I lead a guild on Tarnished Coast. Let me tell you, in my years of being the leader of guilds in various games, the best way I’ve found to wake up on a Sunday morning is with a flurry of text messages from officers about how someone has ransacked the guild vault. I kicked the offending user and sent in a trouble ticket, but this really brought the problems with the guild management interface to the surface.
Now, I’ve done my best to closely manage my guild. I want to keep it a safe place for everyone involved, and so far (with the exception of this morning’s thievery) it’s worked very well! I’ve got all three sections of the vault built and sectioned off by rank. Only full Members have access to part of the vault, and the guild funds and really valuable stuff – like T6 crafting materials, materials for Legendaries, and 80 Exotics – are locked to Officers only.
The problem is that, practically and theoretically speaking, a guild leader can’t just lock everything down out of paranoia. The utilitarian items, like sigils and foods, really shouldn’t be super-difficult for the average guild member to access. It’s not good for morale, and while these things are generally not prohibitively expensive on the Trading Post, the point of a Vault is to be useful to the entire guild. It shouldn’t have to be up to the officers to pull out everything a member wants.
Thankfully my guild is awesome and really rallied together to restock the vault with even better items than were stolen, so this particular story has a happy ending. However, it would be nice if some safeguards were implemented so that thievery were far less of a danger.
A couple things could help with this:
1. More comprehensive permissions based on rank – currently access to vault tabs based on rank is pretty arbitrary, and permissions for the Treasure Trove and Deep Cave are linked.
2. The ability to set limits on how much an individual can take from a vault tab per day.
2a. This would preferably go hand-in-hand with making it so you can drop a stackable item directly onto an existing stack in the vault, rather than having to take the existing stack out, make your own stack, and then re-deposit the whole shebang.)
3. A tag next to each member’s name, or some other sort of widget, indicating the last time the member was online and represented. Currently the only indicator in place is if their location reads as “Unknown,” and this status doesn’t change for weeks after the most recent login. This would help prevent thievery from people who don’t represent often and mostly use the guild for its vault.
The guild interface in general needs a lot of work, but these are the suggestions I have pertinent to my guild’s current problem. Thanks for reading, and for any improvements I know you’ll make!