Player Associations Archive
Thread: Player Association Top 5 Issues
Guild Hall Storage
The storage limits for PA halls has become increasingly difficult to manage for larger guilds. Most guilds like to decorate their halls and display rare items or loot they have gained. While the PA hall size has recently been reduced to 7 lots versus 9, guild leaders still feel that PA hall storage should be higher than your average large house due to the size differences between a large house and a PA hall.
Solution One
Increase the storage on a PA hall to the proper ratio of the 75 items to 1 lot ratio for a total of 525 items maximum. This would allow guilds to better decorate their hall and due to the amount of lots still required most players would still prefer the normal small house method of gaining more storage so we feel this increase would not be abused, but simply allow guilds to manage their halls betters. If the full ratio is still considered to be too large, we would like to request an increase to at least 400 items, which would still be less than 3 small houses and using 6 lots for a total of 450 items.
Solution Two
Allow Guild Management Terminals to be placed or built in to structures other than PA halls. As the high lot count has always been a burden to Guild Leaders, this option would also allow more distinction between various guilds as they could then choose their own structures. The difficulty in acquiring the 'Remote' PA terminal for a structure of the players choosing could be made difficult and an item to be earned by guilds through quests specific for guilds. Or another method could be to make it similar to one of the new loot drops, requiring a few random drops to gather the pieces of the terminal and then requiring it to be assembled by a Master Architect.
Issue Number Two
Guild GUI for Management is messy.
The current method for altering various aspects about the guild through the management terminal is very difficult to manage. You must manage multiple windows and when assigning permissions you must reopen windows and repeat the process for multiple members. For larger guilds, if the Guild Leader wishes to allow all members to sponsor, he/she must go through this method for every individual which can take hours. We humbly request that the guild management terminal be redesigned for a more user friendly interface.
Solution One
For setting permissions allow a guild leader to set 'guild wide' permissions for sponsoring, accepting, etc… If possible, the Guild Leader should also be able to set permissions based on the guild members 'title' until such a time as guild ranks could be included in the future.
Solution Two
A complete redesign of the current terminal. This would ideally allow you to select multiple criteria to alter at once and all be included in one window allowing you to make all changes at one time rather than back tracing your steps for different members. IE, for Member A, you could change permissions, add title, edit title, etc all from one screen. It would be preferable to be able to set guild wide permissions in this manner as well.
Issue Number Three
Guild Vendors or Vaults are needed.
Guilds need a way or securely allowing the transfer and trade of items between their own members without making those options available to the general public. When vendors were allowed in private housing this was not an issue, but due to that change many months ago it has become a growing concern for guilds. Most guilds currently use the /banktip price difference back to guild members but it can become very problematic to maintain a current guild listing and for it to be done in a timely manner (Current guild roster issues will be addressed in our number four issue)
Solution One
Allow Merchants to have special options on their vendors to allow "Guild Discounts" in either percentage form or offer a set price for those in their guilds. This would allow them to run their vendors as they normally would with normal prices for the public but allow guild members to purchase their items at a special price only available to those in the guild.
Solution Two
Create Guild Only vendors or vaults where members of the guild can go and place items and/ or credits into it for other members to withdrawl. The vault would ideally have various permission levels which could be included in a terminal redesign for the Management Terminal that would be set by the Guild Leader.
Issue Number Four
We need a way to see who is in the guild and online.
Guild Leaders and Guild Members alike need a way to check to see who is in the guild and who is online in a quick and easy manner. Currently, the only way to do this is to add someone to your friends list when someone joins which quickly becomes hard to manage with your other friends and when people leave. We would like a better way to handle this similar to approaches taken in Everquest and Everquest II.
Solution One
This is the quickest and easiest method to try to impliment a quick fix on a way to see who is online in the guild. Add a chat command for /who all <Guild name> it would then list all current guild members, online listed first and offline listed after, in the who box for you to review. Currently when you try any commands similar to this you only receive who is in your partiular area and not game wide.
Solution Two
Add a new tab to the Community Window entitled "Guild." This window would be very similar to what is done in EQ in that it would list all current members of the guild, who is online and what planet they are on, their last time logged on(So guild leaders can track who is and isn't active.), and if possible a Guild Message of the Day to announce important info without sending guild wide emails. The list would also be sortable by all of the above mentioned methods for quick viewing. This would go a very long way with the community for both the dedicated PA community and for people across the game.
Issue Number Five
Better Ways to Change / Manage Leadership of Guilds
This is probably one of the tougher issues to solve within the game currently, but it is becoming a very large one. Many guilds have a good deal of inactive members, including inactive leaders. With the current Allegiance method for changing leaderships, in those larger guilds it becomes nearly impossible for guilds to vote out their current leader due to a large number of inactive players in the guild. We would like to request alternative methods for leadership options so that these guilds would be able to retain their membership without being forced to recreate their guilds. This Issue will have multiple ideas, more so than solutions because we would like all of these to be considered and possibily implimented.
