Guildmaster issues and the change in the system that socialbans you immediately

JN_Slevin

TL;DR: Sending Mails will result in a socialban. Even harder then before, if you send more then 10 you will most likely get banned (happened to 4 accounts in the span of a few days)
GMs getting ignored, Tradinggame is riddled from bugs and exploits.
General Overview and a small wishlist, with the cry for help from ZOS

Hello everyone, I would like to tell you a story about the life of a Tradeguildmaster in the Elder Scrolls Online. A place with an awesome in-depth economic system which shackled me from the moment I first took a deeper look into things.
You might not like the system, you might want to have an auctionhouse or some similar system which “kills” the trading community as we know it, but even the hardest opponent to this current system cannot with the right mind tell somebody that GMs are not one of the hardest working players in this game.
This post is not about that this game is too hard or just useless crying. It is a cry for help, because lately ZOS has been dropping the ball hard.
We were never the ones that get heard first, our game gets ignored the most out of any of the branches of ESO.
Goldselling, exploits and horrendous bugs, were present to a point where any other branch of ESO would have gone on a complete crusade against the devs.

Since I am GM we have had:
- Multibidding (which almost all GMs were against since it would raise the prices of the bids even more, oh and btw, ALL the things EVERYONE told you (1) (2)
- THREE times where the Traders either did not swap or went completely free, one of which got the great name “black Sunday” (3) (4)
- Once where gold got multiplied without oversight
- Crown trading
- A few months, where the applications (which don’t give us ANY valuable info. We see the characters level the name and the achievement points, which is useless, give us a way of asking questions in that application so people can answer them) did not show up in the notifications (is it fixed now? Sometimes I still don’t get a notification)
- Countless donations going to the void (people give their hard earned gold to the guild to support it, and all we can do is tell them “I don’t see it in the history I am sorry but to me it looks like you did not pay” which breaks my heart every time I have to do it, why is there no donation button? Or some sort of way to tell a player that the gold has actually gone into the guildbank?)
- The history being cut in tiny pieces to a point where you need almost an hour to get the full information out of the history and that’s only if you do it manually (and god beware if you press e one time too much all your work is gone and you start from the beginning) since addons are so horribly restricted in the access to it, you kind of have to do it manually. Those questions are one of the most asked ones in my guild chat. “Why does my addon not show all the sales”. It should not be like this. This is horrible. (I also don’t understand how this would increase performance, every time some player presses e there is a ping on the server, so I actually believe this made things worse.)
- Multiple times where for some reason addons are blamed for performance issues and therefore ZOS decided to disable the guild history (if you don’t know, the guild history is the single most important thing ANY GM has in this game, everything is in there, donations, sales, joins / leaves etc. Without it you basically cripple everything a GM can do in the guild.)
- A seemingly random shift of the guild trader swap times to a seemingly random time, no one asked for and in retrospect was completely useless, since ZOS did not follow up on the reason why they did it, they said it was “to prevent issues from happening”. Well, that did not work. There are more issues then before (5) (6)
- A few weeks of the trader flip being delayed by 20 minutes. (I’m not one to count the beans, but seriously how does the guild who got the trader the week before deserver the taxes of 20 minutes they did not pay for?)
- A UI issue that has not been fixed or even really acknowledged for almost TWO FULL MONTHS!!! (7)
- Subsequently the guild finder that doesn’t show the hired traders anymore
And lastly, the ultimate reason why after the above I am making this post now.
So, ill explain this a bit further. Since we have to use admin tools of the bronze age, we have no way to reach our members. Somebody will for sure come and tell me “but you have the message of the day” which is true, if there was ANY OTHER WAY of informing members of rules / ranks / guild homes (why is there no button btw?) the MotD could actually be used for brining information across. But since the only other thing we have is the “about us” which is actually maybe 300 characters long. Anybody who ever had a guild will tell you that this is nowhere near enough of getting rules and stuff in there. So, we are forced to use the MotD for things like ranks, rules, notices, guildhalls and general information. Which (obviously) results in people not reading it every time it gets updated. Why would they? If 90% of it is always the same and isn’t relevant NOW.
So after we agreed that the MotD is not a good way of reaching your members about Events, Rule changes, updates etc. We have to use alternative tools.
Which basically is only mailing.
The fun part about mailing is though, that you actually get socialbanned doing it. A socialban is a mechanic which prevents you from whispering / using the guildbank / bidding / using the guildstore etc. You can chat in your guildchats for some odd reason (don’t ask me why its so inconsistent) but if you get it, it essentially means you are useless as a Guildmaster until you can do your usual stuff again. Which btw, the support has to do. And with Covid and other stuff can take up to 2 weeks, which is unacceptable after being crippled of essential tools.
This is not new. This has been around for ages and there is no definitive way of knowing when it how it happens (it always was randomly, once you can send 1.000 mails and you are fine then you send 100 and youre banned ).
Now to the best part: ZOS has been changing something in the last few days, now you actually get banned MUCH FASTER then previously (im talking 10 Mails and you are instantly banned this happened to 4! Accounts in the last few days.), and since we have established earlier that mass mailing is the only way of actually reaching your members this takes away one of the most important tools in GMing, I don’t know any GM that didn’t make use of mass mailing once. Its important. And now we cant do this anymore.

