Guild Launch News
REQUEST FOR INPUT: Alliance Guilds & Guest/Raid Characte
I am currently exploring how to implement two features for Guild Launch.
1. Alliance Guilds
2. Guest/Raid Characters
Alliance Guilds
The implementation we're considering is adding the ability for any Guild Launch guild to declare any other guild as an "Ally". There will be three levels for this.
A. Friend
A friend guild would show on the guilds 'Ally' list. Possibly a widget. Friends would only show on each other's Ally lists, and possibly a widget, and this would be the extent of the functionality for them. The idea here is to allow guilds to interlink their sites without granting permissions.
B. Limited Ally
A guild designated as a Limited Ally will be treated as a non-member for all access except that a new forum permission designation of Ally will be added. This permission level will site between public and Member. So the public can't see Ally forums, Allys can and Members can. But Ally's can't see member forums.
C. Full Ally
A guild designated as a Full Ally will have all of the basic member priveleges of the guild who designated the other guild as an ally granted to them. So if Guild A designates Guild B as a Full Ally then Guild B's members will have basic Member level access to the guild. This includes forum permissions, Member vs. Non-Member widget permissions etc.
Does this work for those of you who want Alliance functionality? Any input?
Guest/PUG/Raid Characters
We are also looking at ways to more quickly add PUG and Guest raid characters to Rapid Raid. Our idea is to allow a character to be added as a special "Raid Only" character. These characters would have their own list somewhere and would not show on the primary character list.
My primary questions in regard to implementing this are:
Where should they be listed?
Does an upgrade ability from "Raid Only" to full character need to be available?
How do we keep people from creating "Raid Only" characters when they should really be creating guild characters? For instance, the Raid Only character is essentially a shortcut, so how do we keep people form overusing it when they should be creating real characters?
Is the designation of Raid Only too much? Should we instead just let people add full characters, to their own account, right from the "Characters not found" import screen? And just let them assign a rank right there also?
We'd very much appreciate your input on this. We want to make something workable for you all and this is getting into some rather esorteric features that I have a solid idea of how to implement, but I very much feel that some "in the trenches" input will be beneficial to the process.
-Stephen
P.S. I may pull this post out once we get some good feedback so I don't have a juicy post sitting here for our competitors to read. Sorry.
1. Alliance Guilds
2. Guest/Raid Characters
Alliance Guilds
The implementation we're considering is adding the ability for any Guild Launch guild to declare any other guild as an "Ally". There will be three levels for this.
A. Friend
A friend guild would show on the guilds 'Ally' list. Possibly a widget. Friends would only show on each other's Ally lists, and possibly a widget, and this would be the extent of the functionality for them. The idea here is to allow guilds to interlink their sites without granting permissions.
B. Limited Ally
A guild designated as a Limited Ally will be treated as a non-member for all access except that a new forum permission designation of Ally will be added. This permission level will site between public and Member. So the public can't see Ally forums, Allys can and Members can. But Ally's can't see member forums.
C. Full Ally
A guild designated as a Full Ally will have all of the basic member priveleges of the guild who designated the other guild as an ally granted to them. So if Guild A designates Guild B as a Full Ally then Guild B's members will have basic Member level access to the guild. This includes forum permissions, Member vs. Non-Member widget permissions etc.
Does this work for those of you who want Alliance functionality? Any input?
Guest/PUG/Raid Characters
We are also looking at ways to more quickly add PUG and Guest raid characters to Rapid Raid. Our idea is to allow a character to be added as a special "Raid Only" character. These characters would have their own list somewhere and would not show on the primary character list.
My primary questions in regard to implementing this are:
Where should they be listed?
Does an upgrade ability from "Raid Only" to full character need to be available?
How do we keep people from creating "Raid Only" characters when they should really be creating guild characters? For instance, the Raid Only character is essentially a shortcut, so how do we keep people form overusing it when they should be creating real characters?
Is the designation of Raid Only too much? Should we instead just let people add full characters, to their own account, right from the "Characters not found" import screen? And just let them assign a rank right there also?