Solutions and Ideas
1 A quick method for transfering leadership from one individual to another. We believe that a /makeguildleader command should be added so that if a guilds leader is planning to step down he/she could quickly transfer leadership to another person in the guild. This would make sure that the person isn't forced to remain where they are or abandon the guild due to situations that could be beyond their control. To offset the ability to circumvent the allegiance process, this command could only be issued once every 2 weeks which would ensure that should the guild overall not agree with the new leader, they would be given the opportunity to vote in a new leader. (The inactivity issue is still here, but will be addressed below)
2 The Allegiance amount required to overturn the guild leadership should be lowered from 51% to around 30% to offset for the large number of inactive players. This would better give the chance to change from an inactive leader to an active one while still requiring an effort on the part of the players within the guild. For larger guilds, even 30% of the playerbase is a big amount. An alternative to this would be to impliment a method similar to the new rules regarding city voting so that only actively cast allegiance votes count toward the leadership and it would run similar to an election with people signing up to challenge the leader. This method may be preferable due to inactive players, especially since the code is already existing.
3 Another way to better prevent these situations from occuring with inactive leaders is to allow the leader of the guild to set a "Officer" permission to individuals of their choice which would basically give the individual full permission setting ability (Except that of removing permissions from the actual guild leader.) This way guilds that operate in a sort of "Council" structure could allow multiple members to be able to set permissions. If the leader did in fact go inactive, the guild itself would still be able to fully function as the officers could take over and still delegate permissions until a new official leader could be voted in via one of the above mentioned methods.
There are our Top 5, let me know what you guys think.
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AgekVahoba wrote:
*****!
Awesome layout Rothin! I think you covered all of the issues that are of paramount concern to us.
Thanks, and you guys brought the issues you felt were most important, I just typed them up and added in some comments on how to fix them.
Wishlist thread soon to include everything we'd like to see with guilds in the future.
atytula wrote:
Issue Number One: Guild Hall Storage
I agree Rothin, and I lean towards solution number one since it is not fair to PA leaders to have a smaller item cap then non guild leaders since they are required to have a PA hall to manage there guild. Solution number 2 does fix this, but I think that the PA hall is something that can be used to define a guild. The devs can really make it a useful tool for guilds. Having a higher cap as suggested will help us decorate our hall, but it is still using the PA leaders storage space for decoration.
My solution is to make decoration objects not take up any space in a PA hall. This does not include anything that is useable (weapons, crates, spice, etc...) but just furniture and decorative loot (paintings and such). This way, the PA leader can spend the time to properly decorate the PA hall. I would also want to see exterior customizations and maybe even a few different internal designs for the PA halls.
Rothin wrote:
The problem I see with that solution (Which I think would be nice) is that to do this, it would take a substantial amount of code to then categorize furniture as a seperate item when counting towards a new total. And then of course, items that allow storage, like chests armoires, etc.. those would still need to count as a regular item. And at the same time, it wouldn't be fair to non guild leaders for us to have seperate furniture storage and them not get it, that would encourage people to use guild halls over houses and you'd have 'pure' storage in houses on top of the new item slots for furniture. It would have to be a 'give to everyone' option if that approach were taken.
Mind you, I'd like to see it happen but I don't think its very likely. Enough storage issues with the DB at the moment so asking to increase X number for certain types of items would probably put more strain on it.
I am all for them implmenting this for houses too. I posted something a while ago on this forum about having two categories of items. Useable and furniture. By default, all items are classified as useable, and then the devs can handpick what is considered furniture (and I would consider furniture storage as furniture, not useable). The useable item limit for a PA hall would remain 250 (or maybe it can be raised to 400) and there would be a 250+ funiture item limit. Again, I would like this for houses too, but IMO, PA leaders have the biggest place to decorate and a horrible cap.
I find it annoying walking into someones house and seeing a few backpacks or furniture storage and nothing else. Why, because storage space is valuable so people don't want to give it up for a nice looking home. I think that if they give a furniture item limit, we will see a lot of well decorated houses (not to mention giving Architect something to do) without having any cost.
I realize that this type of change may be challenging for the devs, and what you are looking for are quick fixes, but I feel that time is needed to fix this issue, not patch it. If we let the devs patch it, they won't come back to us for a long time because they will say that they gave us our time now it is on to the next. I just think it needs to be discussed and when the community decides we can put our pressure on the devs to get it done.
Rothin wrote:
I'll make sure it gets put into the Wishlist for sure, because I think it would be nice. I just don't know how feasible it'd be with the DB storage issues. But it can't hurt to ask.
I'll have the Wishlist thread up this weekend for us to start adding to.
Thanks Rothin.
