As your newly appointed unofficial and unrecognized Guild Maintenance Czar, I have taken it upon myself to mock-up some screens of how the guild functionality on the website should look and behave.

On loading the guild page, the commander should see the following:



From this screen, the commander can promote, demote, or expel members if the guild structure allows it. We'll visit the guild structure in a moment.

You will notice that areas of administration are broken into subsections which are collapsed by default, but on clicking the header will expand that section, collapsing the previously expanded section.

The first subsection is Guild Structure. This allows the commander to set the type of government/leadership they want for their guild.

Original suggestion


This addresses the very common problem of all council not being on within a 24 hour period by allowing the commander to choose a top-down leadership or a more traditional council leadership depending on their leadership structure.

Next, we have the Permissions subsection. This allows the commander to set common preferences, including how many guild MOTDs to retain and who can see the prior MOTDs.



Finally, we have the Look & Feel subsection, which allows the commander to set common guild attributes like message of the day, guild website, and guild image. It also includes the setting to display full login timestamps if desired.



Your feedback is welcome. I look forward to working closely with Guild Software to bring you these exciting changes sometime between tomorrow and fiscal year 2020. I thank all of you for your nomination for my appointment as your new Guild Maintenance Czar.

looks good!

Let the record show that Greenwall is in favor of my appointment as Guild Maintenance Czar.

holy shit!

I really didn't know what can of worms but I'd be opening, but honestly...I didn't think worms tasted so damn good.

This is fucking sick, and I say we start a crowd fund to pay Savet to implement this shit for GS.

Balls in your court Savet...name yer price matey

(Er, we have to actually implement all of the logic in the game server. There is no "crowdfunding someone else making guild features". Making a web-interface is easy).

I am interested an open to feedback on how you guys would like this to work, please continue.

I like everything except the Structure part.
This should also should be able to be done from the Guild Tab ingame.
As far as guild creation is concerned, they should all start with the current guild structure, and have the founder edit the settings immediately.

Structure should look like this:
-----------------------------------
Max Number of Commanders (0 = disabled)

Max Number of Council (0 = disabled)

Max Number of Lieutenants (0 = disabled)

+ Add a Custom Rank
++ Custom Rank 1 (Custom Name 1)
+++ Max Number of Custom Name 1's
++ Custom Rank 2 (Custom Name 2)
+++ Max Number of Custom Name 2's
etc.

Minimum members of (Choose a rank/disabled) before guild auto-disband: _______
(this option would limit silly auto-disband rules, however you must have at least 6 members in TOTAL, otherwise it disbands anyway, to stop one-person guilds)

Powers and Permissions (the appropriate enabled ranks and custom ranks would be auto-filled here so that only enabled ranks would appear)
Ability to Manage these settings (one rank group MUST be selected)
(x) Commander / () Council / () Lieutenant / () Custom Rank 1 / () Custom Rank 2
Ability to /guild invite (one rank group MUST be selected)
() Commander / () Council / () Lieutenant / () Custom Rank 1 / () Custom Rank 2
Ability to /guild expel
() Commander / () Council / () Lieutenant / () Custom Rank 1 / () Custom Rank 2
Ability to /guild vote
() Commander / () Council / () Lieutenant / () Custom Rank 1 / () Custom Rank 2
Ability to change log permissions
() Commander / () Council / () Lieutenant / () Custom Rank 1 / () Custom Rank 2
Ability to change bank settings
() Commander / () Council / () Lieutenant / () Custom Rank 1 / () Custom Rank 2
etc etc.

-----------------------------------------

This is fully customisable which is what a LOT of guilds have been wanting for a long time.

Incarnate is right. He'd have to build the actual guild functionality for a commander leadership functionality. He would also have to build out the api for guild commands to be called from the site, but those could be leveraged in-game too.

I like some of kierky's input. I'll revise the structure subsection tomorrow to incorporate that. The no commander and guild defined disband # may not be a good idea since no commander might require too much retooling in how guilds actually work, and what guild is going to set a low # for auto-disband? That being said, having more than one commander, and defining the # of council and lieutenants is good.

My intention wasn't to build the web interface, though I could. I wanted to help people visualize how it could work and help avoid a single page of mishmashed configuration options that are more confusing than helpful.

and what guild is going to set a low # for auto-disband?

^

Here are some notes I had sitting around for the next time we looked at guilds. They may as well be thrown into this mix.

Keep in mind, these are just notes. I write things down, I don't always think them through. I'm mostly jotting things down to come back and look at later. It's not an RFC, it's not an anything. Just some thoughts that had some reason at some point in time.