This is absolutely not acceptable. We have to work so hard to make the experience better for anyone in our guilds, we try to give them the best spots possible, we try to make a thriving community and we try to be there for our members.
And lately ZOS has been so ignorant about those issues, that I am actually thinking they are working actively against us.


We NEED better admin tools
WE NEED a way to reach our members
We NEED to be heard

Ever wondered why GMs are so incredibly annoying in getting you to join their discordservers? Because literally ALL of the issues about reaching the members are prevented if everybody would be in discord.

Ignoring issues is not solving anything, we aren’t second class citizens, we are the ones that play the game the most and the longest. We are your strongest advocates. And you treat us like ***. This has to stop!

Give us a way to reach you, we know about issues first. We are community managers aswell we are doing events and things that keep YOUR game population in the game. And you ignore us like we are the last people.

At some point it has to stop.
Please ZOS, we are trying our best to make your game the best it can be. Please do not work against us in this task.
I really hope this got the point across. I always try to see the positive in things. And I have to say, some things did really help, like the Guildfinder, an awesome addition which helped us greatly in reducing the amount of time we have to spent recruiting (until it didn’t work anymore). Or the new rank menu, which helps us ranking someone up WAY faster then before. You have shown you can do it.

Help us, please.

(1) = https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/482926/guild-bid-on-up-to-10-different-guild-trader-locations-each-week-with-update-23/p1 18 pages of feedback (with almost none actual dev response)
(2) = https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/484090/pts-update-23-feedback-thread-for-multi-bidding/p1 12 pages of feedback
(3) = https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/490032/trader-swap-issue-eu-server/p1 33 pages of feedback
(4) = https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/530542/pc-eu-trader-swap-failed-please-remember-u23-fiasco-and-act-quick/p1 7 pages about trader issues
(5) = https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/540142/updates-to-guild-trader-swap-times/p1
(6) = https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/540495/we-re-not-happy-about-the-guild-trader-swap-times-and-here-s-why/p1
(7) = https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/542986/guild-info-showing-no-trader-won-bugged/p1 4 pages with no response

Edit: added another source

Ghostbane

Vanilla tools for GMs to mail their guild members is very long over due. The goal posts are always changing for Addon devs who are unable to help.

Gariele

Being a GM has become more work than it needs to be and most of it is how handicapped we are without built in tools to make our lives easier. We have to use outdated Frankenstein addons that barely function and we pay the price when we get hit with social bans.

I have been banned 7 times across multiple accounts trying to send mail across the five guilds I run. One day I can send mail and all is good. A week later I can send the exact same mail and get hit with a social ban that can take weeks to resolve.

