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

Community General Discussion
966
08/04/2018 10:54 PMPosted by Kiwì
how about if you put the guild interface back the way it was until you can find something that works for the players. Just trying to manage the roster has turned into a nightmare. We had set up our permissions exactly the way we wanted them and now we don't have the flexibility to do that any more. Our options are either demote people or let them have permissions we really don't want them to have.

I have to echo these sentiments verbatim. The only reason to have more than 2 or three ranks right now is to regulate guild bank access and even that's pretty weak. Right now my guild has 7 ranks that are redundant in function and appearance.

It's nice to know that Blizzard is "listening" and I hope they are able to amend these changes soon to suit the needs of the communities themselves.

For my guild, the most important features that have been disabled are:
1 - The ability for the individual members to mark or notate each of their own characters with Public Notes. The officers can modify them to appeal to the standard officer notes later which reflect when a person joined the guild or whose alt they belong to. Ideally it would be nice to have the option back so that our officers notes can be transparent to the members even though they are restricted from writing or changing them.
HOWEVER I would be eternally grateful if there way as the GM or officer of a guild to connect alts to a main or characters to a player automatically, rather than counting on a player to divulge this info and keeping track with it manually. It would benefit many guilds who likely offer up guild benefit or responsibility to a single character. (i.e. farming of materials to create a powerful item) Once a character has reached the pinnacle of such an accomplishment the guild can then assist a different player rather than the same player on a different character. Also on that same issue, if a person is misbehaving and the guild has decided to dismiss a player from the guild, the hardest part is dismissing ALL of their characters, especially if they have a sleeper in the guild. (Some character that joined much later than their other characters and did not tell the leadership that they were an alt, either inherently or intentionally.)
2 - The ability to create events that involves the guild as a whole. Previously I know there were issues in the calendar where strangers could communicate (mostly their solicitation of illegal services) through calendar invites. But while my community of active gamers is large enough to be an active and progressive group, I also do not think I have to worry about them soliciting anything illegal in this manner via guild calendar events. If that were the case, I would expect they would push it in gchat instead.
3 - The ever rare need to silence a person from guild chat without completely dismissing them from the guild. Thankfully I have not needed this function since Cataclysm but it was there in the case it was needed.
HOWEVER it would be great to give officers and moderators alike the ability to mute or ban members from chatting in their respective channels with a time limit or a toggle.
4 - If there was one method I saw other guilds use that I would adopt immediately is to allow a specific rank of members to post blindly to Officer chat so that Officers can be alerted to any issue without going to guild chat or whispering them privately.

Just my $0.02 and I hope it's worth mentioning that I appreciate all the help the devs have given their community leaders prior to this point. I am counting on the devs to come through for us again real soon.
967
Oh and while you're fixing the guild UI and permissions increase the guild member limit. Creating alt guilds is a poor solution to the full guild problem.
968
Something from a business perspective we have yet to discuss in this thread is risk (no not the very good board game from Hasbro), we are talking about real world risks of taking certain actions. We all take risks and all of us have an appetite for risk. Some less, and others greater. When you invest in a company in the stock market or you read an article about stocks in a particular industry as investment instruments you will often see the following statement or statements having the same effect:

"You should note that there are significant risks inherent in investing in certain financial instruments and in certain markets. Investment in derivatives, for example, may expose you to risks which are different to those investors might expect when they invest in equities. Similarly, investment in shares issued by issuers in emerging markets (by which we mean those that have an underdeveloped infrastructure or which are less economically or politically stable as markets in developed countries) involves risks not typically associated with equities investment in well developed markets." This (along with what amounts to several pages more of related information) is known as an investment risk disclosure statement. It is meant specifically to address a certain type of risk inherent in the investment of capital and is mandated by all countries with a global or national level investment instrument exchange. It is necessary because people especially in the U.S. U.K. and other nations have the right to contract which brings with it the right to sue based on tort or criminal acts or breach of those contracts. It is a disclaimer that "sometimes" gives a company a legal out if things beyond their control cause the investor to lose money (a type of legitimate harm that if the company is held liable to would increase the company's amount of regulatory riskiness).

