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

[Fumel-arathor (Fumel)]

Here is an excellent post from another thread in response to the Q&A request for feedback:

@Gimmlette-llane

In your recent Q&A, you requested concrete, specific suggestions for changes in the guild management tools. As a guild leader for 11.5 years, I can speak to what I, and my officers, would like to see.

• I want the ability to add more ranks. Nine is not enough. Players have a sense of attachment to a guild when they feel longevity is rewarded. I don’t care if I have to cough up 10k gold per new rank but I want the ability to reward people for being here. I can see this could get out of hand, but how about “up to 15 ranks”, for instance.
• I want an interface that is the size of the calendar. I want a panel which can display up to three columns. One column is “currently online”, one column is the entire roster, and one column is professions. The type size is too tiny. I need to be able to see my roster. For the average player, they would be able to select – via a button – how much of this interface they wish to see.
• I want a typeable search panel that allows me to sort the roster by class, race, name, server, rank, and have ONLY those names I’m looking for show up. I want to be able to type a name and have all that person’s toons show up. This would require labeling on our part, something we do when a person joins.
• Speaking as the leader, I want that “Guild Permissions” box to be double the size. It’s hard to read.
• When I invite an alt, I want a box where I can attach an alt to a main.
• The two notes sections of player panels – general and officer – need to be larger and allow more characters to contain more information.
• Guild Event specific calendar. Instead of a drop down menu, it should be a clickable button which allows you to set repeated events as either “event”, “guild event”, or “other” and it needs to be larger.
• The Guild Message of the Day needs to be loaded in AFTER all the other things that show up when you log on. OR…and I would prefer this…give us a guild bulletin board where there is a message of the day as well as any information officers need to give to people. Plus, people could use this in addition to in-game letters, to post notes like "I’m going to be on vacation.” All messages should age off the bulletin board at two weeks and the board would only hold 10 messages at a time.
• Attendance tracking for those guilds who monitor attendance. Have a panel on the roster where you can just check who actually shows up at an event. Also a line to add names of people who come but did not sign up.
• A button to click if the person has an authenticator. (We use this demarcation for bank permissions.)
• A log of guild activity with date and time stamp, just like the bank log. When a toon is added to the guild, there should be an automatic date, time stamp, and the name of the person who invited.
• If someone gets kicked, I want a way to flag them so they don’t try to rejoin under another name. It’s only happened to us once, way back in Wrath, and it may not be an issue, but as long as we’re talking about things which would make guild maintenance better, I would like this.

So, here you have Spectacular Death’s concrete, specific list of items we’d like to see which would improve guild management. I need to note, the tools I’m using now are the exact same ones I used when I formed my guild 11.5 years ago. There hasn’t been much change other than the recent consolidation of guild leader permissions.

I hope this is a start in getting much needed change for managing guilds. I feel that the sense of community found with guilds has been gutted in the last three expansions. We need support from the developers to enhance the experience we provide to players.