ZOS we build these communities that keep players interested and playing. We try our hardest to make things positive when servers go down or when there is issues with the game.

We need built in tools that allow us to do basic GM duties (mail/notes/donations/sales/ranking/kicking) without the fear of getting social banned.

All we are asking is that you help us.

deleted221106-002999

JN_Slevin wrote: »

TL;DR: Sending Mails will result in a socialban. Even harder then before, if you send more then 10 you will most likely get banned (happened to 4 accounts in the span of a few days)
GMs getting ignored, Tradinggame is riddled from bugs and exploits.
General Overview and a small wishlist, with the cry for help from ZOS


....Ever wondered why GMs are so incredibly annoying in getting you to join their discordservers? Because literally ALL of the issues about reaching the members are prevented if everybody would be in discord.....

And discord is why zos won't do a thing - if players have found a solution that does NOT involve zos servers then 'not a problem' will almost certainly apply.

virtus753

To raise another point: the bug where the roster shifts every time someone logs in or out or changes zones shouldn’t be omitted here. It’s been almost two years of combined time that anyone in gamepad mode (so console players or PC/Mac players with controllers) has had to deal with that. It makes roster management practically impossible, and the fixes were relegated to major updates, sometimes several major updates later, every time it occurred. That’s an emergency fix, not an innocuous UI error that can wait. But wait we did.

And to add to the last item cited, regarding the other major UI bug: there were at least four threads raised on the point of the guild trader UI bug. As far as I saw, we only ever got two acknowledgments: 1) before the first fix that failed; 2) from a mod in passing while closing one of the subsequent threads as a duplicate.

I know for certain that the second acknowledgment didn’t show up on the dev tracker, since it was not from a dev. It utterly defeats the purpose of said Dev Tracker if relevant acknowledgments and updates should be appearing there but are not. If ZOS is still aware of this issue, going on six or seven weeks since the first (and last) dev acknowledgment, we have no way of knowing. It contributes to the feeling of being left to deal with an inadequate system on our own when not only can we not get the support for necessary add-ons but bugs with crucial native features are left to languish for months on end.

superryan94

So after we agreed that the MotD is not a good way of reaching your members about Events, Rule changes, updates etc. We have to use alternative tools.

It's a perfectly fine tool. I get 10 pings a week.
Of course 99% of the time either the message has not changed or very little so can be ignored, but the ping reached me.
Being in 5 guilds my baseline is: 5 pings means nothing to look at, 6 means I got an invite to something and need to pay attention to the game.

I may not be a guild master, but for all 5 guild I'm in, I turn to discord for the simple reason that there is not much of resources in the game that can help me get the needed information, let alone much of it.
The only thing I used to rely on was the mail because they stand out, even between my 50 or so daily material mails because because the guild lead gives them a color<---THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES THEM STAND OUT!!!
I can not tell from the admin side for the simple reason, I am none.
I can however tell from member side(and supporting one guild for 4 years now) that there need to be better ways for the guild lead to tell us there are things happening, changing or we need to do something.

Milo

Souterain wrote: »

JN_Slevin wrote: »

TL;DR: Sending Mails will result in a socialban. Even harder then before, if you send more then 10 you will most likely get banned (happened to 4 accounts in the span of a few days)
GMs getting ignored, Tradinggame is riddled from bugs and exploits.
General Overview and a small wishlist, with the cry for help from ZOS


....Ever wondered why GMs are so incredibly annoying in getting you to join their discordservers? Because literally ALL of the issues about reaching the members are prevented if everybody would be in discord.....

And discord is why zos won't do a thing - if players have found a solution that does NOT involve zos servers then 'not a problem' will almost certainly apply.