We'd very much appreciate your input on this. We want to make something workable for you all and this is getting into some rather esorteric features that I have a solid idea of how to implement, but I very much feel that some "in the trenches" input will be beneficial to the process.
-Stephen
P.S. I may pull this post out once we get some good feedback so I don't have a juicy post sitting here for our competitors to read. Sorry.
For the guests and PUG types..
I'd personally like to see them added to the character table, flagged as Guest with the ability to make them full members.
In the real world you often have people as guests for several raids before they committ to being an applicant and joining. Many guilds will allow applicants and guests to earn DKP. It just seems obvious to me that there would be an upgrade path.
Ideally, the guests/pug would also NOT count on your character roster (and while yer at it, alts NOT being counted on the roster would rock for sure!)
I'd personally like to see them added to the character table, flagged as Guest with the ability to make them full members.
In the real world you often have people as guests for several raids before they committ to being an applicant and joining. Many guilds will allow applicants and guests to earn DKP. It just seems obvious to me that there would be an upgrade path.
Ideally, the guests/pug would also NOT count on your character roster (and while yer at it, alts NOT being counted on the roster would rock for sure!)
1. Alliance Guilds - Shared forums across websites would be a great addition to what you have planned. Maybe you could have it so that an admin can flag a forum for ally access and the allied admins would see it on their forum administration page. From there they can move/rename the category these forums would be placed in, set the permissions of the shared forums for their members (useful if you want to setup a shared officer/leader forum).
2. Guest/Raid Characters - Add another character tab on the Guild Roster page and call it "Friends". I believe CTRT collects enough info to create a character (race, level, class) so have it use this when importing the dkp string for a raid. They would be regular chars in the system and could be claimed/assigned like any other. An added benefit is when you do an update using the profiler mod, any toons that are not currently in the guild but have dkp can be moved to the friends tab without losing that information.
2. Guest/Raid Characters - Add another character tab on the Guild Roster page and call it "Friends". I believe CTRT collects enough info to create a character (race, level, class) so have it use this when importing the dkp string for a raid. They would be regular chars in the system and could be claimed/assigned like any other. An added benefit is when you do an update using the profiler mod, any toons that are not currently in the guild but have dkp can be moved to the friends tab without losing that information.
I'm ditto on:
a- forum sharing
b- site linking
c- automatic membership ? i think that was listed above
d- i've never done dkp, but support any decisions listed here.
some things that havent' been listed are:
- profession skills collaborative lists
- collaborative roster
- collaborative calendar.
.drool.. that would be oober leet.
btw- I've been meaning to ask if you had an ingame calendar mod that synced up with your calendar here? (we have been using group calendar, and a long since updated group calendar web export package)
a- forum sharing
b- site linking
c- automatic membership ? i think that was listed above
d- i've never done dkp, but support any decisions listed here.
some things that havent' been listed are:
- profession skills collaborative lists
- collaborative roster
- collaborative calendar.
.drool.. that would be oober leet.
btw- I've been meaning to ask if you had an ingame calendar mod that synced up with your calendar here? (we have been using group calendar, and a long since updated group calendar web export package)
this could very well be handy but ......bringing in outsiders on raids often does result in recruitment...should their prior work be unrecognised if their charactor is unclaimable? and not a charactor in the roster.....perhaps an alternative is to have a roster list of purely claimed charactors and a list of unclaimed charactors (I gotta say this would make other things much easier too and break down the numbers of toons to sift through.....:S we have 6 pages of charactors over lvl 60 }:-( )
Wyvernslocks wrote:
You can sort the list by claimed status, this is nearly identical functionally to making two lists.
-Stephen
Edit: I just realized the claim sorting was removed when we did the custom roster columns. It *should* be there. I'll get it readded.
this could very well be handy but ......bringing in outsiders on raids often does result in recruitment...should their prior work be unrecognised if their charactor is unclaimable? and not a charactor in the roster.....perhaps an alternative is to have a roster list of purely claimed charactors and a list of unclaimed charactors (I gotta say this would make other things much easier too and break down the numbers of toons to sift through.....:S we have 6 pages of charactors over lvl 60 }:-( )
You can sort the list by claimed status, this is nearly identical functionally to making two lists.
