Help! We need more guild management tools!

ashlee17

Join our call for Change!
Edit*** This thread has now expanded far beyond my original concern and now serves as a rally cry for Zos to give us the guild management tools we need to build strong guilds and communities in Elder Scrolls Online. Please show your support!

Guild banks - All for one or one for all?

As a guild administrator I am faced with a few unfortunate choices.
Should I leave the guild bank open to all members or close it off to all but a select few?
Will members need to beg a moderator anytime they need some snake slime or a stick of yew?
Will guild officers be required to spend more time babysitting and watching over the guild bank then they do playing?
Should guild members just vendor or destroy the items they don't personally need because it is too hard to share them equally amongst guild mates?

I say NO!

I dream of a tamriel where guilds can put reasonable limits on guild withdrawals.
I dream of a day where guild bank access is not all or nothing and guild members can sleep well knowing that what they donate to the guild bank is acessable to those that need it but safe from greed and theft.
I dream of sleeping soundly knowing that the guild logs go back more than 30 or so items and I can go back and look over it later.

Please please comment and vote! Zos needs this brought to their attention so we are no longer faced with an awful choice! Support guilds - Support Community!

AlexDougherty

You need a tiered system where people who prove themselves gain more access to the guild bank. But obviously you don't want newcomers having access until they earn it.

ashlee17

Please please make being in a guild a better and more rewarding experience by allowing us to share goods with our guild mates safely and much more easily. Help us allow greater access to guild members and less work for guild moderators!

ashlee17

If you are in a guild please help us bring this topic to attention by voting and commenting below. I would love to have the tools and information to help me set up a More Than Fair and balanced approach to sharing guild resources amongst its members.

I hope Zos have already figured recognized this problem. To quote a God..

UrQuan

I'd like to see several levels of guild bank (probably 2-5 levels). For simplicity of this explanation let's say 3 levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

When you're depositing you select which level you're depositing into, and when you're withdrawing you select which level you're looking at (or you select all levels to see items in all levels). Different ranks have withdrawal access to different levels.

Primary withdrawal access lets you withdraw from any bank level.

Secondary withdrawal access lets you withdraw from both secondary bank level and tertiary bank level.

Tertiary withdrawal access only allows you to withdraw from the tertiary bank level.

This could either be set up so that bank slots aren't designated for a specific level (ie. you could have 500 items in the primary level, or 500 in the tertiary level, or any combination of items in any combination of levels up to a maximum of 500 items total in the bank), or a certain number of slots could be allocated to each level. If it was set up with slots allocated to the levels, I would want that allocation to be up to the guild leader.

With a setup like this you can ensure that there's a portion usable by all guild newbies, which would be where people would put items that they think might be helpful for others, or that they just don't care about keeping. At the same time, you have other portions where items can be kept safe so that you don't need to worry about a new, unproven guild member raiding the entire bank and running, but once a guild member has proven to be trustworthy, you can give him/her access to other parts of the bank.

ashlee17

Sorry to hear about your sweet roll UrQuan. It's an unfortunate side effect of keeping them in a guild bank Fimmion must have joined your guild!



I love your ideas above and I think something like that could go a long way to helping everyone protect and share their sweetrolls with guild mates in the future! Thanks for commenting - hopefully we can bring this issue to the attention of Zos!

ashlee17

The other benefit of giving guilds more varried guild bank permission settings would be the countless hours zos customer service that would be saved. They would no longer need to be responding to and investigating guild bank access related issues such as theft or missuse.

Lets give Zos all of the feedback they need to create stronger guilds!

I'll settle for ease..
But i dream of wow..

s7732425ub17_ESO

What you do is this:

New members to the guild are "Rank X." However, the guild bank is only open to members of "Rank Y" and above. To go from X to Y, a member has to show that they are legit, so that no random new guy can come and raid the bank.

redspecter23

s7732425ub17_ESO wrote: »

What you do is this:

New members to the guild are "Rank X." However, the guild bank is only open to members of "Rank Y" and above. To go from X to Y, a member has to show that they are legit, so that no random new guy can come and raid the bank.

I'm guessing most large guilds do this already. As stated by the OP, often "rank Y" is officer and above in order to prevent abuse of the system. The OP suggests more tiers so that in situations like this, more members can have access.

