The new Guild UI and Permissions...yikes

/thread
@Raicolette

Thank you for your response. Point well made.

I'm aware of the changes that were made, I've been a Guild Lead or Officer of one guild or another for a VERY long time.

It wasn't until I had my leadership core and other members complain about not having access to one aspect or another till I finally looked. As I had my guild permissions set they way I wanted them and didn't have to mess with them again.

When I saw the change, I was both shocked and furious at the same time.

Out of the 400-500 individual people that have posted here... I can only imagine how many more that don't even bother to look at these forums are upset by these changes.

While this is a "containment" it also makes things easier to get to instead of 101 different posts.

I and anyone else can only hope that functionality will be restored. And like you if not I'll be looking to other sources.

So to Blizzard

These changes will not keep me from running my guild. I will just run it without using your product or interface in order to do so in the capasity that you would want your players to do so.
There's not one darn new thing I like about this new Guild UI. I want the old one back because it was simple, small, and convenient. The addon here that I described, makes managing alts, seeing the log of everything, and just general management smoother and easier.
I think I'll look into that addon, Raicollette. Thanks for mentioning it.

As I've said before, the changes don't affect the management of my tiny guild because there isn't really anything to manage. But I truly despise how the interface takes up half my screen. I hate the look, which is every bit as dysfunctional (in my opinion) as the all-in-one permissions. If I have to go to an outside source to get an appearance I prefer, so be it.
Since Ion asked for more feedback, I am happy to oblige.

“Is Officer”
My objection to this setting is largely based in the fact that I had two ranks that I considered Officer level ranks. The lower level rank had access to most of these abilities, but not admin ones (such as MOTD and edit ginfo). The higher level rank was more of a co-GM position that has access to every permission I can possibly give out.

Under the current system, I do not have a functional difference between these two ranks, and lose the sense of progression from “Officer” to “Co-GM.” I also dislike how it forces me to decide up front if I trust someone enough to give them full access to the guild, rather than providing the option to ease someone into a responsible role more slowly. The way I see it, there are two options for moving forward.

    1) Differentiate the “admin” level permissions from the “officer” level permissions – this will work for my guild, but I can't speak for others.
    2) Unbundle “is officer” so permissions can be indivudially selected – This should work well for everyone.


Below is a feature specific breakdown for how we use the “IsOfficer” options: (Thanks Irannia!)

Feature: Access officer channels
How it was used: We rarely use officer chat.
How did the changes affect my guild: n/a.
Workaround: n/a

Feature: Remove people from voice chat
How it was used: We don't use this.
How did the changes affect my guild: n/a.
Workaround: We use Discord instead.

Feature: Delete other people's chat messages
How it was used: We haven't had need to use this yet. I did test it to see how it works.
How did the changes affect my guild: n/a.
Workaround: n/a

Feature: Delete other people's guild events
How it was used: This was available to both of my officer ranks. It wasn't used commonly, but sometimes someone wanted to set up a transmog run or something, and would need some help with it.
How did the changes affect my guild: TBH, I don't know. We had some issues with the calendar and about 5 of us were trying to get an event to work, pasting and deleting, asking who can see it now. At the time, I wrote it off as “just another bug” and posted an announcement in Discord instead. In retrospect, it may have been at least partially due to this setting.
Workaround: Discord announcement

Feature: View and edit officer notes
How it was used: I actually had this available to everyone in the guild. We used them for telling jokes, posting profession or ilvl info. It was like extra space on the public note.
How did the changes affect my guild: We have basically abandoned the officer notes and no longer use them.
Workaround: Jokes are in Discord, the other aspects are unused.

Feature: Edit public notes
How it was used: Everyone had access to public notes as well. We mark alts in the public note.
How did the changes affect my guild: Alts are not getting marked. Between alts, returning players, and people who recently joined the guild, there is quite a bit of confusion about who someone is, and it makes it difficult to tell who is online. This also has the side effect of slowing down the process of forming groups.
Workaround: None so far. If I'm not online, alts are usually not getting marked. (I need to check out that addon that everyone is talking about.)

