This is what I want from the guild management interface

Community General Discussion
1

Dear WatcherDev,

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.

9 Likes
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All of these suggestions are really good. I especially like the suggestions for a typeable search panel, and a way to link alts to mains.

A note on authenticators: although we do have the option to require an authenticator in order to move to a certain rank, we can’t actually see if there is an authenticator until we try to move that person into the rank. It would be helpful if we had some way to see if the authenticator was active prior to moving people around. There have also been times in the history of my guild where we told someone to get an authenticator for a promotion, they immediately do, and then we have to wait a week while constantly trying to get it to work.

For clarity, I’m not complaining about the delay. I’m complaining about the conversation that I have to have with the eager beaver who wants their promotion, which largely results in them saying, “Is it working now?” and me saying, “Well, let me try again” followed shortly by “Nope, it still didn’t work. It must need more time.” It would be much better if I could look and say, “It’s not seeing the authenticator just yet. I’ll keep an eye on it for you and promote you as soon as it activates.”

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Takoda, we require people to link us the Core Hound pet. For our ranks, non-authenticated toons go in one rank, while authenticated toons go in another. The linking of the pet tells us where to put the person. We’ve never encountered your issue, but that is a great suggestion.

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I would add to have a feature that would automatically move people to an inactive guild member if they are gone for a specific time. Currently, we have to go through each person and with the new guild interface it is impossible since it doesn’t sort correctly (we have to pull up the old guild roster to do this).

I would also add that we really need to be able to give specific permissions to specific ranks, including GM permissions. We have 2 co-GMs but we cannot help the main GM with the interface unless he switches his role with one of us.

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