One of the prime motivations for adaptation of processes in a business environment is risk, or the appetite for or lack of appetite of various categories of risk:

  • 1. Strategic Risk
  • 2. Compliance Risk
  • 3. Credit Risk
  • 4. Operational Risk
  • 5. Market Risk
  • 6. Reputational Risk

Strategic risk is risk associated with your business strategy. I'll give two real world examples here:

  • Kodak
    Kodak's business plan was based on the strategy of being number one in the photographic film industry. It was singularly successful at this. It was so successful at this that when, in 1975, Kodak engineer, Steve Sasson developed the first digital camera, it was seen as a threat to Kodak's core business and so Kodak failed to develop it. Hindsight is crystal clear as they say, but if Kodak had analyzed the strategic risk more carefully, it would have concluded that someone else would start producing digital cameras eventually, so it was better for Kodak to cannibalize its own business than for another company to do it.

    Failure to adapt to a strategic risk led to bankruptcy for Kodak. It’s now emerged from bankruptcy as a much smaller company focusing on corporate imaging solutions, but if it had made that shift sooner, it could have preserved its dominance.
  • Xerox
    Xerox became synonymous with a single, hugely successful product, the Xerox photocopier. The development of laser printing was a strategic risk to Xerox’s position, but unlike Kodak, it was able to adapt to the new technology and change its business model. Laser printing became a multi-billion-dollar business line for Xerox, and the company survived the strategic risk.


Compliance risk is risk associated with laws regulations or policies, often set out by a state agency (the word state here is used to describe the governing body of a nation not the political division within any particular nation) Not in compliance with a statute, administrative regulation, or federal guideline? Get caught and you can expect to be fined and if the failure to comply impacts a third party well then also expect them to make a claim against your company.

Credit Risk is the risk associated with borrowing or lending money. If you do not pay your mortgage you risk foreclosure and harm to your credit rating.

Operational Risk. This is the risk associated with something going kaputsky within the company like a server outage or adding an extra '0' to a $10,000 dollar check so that it becomes 100,000 paid out to a vendor.

Market Risk: This is the risk a business takes when it invests in other businesses or takes on debt related to investments through a market or exchange. If the market as a whole loses a large amount of intrinsic value in a short period of time the market has said to have crashed and the investments made by the company may become worth much less than they were when they were first purchased.

Reputational Risk. Our last category is the category that is common to all industries and all companies and even to individuals. Examples of corporate reputational risk include Equifax, Enron, Tyco International, Smith Barney, E.F. Hutton, Washington Mutual... That list is quite long and if I concentrated solely on these examples I should be writing them down ten years from now. Even individuals are affected by it. Harvey Weinstein (no conviction of any crime (yet) but his reputation is utterly and thoroughly ruined), Bill Cosby (convicted of a crime) and if one wants to look closer to home one need look no further than our own Rob Pardo (allegedly involved in "gamer-gate" although no proof of this exists that I am aware of only allegation), Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, Drysc/Bashiok (aka Micah Whipple), Jay Wilson, and currently Ion Hazzikostas. All suffered or are suffering under intense scrutiny and various amounts of Reputational Risk.

That is a very long preamble but its necessary to put it out there so that we can talk about it because there is a misconception out there that the only thing Blizzard understands or acts on is money or the loss of it. That oversimplification ignores the very real factors of risk.

If we desire changes to be made or to have a change reverted the best way is not necessarily with ideas for fixes nor for umbrage, outrage, pleading, or pontification, but rather to find ways to alert Blizzard to the exposure to various types of risk they have created in taking the actions they have.

Maintaining a civil thread atmosphere is fine and dandy if we simply want a place to vent our frustrations but if we want to point out the issues with the changes that Blizzard has made they have to first be made aware of real consequences to their actions, then they have to be shown ways to mitigate those consequences or ways to adapt to ameliorate the risks involved.
969
These things have been detailed in the thread.

I detailed some of these things in one of my responses.

There is tons and tons of totally legitimate and valid information on this thread.

08/05/2018 08:04 AMPosted by Æthelwulf
Something from a business perspective we have yet to discuss in this thread is risk (no not the very good board game from Hasbro), we are talking about real world risks of taking certain actions. We all take risks and all of us have an appetite for risk. Some less, and others greater. When you invest in a company in the stock market or you read an article about stocks in a particular industry as investment instruments you will often see the following statement or statements having the same effect:

"You should note that there are significant risks inherent in investing in certain financial instruments and in certain markets. Investment in derivatives, for example, may expose you to risks which are different to those investors might expect when they invest in equities. Similarly, investment in shares issued by issuers in emerging markets (by which we mean those that have an underdeveloped infrastructure or which are less economically or politically stable as markets in developed countries) involves risks not typically associated with equities investment in well developed markets." This (along with what amounts to several pages more of related information) is known as an investment risk disclosure statement. It is meant specifically to address a certain type of risk inherent in the investment of capital and is mandated by all countries with a global or national level investment instrument exchange. It is necessary because people especially in the U.S. U.K. and other nations have the right to contract which brings with it the right to sue based on tort or criminal acts or breach of those contracts. It is a disclaimer that "sometimes" gives a company a legal out if things beyond their control cause the investor to lose money (a type of legitimate harm that if the company is held liable to would increase the company's amount of regulatory riskiness).