So people are stuck usinga third party software with no connection or integration from ZOS's side? Sucks.. What if I don't want to use discord? Am I just stuck not receiving information about my guild's? The mails are, atleast for me, a way to see a Guildmaster cares enough to remind us about that stuff. It's hard enough to keep up the requirements (Not complaining) but a remindermail if I miss them makes my life easier. How are the Guildmasters supposed to remind us now? As it stands now, the motd system has failed. There needs to be an replacement.
Or a way for Guildmasters to not get punished for doing their members a favor...

idk

While I agree that guild leadership needs some basic tools that should have been available when the game launched, I think it is more the timing of the mails being sent vs how many are sent.

One thing that has always astounded me is the high degree of detail we see in some areas of the game that required conscious planning to ensure the results were of high quality while other areas seem to not get any attention and end up lacking like the tools for running guilds and we are talking about common tools for managing guilds, not anything special. It is almost like we are looking at two different games.

agegarton

Just wanted to add my agreement here.

It’s about time trade and social guilds were better able to communicate with their members and manage the membership.

Banning a GM for dropping out emails is crazy.

Age.

Fiktius

Souterain wrote: »

JN_Slevin wrote: »

TL;DR: Sending Mails will result in a socialban. Even harder then before, if you send more then 10 you will most likely get banned (happened to 4 accounts in the span of a few days)
GMs getting ignored, Tradinggame is riddled from bugs and exploits.
General Overview and a small wishlist, with the cry for help from ZOS


....Ever wondered why GMs are so incredibly annoying in getting you to join their discordservers? Because literally ALL of the issues about reaching the members are prevented if everybody would be in discord.....

And discord is why zos won't do a thing - if players have found a solution that does NOT involve zos servers then 'not a problem' will almost certainly apply.

But the thing is, Discord alone is NOT solution and it's only disgusting if developers would even think that in-game tools will not need further changes due external platform for community exists.
I truly wish Discord would be solution to all of these issues, but that is not the case.

I'm Guild Master of 3 trading guilds on PC EU and for me it would be HUGE relief if all my nearly 1500 members would join our Discord server, so I could reach them out better way and write further in details why things are happening due Discord is not as limited as guild MOTD or in-game mail is, but at the end "wish" is the keyword.

It's not realistic to expect that all members of especially trading guilds would join in Discord.
Some uses Teamspeak, some just do not want to - and I understand that. I don't force members to join in Discord,
even when I would love to have them there. I try to encourage them to join, but at the end it always comes down to the point that it's not members fault that guild admin tools are so poor.

I was one of those people which received very own cool social ban recently, because I did dare to try to inform my members about Halloween event we're organizing. I had to request help of customer support and I do thank them for solving the issue as soon as it was possible, but I would also say that they probably also are not happy to get constantly tickets about social banned GM accounts either. It would be less work them too, if we wouldn't have to constantly request support to let our accounts get out of jail of social ban.

And it's not like we wouldn't have tried to find alternative solution.
I had to implement new rank changes this evening to my guilds and even when I wrote with red text on top of guild MOTDs about the change shortly, I still received confused questions in the chat, what's happening.
Some people just will always ignore MOTD and refuse reading, that's a sad fact which will be always a thing and reason for that has been already explained in first post of this thread.

Contacting my members via mass mail has been always the most efficient way to reach out my members and having that possibility removed feels super bad.

Guyle

superryan94 wrote: »

So after we agreed that the MotD is not a good way of reaching your members about Events, Rule changes, updates etc. We have to use alternative tools.

It's a perfectly fine tool. I get 10 pings a week.
Of course 99% of the time either the message has not changed or very little so can be ignored, but the ping reached me.
Being in 5 guilds my baseline is: 5 pings means nothing to look at, 6 means I got an invite to something and need to pay attention to the game.

I may not be a guild master, but for all 5 guild I'm in, I turn to discord for the simple reason that there is not much of resources in the game that can help me get the needed information, let alone much of it.
The only thing I used to rely on was the mail because they stand out, even between my 50 or so daily material mails because because the guild lead gives them a color<---THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES THEM STAND OUT!!!
I can not tell from the admin side for the simple reason, I am none.
I can however tell from member side(and supporting one guild for 4 years now) that there need to be better ways for the guild lead to tell us there are things happening, changing or we need to do something.