Feature: Edit ginfo/MOTD
How it was used: This was available to me and co-GMs (but not the officer rank). Typically, I was the only one to actually use it. Occasionally, our raid lead would post a MOTD.
How did the changes affect my guild: I was forced to choose between taking away all other permissions from my 2nd officer rank, or giving them access to everything.
Workaround: For now, I did check the “Is Officer” box on the lower officer rank. But I did some demotions first for the people that I wasn't comfortable having access to those permissions.

In sum, because I had multiple levels of Officer, my structure is broken. To top it all off (and the thing that really upset me) is that I was completely blindsided by this change. I'm sure that Blizzard has the technology to send a courtesy email to all accounts that hold a GM spot. And the capacity definitely exists to say that this change is coming, and to ask for feedback.

What happened in my guild is that all ranks except the co-GM rank defaulted to having “Is Officer” unchecked. So without my knowledge or consent, my 2nd officer ranks were stripped of most of their ability to do anything. Since I had a few of these permissions available to everyone, nearly everyone in my guild ended up losing permissions.

Wishlist

I also spoke with the people in my guild about what we would like to see moving forward. Overwhelmingly, the response was, “Fix the bugs.” I know a lot bugs have been addressed already, but we are still running into bugs every day. I'll not elaborate here, since this thread is not about bugs.

We still did come up with some suggestions. A lot of these suggestions are not directly related to the “Is Officer” box, but they do tie directly into the idea that has been mentioned several times. Guilds need MORE permissions and customization, not less. I know that at least some of these have been mentioned previously. This is just the wishlist for my guild. To that end, I would like to see the following added to guilds:

Recruitment (Is currently a giant mess and needs some attention desperately)
    The guild finder needs major help. I need to be able to provide more information about my guild. And people who are looking for a guild need to have better sorting/search tools to help them find a guild that is a good fit.

    We need a mechanism to invite while offline, such as sending the invite via in-game mail. Probably 90% of the time that I go to invite someone from the guild finder, I can't because they are offline.

    Link the recruitment page to a “recrutiment officer” permission that provides notifications via pop up or in game mail to let guild officers know that a new request was entered. In my guild, we frequently don't see a request to join for a really long time. An alert would be super helpful because then I (or a designated officer) could handle the invite immediately if we are online, or when we get back if offline.


Communication
    Ability to turn off perma chat on a rank level. My preference would be that myself and my co-GM rank would be able to access perma chat for all logs. For guild leadership, it will be a useful tool for researching complaints about things that happened in gchat. If I had the choice, I would set other ranks to have a set duration (such as 24 hours). That way, I wouldn't have to worry about sensitive subjects remaining in the logs forever.

    Better integration with guilds and communities. Specifically, I'd love for the ability to have communities serve as a “bridge” between guild chat and friends/family on other servers. Sort of like a guild extension that would let them actually participate in the guild in a limited fashion (like chat, but no bank access for example). I actually thought this was how it was going to work. I was very disappointed when I found out that it doesn't work that way.

    More space in ginfo. I'm constantly running out of room. We have our one rule, some basic info, and a discord link. I am unable to add community links due to the lack of space. Should we decide to expand into communities, I will have to post the links in Discord instead.

    Default hide guild/officer chat from before you had permission to see it. This one is super obvious. If a sensitive discussion is taking place in guild/officer chat about if someone should be invited or promoted, that person shouldn't be able to see the log.


Management
    Ability to mute indivudial players, not ranks. My raid lead mentioned this. He would like the ability to choose to mute someone for set durations, like 30 mins, 24 hours, or until unmuted.

    Ability to tell ilvl in the guild pane, rather than needing to armory check. This is just a QOL thing. In my guild, we don't pay a ton of attention to ilvl, but it would be very useful to be able to check in the guild pane how everyone is coming along on their gearing goals. Currently, I have to manually check everyone's armory. (Which is super awkward when someone has funky letters in their name.) If I had the option, I would prefer if this is not prominent in the guild pane or an optional permission that I can give to officers only.