One of the prime motivations for adaptation of processes in a business environment is risk, or the appetite for or lack of appetite of various categories of risk:

  • 1. Strategic Risk
  • 2. Compliance Risk
  • 3. Credit Risk
  • 4. Operational Risk
  • 5. Market Risk
  • 6. Reputational Risk

Strategic risk is risk associated with your business strategy. I'll give two real world examples here:

  • Kodak
    Kodak's business plan was based on the strategy of being number one in the photographic film industry. It was singularly successful at this. It was so successful at this that when, in 1975, Kodak engineer, Steve Sasson developed the first digital camera, it was seen as a threat to Kodak's core business and so Kodak failed to develop it. Hindsight is crystal clear as they say, but if Kodak had analyzed the strategic risk more carefully, it would have concluded that someone else would start producing digital cameras eventually, so it was better for Kodak to cannibalize its own business than for another company to do it.

    Failure to adapt to a strategic risk led to bankruptcy for Kodak. It’s now emerged from bankruptcy as a much smaller company focusing on corporate imaging solutions, but if it had made that shift sooner, it could have preserved its dominance.
  • Xerox
    Xerox became synonymous with a single, hugely successful product, the Xerox photocopier. The development of laser printing was a strategic risk to Xerox’s position, but unlike Kodak, it was able to adapt to the new technology and change its business model. Laser printing became a multi-billion-dollar business line for Xerox, and the company survived the strategic risk.


Compliance risk is risk associated with laws regulations or policies, often set out by a state agency (the word state here is used to describe the governing body of a nation not the political division within any particular nation) Not in compliance with a statute, administrative regulation, or federal guideline? Get caught and you can expect to be fined and if the failure to comply impacts a third party well then also expect them to make a claim against your company.

Credit Risk is the risk associated with borrowing or lending money. If you do not pay your mortgage you risk foreclosure and harm to your credit rating.

Operational Risk. This is the risk associated with something going kaputsky within the company like a server outage or adding an extra '0' to a $10,000 dollar check so that it becomes 100,000 paid out to a vendor.

Market Risk: This is the risk a business takes when it invests in other businesses or takes on debt related to investments through a market or exchange. If the market as a whole loses a large amount of intrinsic value in a short period of time the market has said to have crashed and the investments made by the company may become worth much less than they were when they were first purchased.

Reputational Risk. Our last category is the category that is common to all industries and all companies and even to individuals. Examples of corporate reputational risk include Equifax, Enron, Tyco International, Smith Barney, E.F. Hutton, Washington Mutual... That list is quite long and if I concentrated solely on these examples I should be writing them down ten years from now. Even individuals are affected by it. Harvey Weinstein (no conviction of any crime (yet) but his reputation is utterly and thoroughly ruined), Bill Cosby (convicted of a crime) and if one wants to look closer to home one need look no further than our own Rob Pardo (allegedly involved in "gamer-gate" although no proof of this exists that I am aware of only allegation), Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, Drysc/Bashiok (aka Micah Whipple), Jay Wilson, and currently Ion Hazzikostas. All suffered or are suffering under intense scrutiny and various amounts of Reputational Risk.

That is a very long preamble but its necessary to put it out there so that we can talk about it because there is a misconception out there that the only thing Blizzard understands or acts on is money or the loss of it. That oversimplification ignores the very real factors of risk.

If we desire changes to be made or to have a change reverted the best way is not necessarily with ideas for fixes nor for umbrage, outrage, pleading, or pontification, but rather to find ways to alert Blizzard to the exposure to various types of risk they have created in taking the actions they have.

Maintaining a civil thread atmosphere is fine and dandy if we simply want a place to vent our frustrations but if we want to point out the issues with the changes that Blizzard has made they have to first be made aware of real consequences to their actions, then they have to be shown ways to mitigate those consequences or ways to adapt to ameliorate the risks involved.
970
Back yet again, taking time out of my life, to bump this thread in hopes that we will receive a response of some sort, and then hopefully a resolution.