No, it is not a good tool for actually disseminating up to date information at all. There are far too many small changes that can be made to a motd over the course of a day, that literally amount to nothing, but ppl get pinged for it often enough that they quickly conclude it is unnecessary to read it every time. As mentioned already, the availability of space to put rules and regs for a guild is basically non existent outside the motd, so unless a guild devotes a very small section at the top for announcements, there is no space to do so. My guilds for instance have the entire about us section full of links, the motd is filled with the rules and regs, a schedule, some other pertinent information, and basically a single line for a single sentence available to give updates. You may turn to discord, and we who run guilds urge everyone to do so as well, but there remains a large portion of any guilds population that never joins their guilds discord server. So without enough space to get important information out there, and many members not using discord, we are left with mailings as a go to for spreading important announcements, changes, calls for help etc.

SammiSakura

As someone now running 4 guilds across PC EU, I have felt this all too much. I've posted here so many times about my social bans that i've received for mailing my guildies, only to be told by support "find another way to keep your guild members up to date". Well I would, if we had those other ways!

I am now too afraid of being permabanned on my main account to send mails from it, so have had to pay out for a secondary account to send mails from, and even that one has been social banned.
I've implored guildies to join our discord, but as mentioned above, some won't and we can't force them. AND WE SHOULDNT HAVE TO.
We shouldn't have to use 3rd party programs to do things that should be included in-game.

The amount of things lacking from guilds is astonishing. Probably the number 1 purpose of guilds is trading. Yet there is NO built in way to track sales. Not even just for GMs but I know members themselves would much rather be able to see their sales on the roster page.
There is also no way to organise guild events, such as trials, dungeons, social or pvp. Why no Guild calendar, or something like that?

I have so many arguments each week with (rightly) frustrated guildies, who've donations have gone missing in the void, and I have no way to resolve this for them other than direct them to the already over stretched support page.

This is just a couple of additional observations from myself, and I 100% agree with everything written by OP.
We need WORKING guild tools, BUILT IN, NOW.
There's a lot of talk about "The ESO Community" and even this event "Tamriel Together", but the front-line people helping builds these communities, Guild Masters, are routinely ignored & dismissed. We don't expect to be treated better than others, but just want our voices HEARD as this is our area of expertise!

agegarton

Discord is not a good tool - I have many guild members who don’t have it and don’t want it. Many more don’t look at it often enough.

The current in-game tools, such as the guild finder and MOTD are also poor. They are about as basic as it is possible to be, with very limited space for updates, hardly any means of formatting text, and key modern functionality missing altogether.

And even tonight I had a trader ask me why we don’t have a trade kiosk this week....... of course we do, and it’s listed in MOTD, and I have stated that the guild info is bugged...... but some people just glance at the trader status and that’s all they see. It’s hard to criticise them - as some other members did in chat - because they are looking at a feature of the game which doesn’t work, has been bugged for weeks, and has no official commas from ZoS about it.

deleted221106-002999

Fiktius wrote: »

But the thing is, Discord alone is NOT solution and it's only disgusting if developers would even think that in-game tools will not need further changes due external platform for community exists.
I truly wish Discord would be solution to all of these issues, but that is not the case......

I completely and absolutely agree - it does not suffice, proper tools are needed and should be available in-game. And social muting for guild-masters, traders, crafters, family/same household members needs to shift from 'guilty until proven innocent' to 'innocent until proven guilty' (i.e. tag the account for review, don't castrate it pre-emptively).

But, in the scheme of things, I imagine such issues are very, very low priority for zos judging by how little attention seems to be given these necessary features. Hence if they're reviewing their 'todo list' I expect they[zos] will recognise discord use and probabaly note how that's one less thing for the game servers to deal with.

