honestly just destroyed the ability for a guild to feel like a home.
Seriously, if you had a friend who had cameras and microphones everywhere in their house that anyone could access when they came over, would you enjoy going there?
Æthelwulf's comments make me want to ask them to marry me just for their actual valid insight into the information security and data retention industry.
But to be on topic, as a guild leader, I'll echo the sentiments of many who want the return of the muted rank.
Due to my guild (and MANY RP guilds) use of officer chat as OOC or IC chat with guild members, I'm confused as to why I now need to create a third chat channel (a community) for either IC or OOC conversations. A channel that if an individual is removed from the guild, they would still be a member of and could only be removed from but not banned from and if they still had the community join link, they could rejoin multiple times.
1 Like
Thank you for extending the cap, Ythisens.
I don't have much to say today. It seems like we keep coming around to the same agreements on the guild permissions. After myself and my officers tested the guild event, it seems there's still a bug with some of the ranks simply not able to see guild events. I imagine after another server reset and/or hotfix, that could be fixed.
Something else that I noticed last night, was as I was promoting quite a few people to the 'regular' rank, (from recruit), the new Guild UI is supremely buggy, and far from finished. Sorting by rank works only for about 40 seconds, or so, and then it begins to shuffle people around in whatever fashion it pleases. It has an aesthetically displeasing way of listing people in your request while also showing the offliners. It places those online at the bottom, and then keeps ONLY the online members in their own section, never allowing the two to mix.
Also seems to be some very irritating issue of where "Last Online" and "Zone" are mixed from the old UI to the new UI. This is as confusing as it sounds, lol. We have made quite a few memes about it in our discord. <Jon> in the guild is currently at 2 hours. .. what?
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/269990447160492044/471094663860977666/WUT.png
While still on topic, I believe I have more insight on the conversation. It came to me while I was in the shower this morning:
I was a member of both the Alpha and the Beta, and I tested quite a bit of what I wanted to test, adding my own support and help to shape BfA, and as a guildmaster, I'm somewhat upset that there was no mention of further changes besides the UI and the new community features. There seems to be a lot of bugs and hullabaloo surrounding this. While we are able to dismiss some qualms, and even I am able to take my own complaints and find fixes/workarounds, this is all rather hectic. I remember when I was a kid, reading and seeing the new guild UI that was coming in Cataclysm, Blizzard encouraged guildmasters to get on the beta, make a guild and try it out. They asked for specifically targeted advice as guilds were still a huge part of World of Warcraft's community. Now, this goes without saying, I'm sure there are some devs rolling their eyes, like, "Come on, Buliss. We announced a full overhaul of the guild system at Blizzcon." Yes, you couldn't have held our hands any harder. But.. still, you are keenly focused on trying to implement the communities system, and push towards a multi-lateral focus on how players choose a home in game. I'm kicking myself over not bothering to make a guild in beta to give my feedback then, but perhaps next time, give Guildmasters who have access to test realms a swift kick to go try it all out?
Thanks for reading, all. I'll be back again tomorrow. o7
As a Guild Master I have been dealing with this since the new patch.
Basically I had to get rid of two of my ranks due to the changes.
My officers have more permissions than I intended for them to have now.
And my guildies can not do functions that they normally should be able to do.
1. Since the "IsOfficer" permissions are so broad, we can no longer set up different types of officer ranks. Normally in the guild we would have 2 or 3 different types of officers.
For example:
Officer
Raid Captains
Recruiter
Each rank would have a different job, each rank could only do certain things, and it would allow a Guild Master to reward individuals that have shown loyalty or interests in performing a job, giving them their own title.
2. Removal of the "MUTE" ability also destroyed the ability to stifle problems in a guild.
A mute rank is setup as the lowest permission rank.
Meaning when someone new is added to a guild by a non-officer who can not promote, they are in that rank until an officer promotes them.
Overall the mute rank is a way we have more control over who speaks in gchat so that we don't have spam or insults flying around.
For example:
A fight starts between 4-5 regular guildies over loot or something silly, something you know will pass, basically you can mute them in gchat and control the fight until they calm down. Rather than kicking 4-5 people for not following guild rules.
So the ability the mute a guild member is a double use ability. Removing or deleting chat from communities is not the same as muting someone so trying to equate the two is apples to oranges. Especially if its a fight between four or five individuals.
3. You no longer allow guildies to change their own note - only officers can do so which means now every time someone is added an officer needs to be involved - believe me that is not easy, I normally do the notes because my officers are not around half the time and my guildies tend to forget to do it.
4. On live currently (patch 8.0) Guildies seem to be unable to invite since they do not have the "isofficer" permission, the invite button is greyed out. Not sure if the actual /ginvite command still works for them.
5. The new Comunity UI panel is nothing but complaints from my officers and members, from missing people who are online, to being unable to check how many people are online, also being unable to invite to guild, or having chat channels being included.
For example:
ZONE - shows everyone's zone except those who are offline, for them it shows how long they have been offline, makes sense, except if you wanted to remove people now you have to contend with trying to figure out sorting order.
/JOIN Channel - The channels added this way do not show up in the community chat at all and rather than give you a way to merge a channel that previously was created into the chat it just creates a new community with that channel name.
Removed information such as the list of who has has achieved exalted with guild.
Removed information such as the number of people who are currently on versus the number characters in the guild.
People missing from the list even though they are clearly online and talking in party chat.