There really isn't much else to say, it has all been said in the now almost 50 pages.
971
Still no communication from Blizzard. How is this acceptable as a company?
972
Biggest risk they have is GMs deciding to gdisband their guilds and stop buying their product.

However they know they have a captive audiance that won't do this. Many guilds were created early in the game's history and are run by some of the older players who basically created communities and friend networks on their own through hard work and determination.

The opinions and needs of guilds and guildmasters should have value in this game since its main goal is to be mmo, not a solo player game. Even with communities you will need players that are willing to sacrifice game time to create and administer events. You can not do this with a simplistic interface and no permanent foundation.

Communities should be another in set of tools for guilds and guildmasters not something that will supplant them.

As my own experience has shown me when you pick up pugs and give them a community link you do not always get the best of the crop. Point in fact with how toxic lfr has made pugging you have to deal with people who won't go to voice, won't eat or buff themselves,who never even think about actually sticking around for more the two wipes. So yeah unless they plan on giving a reward for not doing bad behaviors in groups, communities will be something that will constantly cause issues for those that plan events.

Without strong GMs and officers, players who have experience building groups and dealing with the misfits in them communities will fail.

The community system seems to want to mimic Discord, however Discord has a guild structure to it, you can assign roles or ranks with different abilities like a guild and give specific people channel permissions, you can mute both voice and channel chat on multiple levels. If anything the implementation of communities barely scratches the surface of what controls you would need to mimic it. Not to mention the fact that you are basically copying another companies intellectual property.

In any case the permissions changes made to the interface should be reverted.

Guildmasters shouldn't have to work with an incomplete interface when we had a very effective and well implemented one in the original guild control panel.

Previously I have pointed out errors/bugs in the implementation of the community ui and the permission changes in this thread, I have also pointed out how ranks are harmed in previous posts, I even explained how communities are created and channels that previously existed do not merge into them. I explained how the community ui differs greatly from the original controls, I also explained how communities could be used for illegal or detrimental actions on the part of the users since they are not an organized system connected to a group but rather one own by individuals like a channel, and now I have explained how the community ui itself harms the game and actually could be a point of contention between Blizzard and Discord.

Blizzard you have all this information in your hands now, I understand you want to improve your product and do things in your way, but as consumers of your product we do not want to see any harm come to it so please try to consider this thread and the advice given.

Please revert the permission changes and consider the Community UI panel and how its being implemented why the need for it and would making stronger links to guild be a smarter route or should you be completely separating the two.

Also as some have said the fact that Loot Master, and Guild Rewards, and Perks that we had earned as guilds have now gone it seems that more and more guild associated features and benefits are going away. Is there truly no more place for guilds in the World of Warcraft are you truly trying to remove them and remove the benefits that they bring to the game?
973
08/05/2018 12:37 AMPosted by Mossclaw
I do find it interesting how may are concerned about persistent chat. For our guild, one of the attraction of Discord was the persistent chat. Now, entire convos could be asynchronous; members that couldn't access Discord when not at their computer could catch up to the discussion. Persistent chat is very inclusive and helps to build ties between members.

At least this is what we have found to be true for our guild. We've been using it for a year, I think. The only time I've found it inferior to forum threads is when creating a flash channel for a volatile subject. We felt that a forum post gives the author more time to pick their words.

Anyway, I just thought I'd contribute a different way to view persistent chat. It's preference in the end.


If only they’d given us the option. I understand the desire for it but neither I nor my friends want to touch that with a 10 foot pole.
974
08/05/2018 11:55 AMPosted by Nysalla


If only they’d given us the option. I understand the desire for it but neither I nor my friends want to touch that with a 10 foot pole.


I can understand where you are coming from on this. Most of my guilds communication happens in Discord. Other than the typical hey anyone up for x dungeon, or BGs or whatever else.

My guild is very much an adult guild, and to say that the chat can go from rated G to extremely "Mature" in a nano second is a gross understatement.

Even if I wanted to change gears and make the guild more family friendly, I would have to wait months or at least till the system purges itself (if it ever will), to allow such a thing to happen. The last thing I would want is for a kid to jump in guild and get curious and look at the chat history. Being on the internet start looking up what some of the stuff stated means. I would not want to be on the other end of that conversation with a parent.