Speculative, I know but when you have something trivialsimple like the active guild trader bug in the guild interface (the current de facto communication medium for guilds) sitting uncommented on and unfixed for weeks, I think it probably reflects accurately on how much attention these issues will be given.

edit: simple(hah)

Arrodisia

I absolutely agree. Running a guild shouldn't become a full time job. Guild masters need better in game tools and bug fixes for multiple reasons. A GM shouldn't be banned for sharing important guild information with guildies via mass mail.

Imho. I see, GM's need the native ability to track the progress and activity of all guild members from within the game and not only through addons. Join dates, sales, purchases, donations, time online per week or month, ..... Being able to see this helps GMs focus on other important things, which are detrimental to the health of an mmo player base. For example, these types of tools would let them know which players need more help and attention. It gives GM's more time to assist new players and be social. So they can adjust as well as learn about the new game and community they just entered.

Basically, in a nutshell, GM's spend many hours organizing things which should already be there. Running the guilds each day is taking away from them actually being able to play with and connect with more players within their guilds. Players want the GM's to enjoy guild time together too. Friendships and loyalties form while spending the time to play together. The lack of tools severely and negatively impacts GM's ability to participate in more guild events, since doing so would mean increasing playtime into an unhealthy amount of hours.

A guild calendar page would go a long way. Mass mails and/or a reworked MotD area. The MotD area could possibly be turned into multiple pages by just adding tabs to the top right corner. That would give GM's the ability to have multiple pages for different topics for example 1 page for a guild calendar, 1 page for sign ups, 1 page for rules, 1 page for helpful information and so on, instead of tiny little spots on one single page. The GM's can't even fit half of what they want to share with their guildies and discord is not enough since every player doesn't use it.

I could go on but it's too late for me. I have a busy week ahead of me.

Good night and good luck all. Have fun in the game.

QueenMisi

I am the GM of a social guild on PC EU, and I agree with all of the points above.

Zos and the game are what brings players to us, but being in a good guild *keeps* people playing for longer. This means more months of ESO+, more crowns purchased, more money. The upcoming guild event shows that the important role of guilds is acknowledged. But what is the point of competing for a guild mount if we can’t even tell our members about it?

I can appreciate that adding in-game guild mailing could be complicated, but surely removing the insta-ban is easy enough? If spammers are an issue, then complaints from players will flush that out. I really hope this doesn’t get ignored.

LumiyaSpellsong

Just throwing this out there - I am not a GM nor would I want to be (based on what I see in this thread about the amount of work it takes!) but I am a member of a couple of really great trading/social guilds, and while I've joined their discords, I'm gonna admit as a casual guildmate, I never look at discord. Why not? Because I don't want to alt+tab out of the game that I am playing in with guildmates to go and read stuff on another site/program/tool. It's just counter-intuitive.

Give GMs the ability to do more information sharing and communication in-game instead of forcing us to do this outside of game. Discord should not be the answer for what could be done inside of the game, where you know, we play.

I support the OP here. Also, thank you to all of the amazing GMs out there and all of your hard work. You are appreciated.

Xerge

Can't wait for next gen MMOs to have implemented tools that facilitate socializing. MMos today suck for communicating. Even just small features... three's nothing, no attention to detail, not a thing.

Elderscrolls online - the game that expects it's players to eat the food with broken forks and spoons.

WTF????? We literally give you money out of our wallets and this is what you give your players??????????????????????????

JoeCapricorn

This needs to be addressed by ZOS NOW

I cannot imagine how hard or how stressful it is to be a GM for any of the guilds I am in. I look up to guild leaders for that reason, their job is not an easy one.

Often they are running day to day things, as well as events, auctions, raffles and such. Sometimes there is ample help but sometimes the guild is in need of new officers. A part of me wants to help, but I know I can be unreliable when it comes to my gameplay (I suffer from burnout easily).