Your idea works great but it is still an all or nothing system so there is a lot of trust involved in getting to "rank Y". I'd prefer a system that allows tiered access from rank W > rank X > rank Y > rank Z so members have a chance to earn that trust instead of a black and white yes/no, all/nothing system.

ashlee17

Thanks reading this post and for your suggestion s7732425ub_ESO! It could help a little as a temporary alternative and a stop gap measure. But with large guilds that often add up to 10 new members per day it can be almost impossible to keep track of every guild member. Once again the lack of guild tools and tiny fraction of guild log history avalible makes this solution hazardous at best and paralyzing to guild growth at worst. Again I humbly ask you all to join the call for zos to add some new features to make running a guild bank (and guild) more enjoyable, less stressful and More Than Fair for all.

Natjur

But then I will not be able to 'borrow' so much was random guilds

Flaminir

I totally agree with OP.... more tools need to be available for guild admin full stop... this is just one of the issues that makes the GM/Officer role more time consuming than it should be.

It's all or nothing... black or white.... we need to introduce a few shades of grey in for this one.

Being able to specify the number of withdrawals in a 24hr period would be a good start. That way people could still get the bits & bobs they need, without being able to raid your bank for everything you have (Or at the very least all the valuable stuff).

Sord

To make this easy for each rank a person gets allows them the ability to take X amount of items out of the guild bank. Rank 1 gets to remove nothing from the bank each day, Rank 2 get to remove 2 items per day, Rank 3 gets to remove 5, etc etc. There can also be different levels, for example there is a section that is a free for all no limits, another level can be as I listed above for more important things and 3 level can be for only Officers and GL and Level 4 is for GL where the most expensive things are.

This way a bank can't be robbed so easily and limits can be placed based on rank and via level of item placement.

When someone deposits something they can decide which level it is deposited at for security purposes as well. Just my thoughts on how I think a guild bank should be. Also the GL can designate how many items slots are in each level. example : Lvl 1= 25 slots, lvl 2 = 200, lvl 3 = 175, Lvl 4 = 100 slots

Edit: Just saw that someone posted a similar idea just above me, his post wasn't there when I started writing lol.

ashlee17

Love your ideas everyone! Keep them comming! It's great to know that I'm not alone! I love the idea of tiered access and being able to set a withdraw limit per rank. That could work really well and provide a gentle introduction to the guild while still retaining accessibility. Hopefully if we keep getting votes and comments zos will become aware of the situation and provide us with a solution

Zos/ESO and lack of guild tools - You are older and wiser now!Please correct the folly of youth!

WhiskyBob

How hard would it be to give guild banks few different sections with different levels of accessibility?

If you want to see how perfect banking system works try EvE Online.

SFBryan18

A good option would be "Request for withdraw" where members could select items that they wish to take out, and wait for approval. Then maybe the leader or higher ups could negotiate a price to be deposited into the bank before the request is granted. However, not a bad idea to just mail them with an offer if you see something you like.

ashlee17

Still hoping for a response from Zos


Thanks for leaving a comment WhiskyBob and SFBrian18 currently using a request for withdrawal system would be very time consuming for officers when you have a large guild. Guild officers are volenteers and burn out is an issue. It would also slow people's access to gear that they need significantly. For example - we keep a few low lvl crafted sets in the guild bank free for members to use. I want low lvl guild members to be able to take and use a low lvl set immediately because delays mean that they might out level the set before they even have access to it. What I don't want is someone to be able to withdraw all the low lvl sets at once to mistakenly use for deconstruction. If Zos becomes aware of our plight they maybe be able to help us out with some more tools. Good guilds help players and create strong communities. The faster and more efficiently we can help our members (without risking having our guild bank cleaned out by a single player) the better it will be for all.

Zos please give us more guild management tools!

Vairkjosab14_ESO

Tiered makes the best sense to me. Otherwise just keep probationary period for a few days!

aceofspades49

I like the idea of this and think that a tiered bank system would be very useful. Allowing people to only take things according to their level of access, meaning that if we allowed access by the level of the item(1-9) a person with level of 1 bank access could take out iron and other things of that level while a person of level 9 would be able to take voidstone ingots. This could also be put into place for gear, a level 1 access could take items of level 1-10, a level 3 would be able to acess the gear of level 21-30 and so on. Another way is to add on something that shows the value of items added, that way as a guild moderator(I am in 2 guilds at this level, Fariy Tail Guild and More than Fair) and Guild leader( The Ebon Blades) we can view and decide if a member should be giving more access to the bank.

ashlee17

Thanks for joining our call for ZoS to provide guilds with better Guild Bank Controls Vairkjosab14_ESO and aceofspades49

Being able to set access to items based on the guild members character level would be cool - to make sure that only level 20's can withdraw level 20ish armor but not take things that they cannot use.

