Guild Leader Data Thoughts

Hey Developers and GW2 Community,

I just wanted to throw out some ideas I have had lately that I think would be useful for Guild Leaders and Officers in running their guilds more efficiently, and get the communities thoughts on whether or not they are good ideas or not, and hopefully get a few of them implemented because other guild leaders would find them useful. As a disclaimer, I know some of these ideas may seem crazy, or nit picky, but if you are a leader running an extremely active guild of 500 players, and want to keep it filled with active/the best players, then it could be useful to you!

I think the guild panel is a very good setup with the ability to show time offline etc. But I wish and think the guild Leader should have access to much more in depth info and statistics about their guilds. Such as, the ability to see how much time players spent representing their guild (in % average) that way Guild leaders could more strongly enforce a represent % if that is something they wish to enforce.

I also think it would be effective to show guild leaders how much players contribute to the guild, either monetarily, and/or active time spent with other guildies in parties. This way leaders could see and reward players who actively throw money at the guild or are spending time with other guidlies, versus the guy who never says a thing and never does anything with anyone and isn't contributing at all.

Another useful breakdown I think would be useful to see for each player (for guild leaders) is how much time a certain player spends in each aspect of the game (PvE, PvP, or Wvw). For example: if a leader wants to run their guild PvE only, they can see if players only play WvW, and are not really contributing or helping towards the guilds vision, and be able to decide if that player is a good fit for their guild.

Another thought I had was to show how active people actually are on a weekly basis. To clarify, if a player logs on for 2 min a day, sits in LA and collects dailies, then logs off, that is not a very contributing player. I think a leader should have the ability to see this to kind of information to determine if that is a player they wish to keep on the roster, or replace with someone who is a better fit to their guild.

I would also love to hear what other players/leaders may have thought would be useful information to know in running their guild more efficiently! I just think overall there could be a lot more data available which (idk if they track currently, or could easily implement things to track) that they could then make available to guild leaders to be able to make more efficient guild decisions. Please let me know what you think! I'm sure I'll have more ideas that I've thought of in the past but forgot as I was writing this, that I will make sure to edit and bring up as I think of them!

No thoughts?

My main thought is: I would expect power tripping guild leaders to get nasty to people not slavishly following rep and activity orders. Yes, data can be helpful, but you're asking for an invasive amount of it.

@Donari.5237 said:My main thought is: I would expect power tripping guild leaders to get nasty to people not slavishly following rep and activity orders. Yes, data can be helpful, but you're asking for an invasive amount of it.

my main thoughts would probably get me a warning/infraction/banned, so I'm just going to agree with Donari's much politer version

Donari, I appreciate your thoughts on the topic, but I would disagree. If you are a leader of a full active guild of 500 players (which you clearly are not) then you would not understand. And yes while I understand some guild leaders may be obsessed with the power of leading a guild, I also think they have a right to run their guild the way they created and dedicated countless hours of time too to make sure it works for them. And that reason is why I think they should have more data available to them. :)

But also understand, people have a right to choose if they stay in a guild... A power hungry leader is not going to be able to lead 500 people and keep them in their guild. I believe people will not stay in a guild if the leader is super power hungry and over demanding. I think the data overall though would be beneficial for them to make decisions they need to make

I think there are definately things Anet could do to help more serious guilds - but I don't think this would help in the slightest. Most people who would enforce this data wouldn't know what to make of it, and just make things messy for everyone involved.

On the whole, these suggestions can be solved by talking to your guildmates. If your guild doesn't talk, or you don't know anyone, or they don't know you... then you should be seriously considering what your guild is about.

@Incrazed.3165 said:Hey Developers and GW2 Community,

I just wanted to throw out some ideas I have had lately that I think would be useful for Guild Leaders and Officers in running their guilds more efficiently, and get the communities thoughts on whether or not they are good ideas or not, and hopefully get a few of them implemented because other guild leaders would find them useful. As a disclaimer, I know some of these ideas may seem crazy, or nit picky, but if you are a leader running an extremely active guild of 500 players, and want to keep it filled with active/the best players, then it could be useful to you!

I think the guild panel is a very good setup with the ability to show time offline etc. But I wish and think the guild Leader should have access to much more in depth info and statistics about their guilds. Such as, the ability to see how much time players spent representing their guild (in % average) that way Guild leaders could more strongly enforce a represent % if that is something they wish to enforce.

Why not take it to the next step and just have the game autokick once it drops below?

I also think it would be effective to show guild leaders how much players contribute to the guild, either monetarily, and/or active time spent with other guildies in parties. This way leaders could see and reward players who actively throw money at the guild or are spending time with other guidlies, versus the guy who never says a thing and never does anything with anyone and isn't contributing at all.

Representation tells you none of those things. On the other hand using already existing API can already tell you how much people are contributing to things like upgrades. If someone doesn't want to contribute then it doesn't matter if they are repping or not, they are not going to spend.

Another useful breakdown I think would be useful to see for each player (for guild leaders) is how much time a certain player spends in each aspect of the game (PvE, PvP, or Wvw). For example: if a leader wants to run their guild PvE only, they can see if players only play WvW, and are not really contributing or helping towards the guilds vision, and be able to decide if that player is a good fit for their guild.

Another thought I had was to show how active people actually are on a weekly basis. To clarify, if a player logs on for 2 min a day, sits in LA and collects dailies, then logs off, that is not a very contributing player. I think a leader should have the ability to see this to kind of information to determine if that is a player they wish to keep on the roster, or replace with someone who is a better fit to their guild.