    Ability to mass delete everything someone said from the logs. I'm really not looking forward to the day when some idiot goes ham in guild chat and no officers were online for hours to kick/mute them. Please give me the ability to remove all that garbage from the logs easily.

    Ability to promote/demote/kick an account rather than just a toon. I like to have alts on the same rank as mains in my guild. I would like to see an optional feature to make this easier on roster management. As is, I always miss an alt, or it wasn't marked in public note. It would be nice to have a clean roster with everyone where they are supposed to be.

    Ability to give officers a different color chat when they speak in guild or some logo to differentiate them from a normal member. I mostly want this for onboarding new members – a sort of “talk to this person if you need help.” But I could see it working for some guilds as a reward structure too.
Checking in again to make sure my voice is heard. Everyone contributing to this discussion needs to keep doing so.

As of right now, I haven't assigned anyone in our guild with the "Is Officer" box since there are certain permissions I will not assign to anyone in the guild, regardless of rank. As a result of this, nobody in the guild has access to any of those eight privileges lumped under that single box. This one-size-fits-all intervention penalizes everyone in the guild.

Please give us the individual permission customization we had prior to patch 8.0. That's it. That's all I'm asking for at the basic level.

For further recommendations to help guild management, add a complete log/record system for the guild bank so the guild master can keep track of cumulative records on gold deposits, repairs, withdraws, item deposits, and item withdraws. If WoW developers can create and maintain a statistics tab with all kinds of totally useless information for my character dating back to the start of the stats system, they can add a simple feature that lets me keep track of a few total guild bank records.

Please address sooner than later. This thread began on July 17. We're now at August 27 and we're two full weeks into BfA content. I'm not asking for an apology from whoever made this change. Just revert the permissions change. That's it. I and MANY others have already given detailed explanations and feedback. You have what you need.

I will continue to check in here until the change is made. Everyone else needs to do so, too.
I've already posted, but I am very interested in keeping this topic alive.

I want Blizzard to know, that until this fiasco with the loss of guild control, I was of the opinion that they (Blizzard) generally had my back.

No longer.

I have not always agreed with changes made to the game (I wont get into those as they are irrelevant in my opinion) but I always excepted Blizz's decisions as what's "best for the game"

The main differences here are as follows.

A} Previous decisions were always made with an announcement of some sort. I was never completely taken by surprise as I was this time with the almost total loss of guild control.

B} The decisions made by Blizz in the past were generally intended as some sort of improvement to "quality of life". There is NONE of that here.

The FACT here is that Blizz decided to ROB me and every other GM on Warcraft of our guild control (control that I for one have had for better than 12 years) without telling us.

We the GM's of Wow were blindsided.

Fact: There is NO improvement to the quality of my life, my guild's life, nor to our game-play.

Fact: As far as I can tell, there are zero threads out there praising this decision and thanking Blizzard for the wonderful new guild ui and "streamlined control"

Fact: there are multiple threads trashing the new and "improved" guild ui / loss of control.

Fact: Blizzard needs to listen to the players. Read these threads carefully. You have foolishly stepped on many many toes here. You will see that NO ONE wants less control. What they want is MORE control over their guilds.
(Chime in and prove me wrong GM's of Warcraft who are actually happy with their loss and control and dumbed down guild ui)

Fact: Blizzard needs to step up and fix this asap. The players are not happy.
08/26/2018 10:40 PMPosted by Takoda
Ability to turn off perma chat on a rank level. My preference would be that myself and my co-GM rank would be able to access perma chat for all logs. For guild leadership, it will be a useful tool for researching complaints about things that happened in gchat. If I had the choice, I would set other ranks to have a set duration (such as 24 hours). That way, I wouldn't have to worry about sensitive subjects remaining in the logs forever.
I really like a lot of your ideas, Takoda, but this is one of my favorites. I don't know enough about programming to know how much work it would be to implement this, but the usefulness of such a feature is top notch.