Basically we would have been better served if the old "Guild Roster" button was put on the bottom of the "Community UI" panel, and all the extra tabs were removed.
I have complained about these things on BETA, PTR and on LIVE but still no changes have been made or fixes done.
Also missed the fact that the Community UI is a storm of new stuff to learn for everyone, and its not simple I was trying to explain it to some guildies on discord and we spent a good hour explaining things and they still had questions as to why it should be used.
I honestly think this was something that was created because they were asked to put something new into the game and they didn't have any other worthwhile concepts to add.
Maybe they wanted to make their own discord like chat but to do so it would take more than just making a community channel, you would have to be able to customize a channel to accept video links, and emotes and everything under the sun that discord has.
Sometimes you don't fix what isn't broken and if you are going to put out a product you should make sure there is a demand for it and it should be better than your competitors product.
The extended cap is awesome, means even if they cant say anything, they are watching. so keep the feedback coming, convo civil and suggestions creative, we have our chance.
Guilds from the very start have been a heart of this game, where people meet, form communities, overcome challenges, become friends, and more in game and out.
For many of us, we have lost countless hours of sleep, stress and otherwise to protect these homes we have made and maintained for our families.
They deserve as much respect, attention and evolution as any other part of this game, and a future if we want it to continue.
good luck everyone and keep it coming.
/dailybump
All this feedback is great to read, keep them coming! And make sure you guys visit the OP and give it a like! :)
There's a lot Blizzard could learn and hopefully implement or fix with the Guild UI, perhaps even extend it to their communities.
Æthelwulf's comments make me want to ask them to marry me just for their actual valid insight into the information security and data retention industry.
But to be on topic, as a guild leader, I'll echo the sentiments of many who want the return of the muted rank.
Due to my guild (and MANY RP guilds) use of officer chat as OOC or IC chat with guild members, I'm confused as to why I now need to create a third chat channel (a community) for either IC or OOC conversations. A channel that if an individual is removed from the guild, they would still be a member of and could only be removed from but not banned from and if they still had the community join link, they could rejoin multiple times.
*Blushes Furiously*
My wife would likely take issue with that first bit.
The reason that I have that insight is I have been in the Information Technology field since the deluge. I have worked for Aerospace, Financial, Medical, and Technology industry companies, on systems that require through regulation and compliance an in depth knowledge of Information topics including Information Security.
Trust me the internal once a year or even once a quarter compliance training (Especially in the Medical and Financial sectors) that are repetitive boring and absolutely necessary dealing with keeping your company information safe know your customer, anti money laundering, bank secrecy act, HIPPA etc are pounded into each and every cubicle denizen in those industries because at one point each of those industries did not do that and the results were:
Data Theft, Loss of Reputation, Regulatory fines, legal fees associated with people suing those who had their private company data stolen or exposed, and in one instance even a ruling holding investigative firms liable for harms they cause by divulging personal information (Amy Boyer's murder).
A multi million dollar or multi billion dollar firm takes a large hit to the wallet when customers of that company stop doing business with them because they can no longer trust them with their data.
What makes it worse, is that most of these companies that have suffered under such events, had at their resource ways to mitigate the precipitory actions that lead to the, mostly, unintentional data breaches, but did not for a variety of reasons pay attention to the data they had custody of until after the event had occurred.
Now the issues I speak of are issues in the real world. The concepts are similar if not exactly the same in Azeroth. The consequences equally as important for the community in Azeroth as it is to citizens of the good old earth (you might say we Azerothians hold dual citizenship (tongue firmly in cheek)) Lumping all of the guild controls under two flags IsGM or IsOfficer (Member being the (current) ground state of rank in a guild it needs no flag its akin to the Everyone role in Windows Security Scheme) treats all of the citizens of Azeroth who are members of guilds equally and that might seem okay until some event occurs that could have been prevented (guild bank being emptied out by a bad actor comes to mind as an example or unintended officer chat divulged to a non officer causing unnecessary strife and drama in a guild) by not lumping all these controls together in the manner they are now. At that point (though no law currently exists to regulate Azeroth in that manner) agencies outside Azeroth not under Blizzards control are going to begin to ask questions. Especially if someone in the real world is harmed by the actions in this game.
Blizzard wouldn't it be in your best interest to forestall such an event? Sure its an edge case. But edge cases have a way of coming back to haunt you. Might you Blizzard not be best served by giving the guild leaders back control of their guilds?
Also feeling pretty annoyed with this change of consolidating so many permissions to be Officer rank only. Many of our ranks previously had permission to create events, set their own notes, etc and now cannot. Would really be nice to be able to customize those other rank permissions again for things other than bank access/repairs.
My own daily bump. I'm really loving some of the suggestions here, Blizzard Devs. Please do consider these things!
I think more customization is better than less, this is a very tangled set up. Allowing certain permissions to certain ranks is one of WoW guild's more useful systems, and incredibly useful. Honestly the system wasn't broken, and this doesn't fix it. In all I think that the previous system checks out better.
Really wish I could grant individual permissions again instead of this all or nothing garbage... people can’t even edit their own public notes... why?
We used the notes to keep track of everyone’s ilvl’s and specs.
I also know a few other gm’s Upset by the restriction of officer chat to officers as they had used it to anonymously discuss raid issues so they could be properly addressed. They had it set so all raiders could write in officer chat but not read it so nobody was called out publicly.
Nobody asked for this.