That way they could have instance access to things they can use

Zos please give us more guild management tools! Pretty please!

Psychobunni

I think a simple ability to limit withdrawals that the guild leader could check off in the ranks would solve the problem.

Don't need a tiered system, where Joe is okay with putting in Kuta in tier one, but so is Sally in tier 2, and Adam in tier 3....3 space slots taken up by the same item...multiple times and you effectively killed usefulness of the GB because of the many multiple items.

The only downside to limits is it would have to be able to be assigned so guild leaders/officers could still run the auto stacker programs, make space as needed. Or.....ZOS could like, actually fix it.... so that the bank stacked itself.(maybe asking a bit too much on that one)

ashlee17

Thanks for commenting Psychobunni Every comment and vote helps us bring this problem to light and bring us one step closer to a fix!

I hadn't anticipated the problem of the same items taking up multiple slots with same item using a tiered system. That would be very annoying. Maybe they can stack withdrawals from that stack depend on the acess lvl. (you might be able to take some of the stack but not all of it if you are under the tier for part of it.

I am also a huge fan of auto guild bank stackers (another stop gap measure until a better solution is available to guilds). Hopefully they can return guild banks to auto stacking at some point as well. Anything that will make life eaiser for people joining, using, running or creating guilds would be fantastic!

Just for your help I am going to add an image of my favorite ever ESO glitch! My werewolf misses horse riding!

ashlee17

I have been thinking more about how we could make guilds easier to manage and more attractive to players. How about introducing some kind of guild participation and recognition system? Maybe Zos could give us a system similar to the system the forum uses to encourage us to comment and participate?

Gidorick

After dumping a bunch of stuff into a guild bank I decided to just use the Guild Store... at least there I get paid for my stuff.

ashlee17

Thanks for commenting Gidorick.

Unfortunately I can totally understand your sentiment. With no way for you to know/track how your donation helps others or for guild leaders to recognize your contribution to the guild it can seem pointless to donate to a guild bank.

One again I call on the powers that be to help us by providing more guild controls, logs and tools to help us recognize those that contribute to guilds and ensure that donations are able to be used effectively to help all guild members.

Help zos hear us! Comment to help us call for change!

istateres

I want to tier BOTH the guild members AND the item in the bank. So maybe level 1 guild member can get bank tier 1 items only, etc. Kuna ends up in tier 4, etc.

Overall, ANY extar tools to help manage membership, banks, etc. would be helpful. Like email, the systems currently in place are minimal at best.

radiostar

Use Bank Item Permissions

Every GB item/stack has tickboxes.
Boxes are only viewable/useable by the GMaster and designated bank officers.
Choices could be "GM", ">RANK X", ">RANK Y", etc., with the last choice "ALL".

Every deposit to the bank defaults to GM only for withdraw.
The Guild Master and designated bank officers can tick off the boxes to make the items release for guild members.

At the banker, guild member selects Guild Bank and sees the bank items as usual.
In the Withdraw Window, beneath the item-type icon selectors is another row with icons for GM, >Rank X, >Rank Y, etc., ending in ALL.
Hovering the mousepointer over those icons gives a tooltip of who is allowed to withdraw and clicking those icons displays all the corresponding bank items for that level of withdraw.

Guild member can then press the appropriate permission icon and then the item-type icon (or vice versa) and have only those items displayed available to withdraw.

Guild Members can always see what's in the whole bank, but can only remove what has been designated by guild leaders for their rank.

I'm hoping this sounds more complicated than it is to implement.

IceDread

If they can not even filter out the wrong languages on the forums... or make the inventory/bank a real inventory system.. one can not even guess if improvements to guild management will ever come.

Antiquity

FFXIV has a tiered guild bank system, and as an officer, I hated it. 3 of something stacked taking up a slot in tier 1, 15 of the same thing taking up a slot on tier 2...... It usually fell on my shoulders to clean and organize the bank. And it usually needed done twice a week. Not to mention putting things I was working on on hold to get stuff out for lower ranking members.

While I am not and never intend to be a guild officer in ESO, here's my two cents:

First, it would be tiered to allow more trusted players access to higher tiers. But, it would be a tiered system with options out the ass.

Auto-reject:
Guild officers have the ability to disallow groups of things from being deposited. Tick the box next to "Level 1 Provisioning Materials" and anyone who tries to deposit Thin Broth or Meal gets a message stating Level 1 Provisioning Mats are not allowed for deposit. It could also be done for gear in ten level batches by quality - for example, a master tick box for gear levels 1-10, with sub-toggles for white/green/blue/purple/gold qualities. So you could,say, reject level 5 white gear but accept level 5 blue gear.