Yet these guilds are what keeps me really interested in the game. Even new ways of playing the game, such as building a maze full of furnishings that you get Home Decorator privilege to move to the starting area before the time is up and auctions selling the labor of other players to farm or fish for you for an hour.

So to hear that there is an issue that could cause any one of my GMs to get banned just for sending out a mailer (which is an essential tool of guild communication and should NEVER be impeded) I feel that I should lend my voice in support of them.

STOP THE AUTOMATIC SOCIAL BANS. For now.

What is the stated goal of those triggers? To find spam? Now, perhaps the text of a mass mail could be analyzed, but perhaps, ZOS, you could figure out a way to see if it is a high ranked member of a guild and all the recipients guildmembers of that guild and provide a clear exemption?

Let's say I'm an officer of guild A, and it has 301 members. I send 300 messages, obviously since I am not sending 1 to myself. This message says, "Blah blah blah important guild stuff blah blah blah".

Then let's say a player without a guild sends 300 identical messages to 300 players. It says "Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top, and Spam."

Maybe there is a system in place that can identify the relationship of the sender to the recipients. If not, there should be.

So that when the back-end analyzes each case of 300 messages being sent out, it can clearly see that the first case is a guild officer sending a message to fellow guild members and the second case is clearly spam. So the second user is social banned automatically.

I can even think about how to implement something like that but I am very very rusty with computer programming. It's been 9 years since I graduated with Computer Science.

Dusk_Coven

This is really just another example of ZOS's fundamental refusal to actually look at play patterns.

It's like the upcoming quality of life improvements for master writs -- sure, it's an improvement to automatically select the item parameters, BUT what players actually need -- and proven by millions of downloads of Writworthy -- is to know whether a toon can complete a master writ or not before even accepting a master writ. That is the true first step in handling a master writ and any quality of life improvement for crafters should have implemented that first to catch up with what the players actually need.

Similarly, they should realize what guildmasters are actually doing in their game. It's so late now in the introduction of the associated systems that it's completely fair to say ZOS is completely out of touch with the player base.

OsManiaC

Since I have zero MMO experience except for UO.

Anyone can please share how guild management in other MMOS? (without giving game name) this is clear that the guild management feature and functions were total fail in ZOS. we got lots of beautiful and undeniable good things but not this one.

It is no shame to do a "benchmark" - from big automobile companies to cellphones every brand is checking "what our competitors do" yes this is basic marketing stuff every company needs to do but ... it is ok. never too late.

with all due respect to the addon makers, this needs to be in vanilla as we also have the console and now stadia people.

I love all my GMs and I witnessed all of their hard work - (someone said in the forums that GMship was a part-time job) but relying on addons and time to do check donations/sales editing badges/notes ... nope, should not happen.

Let's be honest, ZOS will never have resources/priority for guild stuff - we all witnessed how they act for black sundays, guild ui, multibidding etc... ( I still want to have 1-to-1 civil conversation with the guy/girl who suggested multibidding) But giving examples of competitors,

and ....

ESCALATING TO MICROSOFT directly may change things now...

Inaya

Agree with EVERY SINGLE one of the OP's points.

I would love to send mails to our members but I can't afford a social ban which would allow me to do nothing but talk in gchat. Banning a GM for running their guild is ludicrous.

Guilds are an important part of the game, community and economy yet GM's are forced to operate at a huge disadvantage which increases their workload unnecessarily.

There is absolutely no reason this should continue.

LadyNalcarya

It's quite ridiculous to be honest. GMs shouldn't be punished for managing their guilds.

JohnnieKBaller

I've been playing since release on console, started a guild within the first month, and have done everything in my power to cultivate some positivity in the community. Not only are GMs the last (if at all) thought of players in the community, but we're the first to be taken advantage of by other players as well. I've been burnt out lately, devoting my time to playing other games, only logging in to do some administrative work on the guild, and then logging off.

