Lol, this is one of my pet peeves as well. It seems a little odd how so many of these features seem like they were done halfway. I don’t know if it’s a budgetary issue or if they just don’t have the level of creative talent they had before - and I don’t say this to be snarky: I think the art team and the team that designs the actual game play are doing work that I really enjoy, but some of these ‘nuts and bolts’ decisions and designs are well under par. I’m wondering if they have more ‘entry level’ people working on this stuff (if anyone at all).
As I said before, permissions should not be a big deal. Mostly some simple database checks and if/else statements - an entry level programmer should be able to fix it if they wanted to fix it (assuming there is nothing seriously non-standard about their database and code).
Some of these other issues are just bad design or implementation…
I think it’s a case of there being more work than the people assigned to it can handle. By that I mean, they need more personnel, not that the people they have are incompetent. Like, a particular project might require ten people, but they only assign four.
I think all the problems with Blizzard and WoW are coming down from a management level, not from the folks who are actually doing the work. That’s just my gut feeling.
There is a bug thread on this, it has been a problem with merges for quite a while now. Yet blizz continues to force mergers on unsuspecting servers, knowing that they are borking guilds.
Crippling guild recruitment right before an expansion is unbelievable, especially when a new batch of potential recruits has just been merged in. This does not appear to affect ALL guilds after a merger, so I suspect it is a data problem with guild records, probably residue from the communities fiasco.
Another wonderful feature after the merge - my guild now has around 60 garbage member records, which can be seen by scrolling to the end of the member list. We have around 950 members, but /ginfo shows us at 1000. So does /groster, though it does not show the garbage records. The guild/communities interface shows 950, but I have no idea what to believe, and haven’t tested inviting another member.
I put in a ticket, naturally, and managed to get auto-answered (due to “volume”), lied at, then closed.
Thank you blizz, I had been dealing with the permission issue and just hoping for a surprise resolution with Shadowlands, but now I see that expecting you to care about guilds is likely just false hope.
Much appreciated, but I have been rolling alts on various of the merged servers to test all the permutations and try applying from everywhere, and have just not gotten around to getting a guildie to invite one of them yet to see how the supposed max number is affected.
And the answer is… the inflated member number wins. Inviting a new member tells me that the guild has reached maximum. Now I need to kick some more people. One of my guild’s great features is that previously active members don’t get kicked - I have had people return after 3 years astounded that they still have a guild. I have people that are off on deployment, just had a baby, or just got burned out. Now I get to artificially let 50 more potential returnees go just because someone can’t count correctly. On the bright side, they won’t have to return to a guild that can’t even set permissions properly…
Uuuuuugh, that stinks. Our general policy on kicks is that we demote to a no-access rank after 6 months, kick all alts at 12 and then hang on to the main until no one remembers who they are, lol. We’re very alt friendly, so the alt kicks aren’t optional, but we have had that same “oh gosh, I still have a guild” experience, and it’s super fun.
My whole guild is an alt guild. At least, that’s how I advertise it. A place for folks to park their alts if they’re worried about them getting kicked from their “main” guild. Characters come and go, get played or not, it doesn’t really matter.
Now, if Blizz showed more love to guilds, fixed the permissions and did some of the other things suggested in this thread, I would make it a much more active guild. But right now my guild is just a way for characters to have a shorter hearth cool-down.
I almost feel like I’ve hit on Blizz’s ultimate vision for guilds.
No changes on the problems with the guild applicants, etc. for the newly merged guilds. I looked in the bug forums and saw nothing from Blizz about it, though I confess I didn’t do a thorough search. I mean, it’s not fixed in game, so what difference does it really make what they say on the forums?
They wouldn’t want to admit that they know there is a problem, because then people might ask why they keep merging servers and creating more problems every week.
I’m assuming that they have to have the merges done either before the pre-patch or SL release … I only assume this because why else would they continue to proceed with the merges without first fixing the known problems?