Auto-stack:
So let's say you choose to accept ALL provisioning mats. Through the use of tick boxes once again, you can choose to have all level 1 provisioning mats go to X tier. All level 2 provisioning mats go to Y tier. If the designated tier's slots are full, the item is rejected.

There would be a toggle for whether you wanted the ability to have more than 1 stack of 100 of an item. If on, anything after 100 of an item is rejected. If off, you could have the whole tier full of 100 stacks of one item, if you wanted.

-If this toggle was on, and there were 93 meal in the bank, and a player deposited 10 meal, 7 would kept (stacked with the 93 to make 100) and 3 would be rejected back to the player.

-If an item's designated tier is full, the item is rejected.

Withdrawal requests:
No more of officers having to run to the bank and grab out items for lower rank members.

Sally has only been in the guild for three days, but really needs three dwarven oil from tier two, so she can upgrade her battleaxe. Sally right-clicks the dwarven oil and hits "send request". A box pops up and asks her how many, she inputs 3 and hits "send".

All online officers get a notification, viewable at their leisure, detailing Sally's request. Officer Steve sees the request and approves it. The notification disappears from all other officers' notification boxes, and the 3 dwarven oil are automatically sent to Sally's inbox. If no officers were online, the first one to log on would have gotten it. If the request had been denied, Sally would have gotten mail informing her of such.

---

Yay look, I wrote a novel! ;p

ElfFromSpace

A group of guild leaders presented a very detailed list of suggestions directly to the ZOS staff over a month ago. I know it's a long list, but I think it's worth copying here. The developers received this list of suggestions very well, but unfortunately I think the console release and other issues have received higher priority over these sort of changes:

Bidding System
Bidding system puts a huge strain on players, especially guild leadership. Trade guilds depend on their kiosk to attract and retain membership. Without a kiosk they can’t make sales to add to the guild bank. Trying to guess how much gold is needed to secure the kiosk is daunting, and when a bid is lost members get upset and rapidly abandon guilds. Bidders get up just before 7 am to place the bid last minute to deter spying, and to rush for open kiosks if their bid is lost. By working together some guilds have established themselves in favorite spots and maintain a degree of stability. We also help each other out looking for open stalls at 7 am. But this is very tenuous and we never know if someone will drop an unreasonably high bid one week just to push us out or to move up into a better spot. Every week trade guilds fold from failure to maintain a good kiosk, and the leadership often leaves the game rather than rebuilding.

Please disable the Hired Trader category on the guild history. It serves us no positive purpose and has led to us repeatedly increasing our bids by small amounts in an attempt to hide them. This could potentially spam the servers worse than bank restacking. Make the bid history only visible to people with permission to hire traders.


Allow guilds to place a backup bid on a secondary kiosk. Prevent the need to wake up before 7am EST Monday morning to secure an open kiosk if a bid is lost.

Ability to cancel a bid to prevent unreasonable bid amounts entered by mistake or miscommunication from resulting in guild bankruptcy and eventual dissolve.

Location
Relocate city kiosks to more central areas such as banks, wayshrines, and crafting stations.
Incentive to bid on kiosks along roadsides, e.g., relocate them nearer to set bonus crafting stations and dungeon entrances.

Brainstorming Bid Ideas
Guild Halls as selling points
City bidding- You bid on a city and the top 5 guilds are placed in that city.


Recruitment

Guild recruitment posting boards that allow guild leaders to purchase weekly advertising posts. Allow players to request guild invites from these posting boards.

Allow players to view guild info and request invites to guilds from hired kiosk locations.

Implement a Guild Finder or Guild Search function that allows players to contact guild leaders and or recruitment officers. This would allow players to request invites to specific guilds and for guild leaders to seek collaboration with others for events, trade, PvP, trials, etc.


Roster

Leave Guild Hotkey
Guild members and even leaders have accidentally left their guilds because the “Leave Guild” and “Add Member” buttons are in the same location on different tabs. The “X” key is often mispressed instead of the “Alt” key and the confirmation prompt is easily confirmed by muscle memory.

Misclicking could be prevented if the “Leave Guild” button were moved to the guild roster tab and anchored to the lower left corner.

Require users to type “LEAVE” on the confirmation dialog box similar to character deletion.