Hey ESO, the less time I'm on, the fewer crowns I'm likely to buy.
(I don't know, maybe that'll work? Gotta threaten the pocketbooks...)

Anyway, it's discouraging, and I've been fighting with myself over it for some time. And right now they have this "show off your Guild" nonsense sweepstakes or whatever going on... Show it off? We can't even MANAGE our guilds due to the utter lack of support from the game, and now we have homework to do so that they can simply pick the guild with the most followers...

I'm tired of it. It's even more infuriating to see that we're tired of it.

We're the players who are here for other players, and yet are the first to be punished for it.

JN_Slevin

It is actually quite the good point @QueenMisi made earlier

QueenMisi wrote: »

But what is the point of competing for a guild mount if we can’t even tell our members about it?
.

How are we supposed to join that guild contest thing if we cant tell all our members that we do?

SammiSakura

Well, it would appear that ZOS employees can check our thread, but not reply, judging from the rules warning I got today for thread bumping (which is my bad, I didn't realised it was against rules here)
But wouldn't it be better to actually acknowledge us? How many more times are we GMs going to have to shout about game issues before someone takes notice?
And in-before the Guild UI bugs out again (notice that maintenance didn't fix the UI for all Guilds today, which is worrying enough as it is...)

JN_Slevin

Please forgive my horrible editing skills, but why not make the "Background Information" customisable tabs? Each has 500 characters and we can add as many as we want?

Also, give us a choice if we want to ping people with the motd, and give us different pings (maybe a priority ping which you have to accept or smth)

Another option would be, to let GMs Massmail their members instantly.

I dont know.. There are alot of options that are better then what we have now. Our admin tools are:

• one Membernote with 254 characters
• ten Ranks
• one about us section with 256 characters
• and lastly the Message of the Day, which is anything but a message of the day...
• and the chopped history...

Thats it, nothing else, thats all we got...

Arrodisia

JN_Slevin wrote: »

Please forgive my horrible editing skills, but why not make the "Background Information" customisable tabs? Each has 500 characters and we can add as many as we want?

Also, give us a choice if we want to ping people with the motd, and give us different pings (maybe a priority ping which you have to accept or smth)

Another option would be, to let GMs Massmail their members instantly.

I dont know.. There are alot of options that are better then what we have now. Our admin tools are:

• one Membernote with 254 characters
• ten Ranks
• one about us section with 256 characters
• and lastly the Message of the Day, which is anything but a message of the day...
• and the chopped history...

Thats it, nothing else, thats all we got...

That looks like a good idea. It would definitely be a start. Having more space to share important, helpful and fun things with guild members would certainly be a win.

Fiktius

JN_Slevin wrote: »

Please forgive my horrible editing skills, but why not make the "Background Information" customisable tabs? Each has 500 characters and we can add as many as we want?

Also, give us a choice if we want to ping people with the motd, and give us different pings (maybe a priority ping which you have to accept or smth)

Another option would be, to let GMs Massmail their members instantly.

AMEN!

SammiSakura

JN_Slevin wrote: »

Please forgive my horrible editing skills, but why not make the "Background Information" customisable tabs? Each has 500 characters and we can add as many as we want?

Also, give us a choice if we want to ping people with the motd, and give us different pings (maybe a priority ping which you have to accept or smth)

Another option would be, to let GMs Massmail their members instantly.

I dont know.. There are alot of options that are better then what we have now. Our admin tools are:

• one Membernote with 254 characters
• ten Ranks
• one about us section with 256 characters
• and lastly the Message of the Day, which is anything but a message of the day...
• and the chopped history...

Thats it, nothing else, thats all we got...

This is a fantastic idea. Definitely think Tabs for guild information would work well (we still need to work on this damn social ban thing though)

Starlight_Whisper

Ghostbane wrote: »

Vanilla tools for GMs to mail their guild members is very long over due. The goal posts are always changing for Addon devs who are unable to help.

Indeed time to buff guilds