Quality of Life Guild Improvements for HCL Event and Live Servers

[Dark_Lord_Mary]

After my third HCL event, running the biggest guild during the past two events - thank you to everyone who played with me by the way - I am confronted by DDO's lack of tools for guilds and guild masters. Guilds as coded are woefully inadequate for the HCL event for many reasons.

Some very simple quality of life changes for Guilds both HCL and live - See my previous post on Elemental Guild Gems for Moving Guild XP

And:

1. Guild Masters granted an account ban feature to deal with players who are trolling in violation of the ToS and Community Standards. During HCL III one of our guildies said racist/sexist things. I removed that person from guild. However later when I was offline, someone readded them. I had to remove them again and use Discord to inform members that player was banned. I also informed the other GMs of the other big HCL guilds that said player was to be looked out for. That player was able to find a home in one of the other guilds with guild rules that were according to their GM adult-themed and 'we don't care' - and despite my urgings, nothing happened to that player. This illuminates the lack of tools we Guild Masters and Guilds have to deal with violations of Community Standards and the ToS - if a player is behaving in a way that is clearly racist or sexist, yes we can eject them from the guild - but there is no way to ban that character from being added back. And even if everyone knows not to re-add the player, that person can just roll up a new toon, guild that one, and continue trolling. HCL also has no in-game SSG support - so what can we do to deal with bullying or racism or sexism? Our hands are tied. This is unacceptable. Please SSG - add code to allow guild masters and officers the ability to ban players and accounts, squelch accounts, and allow us to report that behavior directly fast-tracked to SSG for review. We are LGBTQ friendly and in support of black lives matter - we do not tolerate sexism or racism of any kind. We hope SSG agrees and fixes this. This is number one.

2. The 'Recent Departure' system works on the live servers where membership is static and slow, the 2-week timer makes sense on a normal server. This needs to be removed for HCL. It makes no sense for HCL first because of the volume of players rolling, questing, dying, deleting, rolling again, etc, repeat. For a guild to suffer membership max numbers due to this departure system, it's frustrating for the guild master, officers, members, and recruits. It should be removed. The guild should cap at 1000 unique accounts, and not count alts.

3. Guild donations of plat/shards should be allowed to the Kobold on the top deck of the ship, not just in the harbor at the NPC in the ship vendor. The donations too should be viewable by the guild and the guild master should be able to add and remove funds from this. The bank should have a withdrawal feature so the Guild Master can redistribute funds for the guild without losing them due to the dead-end one-way sink that guilds presently are.

4. Guild Master should have the option to turn on a guild tithe that automatically donates quest platinum to the guild funds for use to purchase guild amenities. 10% of Platinum earned or 25% would not be noticed by most players since plat is pretty meaningless in DDO.

5. The Guild Master needs - NEEDS - the ability to lock decorations in particular spots on the ship. Officers should not be able to move decos placed by the Guild Master, period. This is supremely important.

6. Guild Master needs an audit system for the guild bank to see who is putting items and plat in and who is taking items and plat out. Weekly limits should be allowed to be set - for example, members can withdraw X number of items and XX amount of platinum /week.

7. The guild master needs to be able to create custom ranks - such as a recruiter rank that can add members to the guild but is not an officer. It would be suggested to give guild masters the ability to create 10 ranks including Guild Master, Officer, recruiter, member, recruit - etc.

8. The guild master needs to be able to tag toons as a players 'main' toon so it is easy to keep track of main toons and alt toons.

9. Guild master should be able to move the ship from port to port - instead of flying over some endless sea - I would very much like to park my ship at Sharn for example, or in the Stormreach Harbor, that way, if someone logs in and falls off the ship with no feather fall they do not die. This is a thing that kills some players on HCL that needs to be addressed.

10. A new ship decoration 'Shrine of Battle' to commemorate the HCL events. What the buffs are that is up to the community. A deco for they many players who have won and lost many hard battles during the HCL event.

11. Cargo Hold needs to be deleted and all amenity hooks for old ship buffs moved to the top deck.

12. Please change the message a player sees when they are removed from a guild; it presently reads a very belligerent and hostile, 'YOU HAVE BEEN EXPELLED FROM YOUR GUILD!' Exclamation Point! This is way too hostile - and really doesn't help people who are already upset chain dying over and over on HCL to see a message if they were removed due to inactivity or whatever. It instead should say nothing, or if a message must be displayed, it could read something neutral, such as 'You are no longer in a guild' - please, again, please change this, the hostile tone is unnecessary. Words matter.

These suggestions if implemented would greatly make the guild master's job much easier, and also allow for guilds to give members a much smoother and enjoyable experience and allow the community standards and the ToS to be upheld.