On the other side to this, when the kids are away the adults play... I wouldn't want Jr. or little Suesi Q see what mommy and daddy talk about when they are sleeping...

It just makes for a lot of possible awkward situations. This is just one example.

Another would be the simple truth of Guild Leaders and Officers are often A type personalities. We but heads from time to time, and if that happens in "O" chat then you have the issue of logging in and having that jump in your face as soon as you log back in, only fanning the flames. I get the sentimate here.

I agree there should be an option to either allow it to record or not, ot to be able to purge the log without having to delete every message one at a time.
975
Still nothing from Blizz on this horrendous change?
976
08/04/2018 10:00 PMPosted by Irannia
I've suggested doing an advanced option, which I think would be a great addition to this. Your guild leaders and now Community Leaders need these granular controls to be able to build successful functioning environments. Not because we are control freaks, but because it's human nature to work towards something. Hence why games like WoW are as successful as they are.
I like the "Advanced" option. That lets people keep the current all-in-one permissions if those work best for them, but allows others to customize their guild permissions. A tiny guild like mine is fine with the current permissions, but I would be afraid to grow it without more customization of the permissions. A large guild obviously needs far more flexibility than the current permissions allow.

However, if that's too much trouble for Blizz, then we really do need to go back to separate permissions so guild masters can manage their guilds how they please.
977
Just here to keep this topic going. All an very good read to why guild permissions need to be restored.
978
Please revert the permissions function.
979
Another day, another bump.

There is a ton of information and resources in this thread.

I've hashed them dozens of ways, and other people have hashed them dozens more.
980
Pretty sure Blizz is trying to kill off successful organized guilds... Cant think if a logical reason why they would but its Blizzard so none is needed.
981
Classic Guild Frames addon on Twitch will revert the Guild UI back to what it looked like but does not change the permissions back. Just fyi. Might be another work around for some outside Guild Roster Manager which seems to counter act somethings you may try to do (i.e. leave a guild on another toon). I had to disable GRM to do that. Not sure if there is conflict for things like that using Classic Guild Frames.

Please give us more tailored control be it advanced options or reverting it back.
982
A simple "we see you guys have concerns and we have passed this info along to the guys who are more important than us CM's" would make things a little better and give players a small bit of faith that feedback is ever taken into consideration.

These new blues are something else. I shake my head when I see people actually praise these guys. The last decent blue we had here was Bashiok. It's amazing how little communication the new Blizzard passes off as improved communication, I guess posting in joke threads counts as something.
983
I like the idea that Blizzard could add an "Advanced" button on the permissions panel it would then be left to the Guildmaster to choose what permissions go where.

If needed Blizzard could add a disclaimers stating, "We do not provide technical support for any changes made to these permissions settings use at your own risk." And add a button on the bottom to reset to defaults.

I understand why Blizzard may think, "well this has to be simplified for new users", however some things have to be more complicated to be more effective and perform better.

You wouldn't expect a bicycle to be as efficient as a truck at handling big loads of construction equipment. With this I mean the interface now is too simplified and doesn't perform the task needed.

As far as viewing and purging guild logs I agree, allow the Guildmasters to have control if logs should be able to seen by everyone or be held hidden depending on permissions, also allow Guildmasters and those they give permission to clear the logs.
984
We are now ONE WEEK out from launch. Activity will really start picking up this week. With all the extra activity, recruiting, alts wanting to join, events starting up... this is all going to be a giant headache. We need a fix SOON - even if it is just a bandaid until a later patch. Please and thank you.
985
Fifty pages in, and not even lip service from the Blues? I know you're focused on fixing the debaucle that was created by letting an AI algorithm decide how best to squish the stats, but NOTHING on this?

Oh, wait... that's right, ONE Blue post--extending the comments on this thread because they didn't want to clog the forums with multiple threads on this issue... Because then you'd actually end up having to deal with the angry mob of Guild-Masters...

Dissatisfied customers can ever so quickly turn into an angry mob when left with no acknowledgement, when all they need is, "Hang on, we'll address your concerns when we fix XYZ," or, "we have no plans to change it back."

Though, admittedly, the latter will effectively kill guilds entirely, making this game even LESS of a community than it has already become. If every player is an island, can you justify calling it, "Multi-player?"

"Welcome to Island of Warcraft! Your Solo Online Sandbox Where You Pass Other Players, Sometimes."
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