Since around the time of the release of HoT, I’ve become more active in a number of different guilds, and in doing so, identified some rather frustrating elements of the guild panel UI, as well as one particular feature that I’ve found myself really wishing was present (there’s the exciting tease that makes you want to read the whole post :P). In this post, I’ll go over the problems with the UI that I have perceived, and the possible solutions that I’ve come up with. I, of course, don’t know how the developers implemented the guild panel, so I appreciate some of these may in fact be difficult changes to make under the hood, despite being simple alterations in theory. So without further ado, prepare for a massive wall of text.
The first issue is a rather minor one, and that is that there is no way to reassign guilds to the different account slots you have (g1, g2, etc). So, if you have 4 guilds, then leave the guild in the 3rd slot, that slot will be blank. Beyond looking untidy (in my opinion), this also hobbles those who like to have absolutely everything in game meticulously organised. For example, I’d like to have my primary guild in g1, my personal bank guild in g5, and side guilds in g2-g4, but short of leaving then asking for an invite again (which is very inconvenient to all involved), there isn’t any way to reorder them in the UI. My theoretical solution would just be to be able to drag’n’drop guilds to different slots. Hardly groundbreaking, I know, but why re-invent the wheel? 
The next issue is also a minor one, arguably even less of an issue than the last, and that is that to check the roster, ranks, missions, or storage of a guild, you need to be repping them. This wouldn’t annoy me at all, except for the fact that most guilds I’m in have very long MotDs (Message of the Day), and quickly switching representation from A to B, then back to A will completely bury my chat log. More than anything else, this a problem with the current Message of the Day system. All of the guild’s I’m in use it for scheduling events, teamspeak/discord information, rules, etc, the bulk of which is more akin to “guild information” than a message of the day.
If a new tab was added in the guild panel called “Guild Information”, or something along the lines, then we could use that tab to use the entire area of the UI for a long, detailed info sheet explaining all of the things that currently bloat MotDs. Having its own area of the guild UI and making it so that this longer block of text is never posted into the chat box would mean that the max character limit could be raised above the current 999 (or even removed altogether) without fear of clogging up anyone’s UI.
Then, crucially, the Message of the Day would stay where it is in the guild panel UI, and still be posted to a player’s chat log when they come online, but it would have a max character limit of 199 – the same as all other ingame messages. Also, my recommendation would be for the MotD of each guild to only appear in your chatbox once per day when you first represent them, or when it changes (maybe make this configurable in the options menu – 0: Never show MotD in chat, 1: Only show MotD in chat once per day per guild, 2: show MotD in chat every time you start representing a guild).
This would allow guilds to maintain a detailed information sheet with all of the stuff that rarely changes, and also have a smaller MotD that won’t clog up chatboxes for more short-term things, like upcoming scheduled events, or congratulating a new officer’s appointment, or something.
Next is a very quick thing, and that is to split out the “Admin Lower Ranks” permission into “Can Invite New Members” and “Admin Lower Ranks”, because in my main guild, we want as many members as possible to be able to invite their friends, but a necessary evil that goes along with that is that lowly ranked members technically have the power to kick, promote and demote members of even lower rank, when we’d like that to be reserved for officers and leaders only.
Finally, I get to that bigger feature request I mentioned at the start – tags, Teamspeak 3 style. So, for context, the main reason I thought of this is because of one particular guild I’m in which I use for pugging raids. In that guild, ranks are assigned based on which bosses you’ve killed and which achievements you’ve earned. right now, we have Double Kill, Triple Kill, Quad Kill, Penta Kill, Hexa Kill, Forsaken Eternal (all 6 killed + eternal + last cannon), and Eternal Sadist (Forsaken Eternal + SP Sadist), and then officer and leader above that. Which is an awful lot of ranks. And next week, when Wing 3 releases, that’ll just go through the roof – ranks for 2-9 kills, then the 3 ranks for the achievements in each wing. Its not even that useful, because it says nothing about which bosses you’ve killed, because you don’t have to kill them in order.
Enter the idea of tags. If you’ve ever used Teamspeak 3, you’ll know where I’m going. My suggestion is to keep the idea of ranks in place as far as permissions within the guild are concerned, but add customisable tags which are not mutually exclusive and don’t convey any permissions by default (I’ll come back to this).
This way, in the raiding guild scenario, each member could be tagged with which bosses they’ve killed and which wing’s achievements they’ve finished, rather than the bloated system we have now. In fact, this is something that could benefit every guild in the game with more than a few people in them. For normal PvX guilds, you could tag raiders, open world PvE commanders (teq, TT, etc), WvWers, and PvPers without separate ranks. Guilds centring around streamers and youtubers like Peachy Party and Spud Club tend to have a mix of players on NA and EU servers, so rather than having ranks to show that, they could have different NA and EU tags. The list is endless; tagging PvE players who do fractals a lot with their fractal tier, PvP guilds tagging members with their league division, whatever. The crucial bit is that the tags would all be customisable by guild members with the appropriate permissions. For their visual appearance, I’d like to see the the same system currently used for guild emblems used to design the tags. Going back to what I said about tags not conveying permissions, it could actually be an incredibly powerful system if tags could also give members sets of permissions. It’d make “Decorator for a Day” much easier to manage, for example, and allows individual members to have their permissions tailored to them.
Anyway, I’d love to hear people weigh in on this. Do you agree with the proposed changes? Do you think these are even issues worth fixing? Is there anything else about the guild panel that you think could be improved?