Ownership/Membership
Allow guildmasters a successor function for an officer to inherit guild ownership if said guildmaster becomes inactive for a period of time or auto-pass guild ownership after a set period.

Allow players to become the guildmaster of multiple guilds. This would allow for affiliated guilds to be controlled on one account and offer the ability for dedicated leaders to inherit ownership of guilds that would otherwise be abandoned.

Add a column on roster for the date that a member joined. This would allow leaders to recognize the dedicated/long term members.


Implement a feature to merge guilds in order to quickly and effectively transfer members from one guild to another. Each member would have an option to accept the merge upon logging in, preventing tedious mass mailings and tracking members down.

Offline Status
Add a status icon or color indicator to the chat window when in offline mode.

Notify players if they are set to offline on initial logon and when a tell is sent. This would prevent players from forgetting to set their status to online to receive replies.

Disable tells if you are set to offline.

Ranks

Additional permission for “Edit Own Note”. Allow members to edit their own notes while preventing them from tampering with the notes of others. Also addition of a second “Officer notes” that can be used to document warnings, etc

Additional permission for “Deposit Gold in Guild Bank”. This would grant leaders the ability to effectively close raffles/lotteries that are tracked by bank deposits.

Additional permissions for “Limited Remove Members”. A daily kick limit set by the guildmaster would act as a failsafe to prevent rogue officers/hacked accounts from deleting entire guild rosters.


Heraldry

Additional permission for “Edit Tabard Design” allowing other members/officers to design guild tabards.

Add the heraldry tab to guild interface for all members so that they can preview a guild tabard design before spending 2k gold.

Award guilds a gold percentage from tabard purchases as an incentive for members to purchase them in support of the guild.


Allow tabards to be tradable so that they may be awarded as prizes or donated to another member.

Offer a small buff to players while the tabard is equipped to encourage members to wear them more often. Buff could be applied only when grouped with other tabard wearers.

History

Implement a function to show which members/officers recruited a new player to the guild. This would allow members/officers to be recognized and acknowledged for contributing to guild recruitment.

Add a textbox to filter by member name to review bank, sales, and roster history per individual member.

Add filters to roster history for joined, left, kicked, demoted, and promoted.

Store

System Additions
Allow players to purchase or earn store more slots via guild ranks. This would lower the number of players who join 3 or more trade guilds in order to acquire more than 30 slots.


Include the name of the item and guild an item was sold in with Item Sold mail.

Send a system mail or list on guild history, a weekly sales summary showing the amount of sales and gold earned, both in total and from the kiosk that week, e.g.,
<guildname> sold 54,000g this week, 48,000g via <tradername>.
<x> taxes collected, <y> taxes from trader sales.
Allow guild to have some store slots to sell stuff from the guild bank directly, and have the entire sale go into the guild bank. To allow guild admins to sell off excess materials out of the guild bank.

User Interface
Save current search filters upon exit from guild store. This would prevent players from the need to re-apply the same filters on each individual store when shopping around for specific items.

Add a textbox to filter by item name and a right-click “Search for Similar” option that automatically applies that item’s filters.

Add a search filter for treasure maps.

Bank


Guild banks frequently timeout while attempting to retrieve item data requiring players to manually reload the bank window often 2-5 times before the inventory will display. As a short term solution, automatically refresh guild banks when retrieving items to prevent frequent timeouts.
Add an option to autostack categories in the guild bank.


Allow guilds to purchase more bank slots. With 500 members, 500 slots is very limited.

Add a tabbed or tiered system to the guild bank each with separate rank permissions including a daily withdrawal limit. Given the ability to assign only full or no access, guild banks are often closed to members due to risk of thievery.

Stop bankers from wandering and breaking connection to bank.


Mail
Retrieve mail from the server when the mail window is opened or implement a retrieve mail button. Currently, players must log out of the game and log back in or travel to a different zone in order to request mail from the server.

Implement a “sent mail” outbox and a reply button. Sent mail can be very important for people mailing orders and could be used to resolve disputes.
Add a confirmation to “send gold” to prevent players from accidentally sending gold instead of entering a cod amount

ashlee17

Great work everyone! Keep adding all your suggestions for guild tools- Stronger guilds = Stronger communities!

IceDread - I can understand how you feel Thats why we continue to give feedback to Zos!



radiostar- Thanks for outlining a possible solution- tick boxes could be an awesome system!

Antiquity- love the idea of notifications!

ElfFromSpace thanks for adding the manifesto! Some fantastic ideas there!

I call on all guild leaders, officers and members to comment here and bring the need for more guild tools to the developers attention!