I’ve seen a bunch of posts about problems, but not much in the way of replies. I’m on a realm that has been merged for years, so I’m not impacted with the worst of this, but I have seen stray characters showing up in the roster who are not in the guild and that I can’t select.
Permissions are still broken. Communities continue to be swiss cheese.
Do you have any intentions or plans to communicate with us Blizz, or fix these issues? Or will you continue to be outclassed by every other MMO while you dig your heels in and refuse to admit the systems you make with every expansion cause more frustration and unneeded complication?
We’re still here. I want this game to succeed, but it seems like every expansion there are new ways I’m disappointed. Yes, I could ‘just unsub’, but I have friends who I enjoy playing with. And I want to believe that the devs and those higher up who make these decisions will pull their heads out of the sand and realize that the current conjecture is dooming them.
It starts with the ‘small’ things. Like communicating with your community- not just when you have shiny new things… but when you owe them feedback. Especially when you owe them feedback.
Seriously, you just wrote exactly how I feel about WoW right now. Are they even trying to fix the guild problems the newly merged realms have run into? This is lamentable.
Why fix what isn’t broken? I don’t understand the mentality behind this, other than to think it may be someone given permissions in Blizzard to change things who shouldn’t be. This is very short sighted. Perhaps Blizzard needs to look at their own permissions and focus on those rather than mess with ours.
It is broken, though- Ion admitted it in an interview that what happened with guild permissions was an unintended consequence and that they were working to restore granular permissions. That they ‘wanted additional feedback’. They’ve since given us radio silence while communities themselves are literally coming apart at the seams. Considering this was a feature they were quite excited about, the fact that they don’t seem to care about the fact that the infrastructure is borked is… unfortunate.
Are there a lot of other issues that need addressing? Absolutely! And I do think Blizzard needs to do a lot of internal … soul-searching, for lack of a better? They need to remember what made this game fun, and not be afraid to go back to their roots instead of constantly trying to re-invent the wheel. But it doesn’t mean I’m not going to continually remind them that they very specifically asked us for our feedback so they could tackle this issue, and I have every intention of holding them to their word. Even if they won’t hold themselves to it.
Perhaps I misinterpreted, but I actually took Zysis’s comment to mean something along the lines of:
“Hey Blizz! Why’d you go and try to fix what wasn’t broken by messing around with our guild permissions? I just can’t wrap my mind around that sort of thinking! Blizz, you need to do some very careful self examination and focus your attention on that, instead of tinkering around with our guild permissions were you are not invite nor wanted!”
I saw no changes to the problems caused by the mergers when I was online earlier. I’m hoping tomorrow’s slightly longer maintenance will solve the issues, though I fear the extra time is only a Shadowlands prep.
It really sucks that instead of having the permissions fixed, I now have multiple other broken things to deal with. I can’t even see or invite applicants to my guild through the guild finder! Yeah, if anyone’s wondering where my optimism went, it took a critical hit from Blizz.
This is one of the most important things in the game. An MMO relies on people being able to play together, to me it goes against the terms of the service they are providing the consumer. If only, right?
The huge issue here is that the best and most important time to recruit is after a merge, and around the start of a new expansion when a lot of players are returning. We have both situations here, and our ability to recruit is cut off at the knees, with no indication when (or even if) this will be fixed. I do NOT want to abandon this guild and start a new one simply because they refuse to fix a core problem.
Very disappointed to say the problems caused by the recent merger were still there when last I checked.
I’ve been posting in this thread all along to prod Blizz into fixing the problems they caused when they introduced the communities feature. It’s beyond belief that they’ve actually managed to make things worse.
I was wondering about not being able to see the applicant history and such also I have noticed a LOT of random people in guild from different non connected realms showing up in my guild roster. I reached out to support and she removed them the first time since I had no option to kick them but now there are more…idk what they are doing with guilds but I hope it’s fixed soon