-Stephen
Edit: I just realized the claim sorting was removed when we did the custom roster columns. It *should* be there. I'll get it readded.
Hi,
I'm not sure about the practical usefulness of allied guild functionality (although shared calendars and forums sound good) but that's mostly from the point of view of I don't know how many guilds on my server use Guildluanch as their hosting option (sad but true), so there would be limited opportunity to collaborate anyway.
Now that said, I'm VERY interested in what can be done to make things easier to deal with players that are not really in your guild. As some background, my "guild" on guildlanunch is not really a game guild. We have a small number of players in the guild in the game, but we have deliberately created a raiding alliance which does not require people to leave their guild to play, and most people have taken advantage of that opportunity to remain in their guild for whatever reasons, but still join us for raiding. Because of this, we don't have any real functional requirements in terms of limiting what "guests" can do/see, because everyone that raids with us, regardless of their guild tag, is a member.
Definitely improving the handling of "characters not found" on the raid import screen would be top of my list as currently it is a bit of a mission to manually add players that have raided with us and therefore need to be awarded DKP. The XML string from CTRT certainly has all of the required information, with the exception of the Game and Server properties, which I would have thought could easily default to the game and server of the guild you are adding them to.
What else might be cool?
Some alliances (not us) might give DKP bonuses to people with a different rank or guild. So people in the "main" alliance guild get more DKP that those who are not, or toons with a certain rank get more DKP than other ranks. This might be a useful feature.
In a similar vein, setting signup limits which mean you cannot sign up for an event until a particular date may be good. Again this might need to be on a per guild, guild rank, or "guildies vs guests" basis, such that people in the guild get the oportunity to sign up before others that are not in the guild can.
Not strictly on the topic of allied guilds, but an enhancement to the Rapid Raid signup sheet which shows a separate section for alt toons might be nice, so you can invite people from the mains list first, and then start getting people from the alts list. In an allied guild raiding situation this would become more pertinent, because the raid leader would be less familiar with which signups are alts and which are mains.
Also, as a side note, it would be cool to be able to copy a macro from the site for the invite list. So I can just copy from the site a /invite list , paste into a game macro, and hit it. Better yet, an export file which can be read into a game mod, and automatically responds with invites when those people on the signup sheet whisper you would be cool.
Phorien
I'm not sure about the practical usefulness of allied guild functionality (although shared calendars and forums sound good) but that's mostly from the point of view of I don't know how many guilds on my server use Guildluanch as their hosting option (sad but true), so there would be limited opportunity to collaborate anyway.
Now that said, I'm VERY interested in what can be done to make things easier to deal with players that are not really in your guild. As some background, my "guild" on guildlanunch is not really a game guild. We have a small number of players in the guild in the game, but we have deliberately created a raiding alliance which does not require people to leave their guild to play, and most people have taken advantage of that opportunity to remain in their guild for whatever reasons, but still join us for raiding. Because of this, we don't have any real functional requirements in terms of limiting what "guests" can do/see, because everyone that raids with us, regardless of their guild tag, is a member.
Definitely improving the handling of "characters not found" on the raid import screen would be top of my list as currently it is a bit of a mission to manually add players that have raided with us and therefore need to be awarded DKP. The XML string from CTRT certainly has all of the required information, with the exception of the Game and Server properties, which I would have thought could easily default to the game and server of the guild you are adding them to.
What else might be cool?
Some alliances (not us) might give DKP bonuses to people with a different rank or guild. So people in the "main" alliance guild get more DKP that those who are not, or toons with a certain rank get more DKP than other ranks. This might be a useful feature.
In a similar vein, setting signup limits which mean you cannot sign up for an event until a particular date may be good. Again this might need to be on a per guild, guild rank, or "guildies vs guests" basis, such that people in the guild get the oportunity to sign up before others that are not in the guild can.