Some of the things are repeats of how stuff already works. Some were designed to try and preserve guilds that were expiring too quickly (we just changed the timeout anyway). Others were notions that sprang from how many problems we were having with guilds that had been "abandoned" by their commanders, which then got into the sticky situation of people asking us to help them take over their guild, because some dude bailed on the game and hasn't been heard from for 5 months or whatever. So, I was trying to find some structure that might allow a guild to remain healthy.

OTOH, keep in mind that features intended to keep guilds healthy and active.. are not likely to be utilized if they're optional. I'm all for configurable structures, but this is my experience from being on this side of things.

Guilds:

- Change "48-hour" disbandment period to 7 days.
- Require Level 3 in any License, to be Council or Commander.
- Council members and Commanders may not be Trials or F2P.
- Only 5 Council members required to create a guild (up to 9 allowed).
- Voting still works on simple-majority rules. If you have an even number
of council members, and fail to get a majority (deadlock), the vote fails.
- Add "Promote" to command to Commander:
- Promote council: Promote a regular member to Council, to fill a vacant spot.
- Promote replacement: Flag a member as a replacement Commander, if the
existing Commander should resign or be removed by a non-voting reason
(such as character deletion, administrative banning, etc).
- If a commander does not log in for 60 days, email said commander
with a warning to either log in or resign their position within the next
7 days. If no login within 7 days, either the designated Replacement, or
if not available, highest-level member of leadership (Council or Lieutenant)
is promoted to Commander.
- If a Commander has been voted out of office, email-notify them.
- If a guild has impending disbandment for some reason, email Commander, Council and
Lieutenants (if any) immediately, at the beginning of the 7-day period.
- If a guild does not have enough council members after the 7-day disbandment period,
and risks being disbanded at the end of that period, then auto-promote the
highest-level regular-members to council.
- If there are not enough regular-members to promote to council, then disband the
guild.

If auto-promotion becomes a thing, let officers & councilors resign their posts from the website. Some won't re-subscribe just to resign.

I have never been in an established guild that has been in danger of disbanding -- so if this already exists great, but if not:

-During disbandment periods, MOTD will be replaced with a warning regarding the pending disbandment.

-During disbandment periods, Guild Page (on VO website) will indicate pending disbandment (viewable by all players).

+1 million. Please do this Inc!!

I have updated the original post to include structure definitions of number of leadership positions. This would be available to either structure type.

I did not include custom roles at this time, but rather than custom roles, I think it makes more sense to rebrand existing roles for a guild's RP. If we start adding a bunch of custom roles, then we also have to have the ability to define what those roles can do, and add a bunch of logic for guild disbandment based on those roles.

Regarding Incarnate's notes:

- Change "48-hour" disbandment period to 7 days.
- Require Level 3 in any License, to be Council or Commander.

This is a good idea, as leadership should be familiar with the game.

- Council members and Commanders may not be Trials or F2P.

I know we are trying to emphasize subscriptions, but free players can bring value to the game by adding to the player base. I recommend changing this to "Must have had a subscription at one time" to avoid the ping-pong effect of people losing position when going free as their sub lapses.

- Only 5 Council members required to create a guild (up to 9 allowed).

This is good!

- Voting still works on simple-majority rules. If you have an even number
of council members, and fail to get a majority (deadlock), the vote fails.

This is good if I read this correctly, in that if you have 10 council but only 5 vote, 3 in-favor votes are a success when the voting ends.

- Add "Promote" to command to Commander:
- Promote council: Promote a regular member to Council, to fill a vacant spot.
- Promote replacement: Flag a member as a replacement Commander, if the
existing Commander should resign or be removed by a non-voting reason
(such as character deletion, administrative banning, etc).
- If a commander does not log in for 60 days, email said commander
with a warning to either log in or resign their position within the next
7 days. If no login within 7 days, either the designated Replacement, or
if not available, highest-level member of leadership (Council or Lieutenant)
is promoted to Commander.
- If a Commander has been voted out of office, email-notify them.
- If a guild has impending disbandment for some reason, email Commander, Council and
Lieutenants (if any) immediately, at the beginning of the 7-day period.
- If a guild does not have enough council members after the 7-day disbandment period,
and risks being disbanded at the end of that period, then auto-promote the
highest-level regular-members to council.
- If there are not enough regular-members to promote to council, then disband the guild

All good!

Most of the above changes are back-end mechanics, which are good, but we also need to be able to structure the guilds for different leadership styles.

There also needs to be a way to abandon the guild creation process as currently someone who tries to help found a guild is locked into that guild until it fails to be created.

+5000