Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Hitting the Limit

500 is the magic number it seems. 500 members that is. It's not a hard limit, but Blizzard's UI code has a soft cap for guild membership at 500, after that the UI starts breaking and for me as a guild leader, problems start popping up.

1. I start losing people from the roster. They are still in the guild, and may even be online, but you won't find them on the guild tab (doesn't matter if you have "show offline" selected or not, or how many people are actually online).

2. Those people you can't see? You can't use the guild tab's controls for them now, since they don't show up. You have to type in the command you want to use (such as /gremove).

This might not be a problem for very many guilds, most haven't reached the 500 cap, but our guild, a community focused guild with a LOT of active "altaholics" like myself reaches it easily. And as guild leader, I look at my guild tab all the time. I check to see which of my officers is online, how many people are playing, who's alt that character typing in /g is, etc.

Blizzard is aware of the issue (working as intented) and at one point we thought it was going to be fixed, but so such luck so far. I've tried posting it as a bug, submitting a ticket and talking to a GM about it, but nothing has come of it.

What I'm wondering is, can we make a UI mod that will replace that guild tab with one with a higher member limit? That's asking a lot...since to be useful to a GL it'd have to have all the functionality, but even if I'm the only one that has to have the mod so I can see everyone, I'd be ok with that. Maybe there is an easier way. We've tried having an alt guild, but then the problem we have is people playing alts can't see /g and a new chat channel just doesn't seem to cut it. Maybe what we really need is an Alliance option, so we can share /g across more than one guild.

I need some sort of solution, I'm tired of turning alts away, it really impacts the community atmosphere my guild works so hard to promote.

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