Not strictly on the topic of allied guilds, but an enhancement to the Rapid Raid signup sheet which shows a separate section for alt toons might be nice, so you can invite people from the mains list first, and then start getting people from the alts list. In an allied guild raiding situation this would become more pertinent, because the raid leader would be less familiar with which signups are alts and which are mains.
Also, as a side note, it would be cool to be able to copy a macro from the site for the invite list. So I can just copy from the site a /invite list , paste into a game macro, and hit it. Better yet, an export file which can be read into a game mod, and automatically responds with invites when those people on the signup sheet whisper you would be cool.
Phorien
The forum sharing between allied guilds would be a very nice addition, as would the ability for allied guilds to all be able to share a calendar. As it stands now, we can set up a person from an allied guild as a character in our guild, but then that person has 2 characters in their character list (one from their own guild and one from ours), which can be a bit of a headache for the person with the double-characters.
Phorien wrote:
I would be interested in this....
also in the ability of setting raid templates against the sign up whereas it becomes more a situation of people confirming attendance or leaving a note (in the case of regular attendee's) against a raid saying why they cant attend.....while leaving a sign up option open for non regulars to sign up as a reserve.....
I found a mod which uses CSV to put together raid makeups to make inviting simpler and have been checking it out.....I beleive it could be easily integrated into the rapid raid system due to using a format as simple as CSV and could be used for both import and export.....although I do not believe it has an export feature as yet.....although being as the raid tracker mod tracks attendance which is uploaded to rapid raid if exporting a line up from rapid raid to the mod it would be in the same format as would be necessary for exporting the data and essentially be the same data delt with..... :| that does make sense to me it is 6 am so if it doesnt to you there is a reason....its been lost in translation from walking dead to human speak
the mod I am referring too is autoinvite a beta mod available on wowace
http://files.wowace.com/autoInvite/autoInvite-r73947.zip
Also, as a side note, it would be cool to be able to copy a macro from the site for the invite list. So I can just copy from the site a /invite list , paste into a game macro, and hit it. Better yet, an export file which can be read into a game mod, and automatically responds with invites when those people on the signup sheet whisper you would be cool.
Phorien
Phorien
I would be interested in this....
also in the ability of setting raid templates against the sign up whereas it becomes more a situation of people confirming attendance or leaving a note (in the case of regular attendee's) against a raid saying why they cant attend.....while leaving a sign up option open for non regulars to sign up as a reserve.....
I found a mod which uses CSV to put together raid makeups to make inviting simpler and have been checking it out.....I beleive it could be easily integrated into the rapid raid system due to using a format as simple as CSV and could be used for both import and export.....although I do not believe it has an export feature as yet.....although being as the raid tracker mod tracks attendance which is uploaded to rapid raid if exporting a line up from rapid raid to the mod it would be in the same format as would be necessary for exporting the data and essentially be the same data delt with..... :| that does make sense to me it is 6 am so if it doesnt to you there is a reason....its been lost in translation from walking dead to human speak
the mod I am referring too is autoinvite a beta mod available on wowace
http://files.wowace.com/autoInvite/autoInvite-r73947.zip
bolitash wrote:
O am ditto on Calender mod for sure!!!!!
I'm ditto on:
a- forum sharing
b- site linking
c- automatic membership ? i think that was listed above
d- i've never done dkp, but support any decisions listed here.
some things that havent' been listed are:
- profession skills collaborative lists
- collaborative roster
- collaborative calendar.
.drool.. that would be oober leet.
btw- I've been meaning to ask if you had an ingame calendar mod that synced up with your calendar here? (we have been using group calendar, and a long since updated group calendar web export package)
a- forum sharing
b- site linking
c- automatic membership ? i think that was listed above
d- i've never done dkp, but support any decisions listed here.
some things that havent' been listed are:
- profession skills collaborative lists
- collaborative roster
- collaborative calendar.
.drool.. that would be oober leet.
btw- I've been meaning to ask if you had an ingame calendar mod that synced up with your calendar here? (we have been using group calendar, and a long since updated group calendar web export package)
O am ditto on Calender mod for sure!!!!!