I know a lot of folks really don't like the permanent chat, but they would probably be okay with it if it functioned like you suggest. Allow the GM to set how long chat is visible and to whom is a beautiful idea.

08/26/2018 10:40 PMPosted by Takoda
More space in ginfo. I'm constantly running out of room. We have our one rule, some basic info, and a discord link. I am unable to add community links due to the lack of space. Should we decide to expand into communities, I will have to post the links in Discord instead.
This is another terrific suggestion that would benefit even a small guild like mine. I'd love to see this implemented.

Of course, as always, the main thing I want is to have the permissions separated out like they used to be. I believe the need for this has been explained enough times throughout this thread that I don't need to repeat it.
Suggestion
Chat history - the ability to change the time the chat history goes back for the guild unlimited, 30 days, 7 days, 1 day, etc.

I thought it was unlimited but on log in this morning it appears that the prior history is gone. Maybe related to tuesday reset or a new patch?
08/28/2018 09:44 AMPosted by Kohmet
Suggestion
Chat history - the ability to change the time the chat history goes back for the guild unlimited, 30 days, 7 days, 1 day, etc.

I thought it was unlimited but on log in this morning it appears that the prior history is gone. Maybe related to tuesday reset or a new patch?


Mine is the same as it was before.

It would be nice to hear what Blizzard thinks of the suggestions so far, because a lot of feedback has been given at this point. Customization and functionality was lost, and the only thing we gained in return was persistent chat. Which should have been an option, not a forced feature.
If only there was a giant, 69 page thread outlining people's concerns with the new guild permissions system breaking how guilds are ran.... then, Ion wouldn't have to say they were looking for feedback on a Q&A.....
08/26/2018 10:40 PMPosted by Takoda
Default hide guild/officer chat from before you had permission to see it. This one is super obvious. If a sensitive discussion is taking place in guild/officer chat about if someone should be invited or promoted, that person shouldn't be able to see the log.


This! Definitely so for officer chat discussions.
Still not fixed still causing issues.

"Is Officer" needs to be fixed by breaking guilds in this fashion you basically have broken relationships and are causing trust issues between huge masses of your playerbase. Even if you can't see it now its a hidden wave that will become a tsunami later.
Feature: Change officer note.

How my wife uses it: To keep track of when people joined and whose alts belonged to whom.

Workaround: 20 minute diatribe every day about how the guild used to be much easier to control followed by a query of "am I right?". Arbitrary head nod required or I face severe consequences for trying to pay attention to Kevin Owens vs. Seth Rollins aka Match of the Effing Year.

Blizzard plz fix.
08/28/2018 04:37 PMPosted by Venjin
Feature: Change officer note.

How my wife uses it: To keep track of when people joined and whose alts belonged to whom.

Workaround: 20 minute diatribe every day about how the guild used to be much easier to control followed by a query of "am I right?". Arbitrary head nod required or I face severe consequences for trying to pay attention to Kevin Owens vs. Seth Rollins aka Match of the Effing Year.

Blizzard plz fix.


This one has been the most obnoxious of the remaining issues for many I think. MANY guilds have people who aren't under the crazy "Is Officer" umbrella who still have invite privileges. It used to be so simple for them to set the officer note when they invite someone to the player's main's name, who invited, for what team, date, etc.
will keep my critique short as the issues I'm encountering are the same as those reported by others: loss of fine permission control, annoying bugs, etc.

The fact is that blizzard wants in on the Voice/Text chat bandwagon that players already have using Discord (and Slack/others to a lesser degree). Blizzard invested resources to this end and the result is piss-poor and will only serve to drive players further way from their new "Social" option. Why use a tool that gives you just three options of control when, with a third party solution, you can have super fine granular admin control, plus links, images, friends from other games and guilds can join and you're not limited by game studio.... Not to mention with overlays you can have your third party solution appear integrated into your gaming experience.