I understand it may be a fair bit of work, but a much smaller scope then the two Jedi publishes and a few of the profession revamps earlier this year. PAs touch most people in SWG in one way or another, and with a lack of constant content updates in SWG, it is the PAs that make playing a MMORPG like SWG worth playing. We deserve some focus to give us the ability to build that content. I could spend weeks just going around planets looking at PA halls that let me in, to see what people are doing for decoration. Some PAs may have a military style, with lots of cool desks and chairs and a parade square on the top, while city based ones may have a really well laid out town hall. But the average PA hall has one room decorated, the rest bare. Even the PA halls in cities like Coronet have an empty basement.
Increasing the limit of the PA hall will allow some players to decorate it, but in the end, the majority of PA Hall owners will look at that space as more personal/guild storage, not as a chance to add some decorations. Well,I think I am spinning in circles here. I don't know if others feel the same as I do. Please post and state your views (PA leaders only though as Mall owners are a completely different ball of wax).
Everything else is great. I hope SOE listens.
whitestar19 wrote:
Not a bad list but I do have issues with #1.
If this happened, I could see a lot more people using PA Hall's so they could really do a great job decorating them and having a lot of space to store items. I feel PA Hall's should only be used just for the intended purpose and not for people's homes, which more people would use them for. What SOE needs to do is up the item count on all houses to balance this out.
Increasing the PA lot to the proper ratio would not encourage anyone to use PA halls over regular housing. Currently, you can place 3 small houses for a total of 450 items (250 more than a PA Hall) and still not even equal the lot count of the PA. You could place 4 smalls for a total of 600 items only costing 1 more lot than a PA hall. Increasing the storage ratio to the properly amount only rewards PA hall users because they get a proper storage amount instead of being rewarded for placing 3 or 4 small houses. And for us especially, placing 3-4 small houses is NOT an option for Guild leaders since we MUST have the PA hall, thus we're being penalized for running a guild. That's why this is and has always been our number one issue. So myself and along with the majority of the PA Community feel this is very much a huge issue for us.
Concerning the guild terminals, I feel they only belong in PA Halls. Having a PA takes responsibility and sacrifice. I knew what was involved when I had to place a 9 lot Naboo PA Hall for my guild. Not everyone would do that. Allowing guild terminals to be placed anywhere would take the meaning out of PA Hall and a lot more guilds would pop up if they could put them in 2 or 1 lot houses. PA Hall's are for PA's.
The Reason we have asked for this is mostly due to the reason for our number one issue, storage. We're not able to place multiple houses to get the storage that every other person is able to get, if we could place PA terminals in other buildings then we could solve the storage issue by another means. The PA Hall is the cost of starting a guild, an item to attain to be able to do it. The goal if they allow PA Terminals in other housing is that the Terminal to be placed there shoudl be equally as difficult, maybe even more so to attain so that Guilds will have the option to do this. By allowing different structures to be a Guilds home, you'd also see a lot more distinction in guilds. Entertainer guilds could use a Cantina as their home.. Medical guilds a Hospital, smaller PAs a small house, the Large PAs, the standard guild hall. It just opens up so many more options and would add a reason to be different than everyone else, where as right now everyone is stuck in the same building with a different floorplan.
Everything else is great. I hope SOE listens.
I'm glad you liked the others!
whitestar19 wrote:
Not a bad list but I do have issues with #1.
If this happened, I could see a lot more people using PA Hall's so they could really do a great job decorating them and having a lot of space to store items. I feel PA Hall's should only be used just for the intended purpose and not for people's homes, which more people would use them for. What SOE needs to do is up the item count on all houses to balance this out.
Concerning the guild terminals, I feel they only belong in PA Halls. Having a PA takes responsibility and sacrifice. I knew what was involved when I had to place a 9 lot Naboo PA Hall for my guild. Not everyone would do that. Allowing guild terminals to be placed anywhere would take the meaning out of PA Hall and a lot more guilds would pop up if they could put them in 2 or 1 lot houses. PA Hall's are for PA's.
Everything else is great. I hope SOE listens.
Havinga PA takes sacrifice, but it is silly for it to be what it is. The sacrifice it takes to run a PA is the legistics of running a PA. Not a physical limitation put down upon us from SOE. I too knew that I would be taking a huge hit lead a guild in that I lose a lot of personal storage. For me though, storage is not a big deal, since many of my guild members are more then willing to give a few lots to the guild and hence there is lot of storage. But as a PA leader, I am finding that the PA hall, with its 250 cap is limiting when it comes to proper decoration of the hall. Every building should be properly furnished based on its owners desires. The problem is that owners desire storage space and could care less about decorating there houses. This is a huge deal for PA halls since there are so many rooms and such a small storage cap.
I like Rothin's solution of allowing guilds to have a PA terminal for more then one reason. It is very annoying to have to rely on a PA hall to recruit members and perform PA tasks. With PA terminals, we could place on in different members houses and be able to do this from multiple planets. Also, like he said, some people may want to form a PAbased around entertainment and would like there PA hall to be a cantina.
Right now, being a PA leader means doing alot of work under a systesm that is working against you. What Rothin, and the other PA leaders are looking for is the proper tools to run our guilds and make them a success, without adding uneccessary burdens.