Blizz did the exact same thing with their first go at in-game voice and it failed as it too was piss-poor plus players were already happy with Vent/TeamSpeek/etc.

Why couldn't Blizzard have spent the resources they used on the social stuff on something players have been requesting for over a decade: player/guild housing? The short answer is because whatever politics were going on over at Blizzard meant that someone wanted to stroke their ego and dabble in VoIP and thus move players off the hacked IRC-based setup that has been in use for well over a decade—or they had a friend they had hired that wanted to dabble. The end result: a craptastic implementation of something players don't need which crippled the one existing tool that actually was used by long standing communities within the game.

Also for users wanting better visibility into join/leave activity as well as a few other bells and whistles, I use Guild Roster Manager. It's not as good as the now defunct Guild Warden, but it's not terrible. If only I could find someone willing to resurrect Guild Warden....
bump
I pray to Elune someone is working hard on this because after 69 pages it's looking extremely bleak, frustrating even.

There is no amount of feedback that I can give that hasn't been stated twelve times over in this thread, and at this point it's looking like an echo chamber of lost hope. Please revert the changes, then look into improving. Improving means giving more options without lumping them all under one category, allowing more player control of what they've created.

If what you're worried about, Blizzard, is player domination pushing people away, need I remind that this is an MMORPG, meaning that for every four guilds you find that don't fit your bill there is always at least one that will feel like home.

Please stop giving player freedom. It only makes things frustrating and ends up moving players to a third party system in order to do what they want.
Feature: Edit Guild Message of the Day.

How my wife uses it: Yes, it gets buried in addon spam, but it's her surefire way of saying "Hey you were notified of X in the MotD and it's been like that for days". Due to previous officer turnover, the MotD has been exclusively controlled by the GM since 2008.

Workaround: She's been spamming guild chat with notifications. Manually. On a schedule. And guess who's responsible for reminding her? Even when that person is knee-deep into a cutscene on his brand new copy of Yakuza 2 Kiwami?

<-- THIS GUY!

And if I fail? 10 minute discussion on how "I need to get on board with what she's trying to do here".

Blizzard plz fix.
08/29/2018 02:37 PMPosted by Venjin
Feature: Edit Guild Message of the Day.

How my wife uses it: Yes, it gets buried in addon spam, but it's her surefire way of saying "Hey you were notified of X in the MotD and it's been like that for days". Due to previous officer turnover, the MotD has been exclusively controlled by the GM since 2008.

Workaround: She's been spamming guild chat with notifications. Manually. On a schedule. And guess who's responsible for reminding her? Even when that person is knee-deep into a cutscene on his brand new copy of Yakuza 2 Kiwami?

<-- THIS GUY!

And if I fail? 10 minute discussion on how "I need to get on board with what she's trying to do here".

Blizzard plz fix.


*makes snapping sound of a whip!*

J/K! I've been happily married for 35 years. You do what you gotta do to keep the SO other happy!
08/29/2018 04:10 PMPosted by Chelives
08/29/2018 02:37 PMPosted by Venjin
Feature: Edit Guild Message of the Day.

How my wife uses it: Yes, it gets buried in addon spam, but it's her surefire way of saying "Hey you were notified of X in the MotD and it's been like that for days". Due to previous officer turnover, the MotD has been exclusively controlled by the GM since 2008.

Workaround: She's been spamming guild chat with notifications. Manually. On a schedule. And guess who's responsible for reminding her? Even when that person is knee-deep into a cutscene on his brand new copy of Yakuza 2 Kiwami?

<-- THIS GUY!

And if I fail? 10 minute discussion on how "I need to get on board with what she's trying to do here".

Blizzard plz fix.


*makes snapping sound of a whip!*

J/K! I've been happily married for 35 years. You do what you gotta do to keep the SO other happy!


Not gonna lie, the benefits are worth the work! Especially in WoW since she's my healer lol.