I would also love to hear what other players/leaders may have thought would be useful information to know in running their guild more efficiently! I just think overall there could be a lot more data available which (idk if they track currently, or could easily implement things to track) that they could then make available to guild leaders to be able to make more efficient guild decisions. Please let me know what you think! I'm sure I'll have more ideas that I've thought of in the past but forgot as I was writing this, that I will make sure to edit and bring up as I think of them!

@Incrazed.3165 said:No thoughts?

My initial thought is that you only waited 3 hours.

My second thought is that there's a fundamental disconnect about how guilds work. Guilds are not businesses, they are social organizations. They don't need to be efficient; they need to be supportive of the needs of its members (which might include being hardcore about gaming or low key or whatever in between).

The way to run a supportive 500-member organization is to not depend on a single person to figure everything out. A strong guild includes delegated responsibility and authority, includes multiple people looking out for various aspects of the membership. (Even in a business, "efficiency" isn't enough to run the most effective companies.)

Every single stat that the OP wants to measure covers the tangible, and there's not a single indication that there's any concern about the intangibles: are the members having fun? (And no, the fact that there are 500 people in a guild isn't sufficient to demonstrate that. I've been in huge guilds that kept going on their own inertia, long past the exp'r'y date, because people preferred what they knew rather than having to take time to find something else.)

The OP is correct that it's difficult for a GL in a 500-person guild to know everyone who participates or contributes. But the data mentioned won't show that either: sometimes the person who logs on for 5 hours / month and just chats can do more to hold a guild together than the one who is on nightly and donating 100s of gold. A good GL should know most of both types without asking for ANet to provide intrusive levels of data and their lieutenants should be able to help them learn about any others.

That said, if the OP really wants this sort of data from their guild's members, it's possible to obtain without ANet doing extra work. Require everyone in the guild to setup a public API key. Write (or commission someone to write) a script that collects data from the API at regular intervals. With the current API, it's possible to measure some data directly and other bits via proxies. For example, "time online this month" can be computed from grabbing /age data at regular intervals. WvW & PvP participation can be measured via ranks. Proxies for raids exist by measuring LI (and including legendary armor).

tl;dr good guilds don't need to be efficient; they need to have GLs who understand how to run social organizations.For those GLs who feel that data is essential, it's possible to use the API to make that happen.

Well, if this is just for those few who lead 500, then make it so the guild has to have 500 members with active accounts before they can have all that. Because if all that is available to every guild, the power tripping will happen in the smaller ones.

To be honest, this kind of system sounds like something that would just create a lot of needless anxiety for guild members, leaders included.

You have to keep in mind that different gamers have different circumstances. Some can only play an hour a day, some can play all day. Some earn more in game, some less. Some have big credit card budgets to spend real money on the game, others do not. So there will obviously be a great deal of disparity when it comes to how much members can contribute to a guild and how much time they can spend playing in a guild.

Given that fact, would you really want a system introduced that allows guild leaders or officers to scrutinize others, and possibly punish them for circumstances outside of their control? Would you want players in the game to feel fearful about whether or not they are doing enough, or to feel guilty for what they can or cannot achieve? Even if you have a perfectly amiable guild leader who understands all this and treats their members fairly, there would still be that cloud of doubt or unease for members, because they will know big brother is watching, so to speak. And for less amiable leaders who simply look at data and don't consider their context, I can foresee the system being abused to a significant degree.

Keep in mind, guild leaders are in the minority of players in GW2. For every one leader, there are many, possibly even hundreds of normal players. To inconvenience the majority for the sake of catering to the minority is never a great idea for any game. I say this as a guild leader myself.

@Incrazed.3165 said:...I appreciate your thoughts on the topic, but I would disagree. If you are a leader of a full active guild of 500 players (which you clearly are not) then you would not understand....

So the only oppinions you want is from Guild leaders of active 500player guilds...well I'm out then. Have luck m8.

I'm with the OP. And in addition I would like restricting 1 guild per character.

@YoukiNeko.6047 said:I'm with the OP. And in addition I would like restricting 1 guild per character.

Why would you want to restrict characters to 1 guild? Lol.

I think a leader of a big guild that needs this kind of data is a bad leader in the first place.A guild is a group of people. Leading them is something a leader should see as an honor. Seeing your members as some kind of lifestock that needs management is just disrespectfull to the people you are trying to lead.

I think the current tools are more then enough to clear out inactive people. The people you don't want to kick, should be people you actually know and remember. That is in my opinion how a good leader works. He knows who is important to the guild. If you need these tools to recognise who is important, you are not a strong leader.

@Tenrai Senshi.2017 said:

@YoukiNeko.6047 said:I'm with the OP. And in addition I would like restricting 1 guild per character.

Because this way you can have alt in different guild (like bank guild) while your main is in your main guild.

@YoukiNeko.6047 said:

@Tenrai Senshi.2017 said:

@YoukiNeko.6047 said:I'm with the OP. And in addition I would like restricting 1 guild per character.

But you can effectively already do this. You can have different characters represent different guilds and be in multiple guilds at the same time. But the guilds are still tied to your account rather than each separate character (which in my opinion, is better).

I got six words in before I was already physically exhausted by OP's entire ~deal~

"There are 3 kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics".

I happen to be a big fan of statistics (fortunately, since it sometimes feels like my job is to run numbers through Excel) but I think it's something you have to be careful with because there's so many factors involved in how even the simplest data can be interpreted. Now how does that work? It's just numbers isn't it? And they're taken straight from the game so they can be miscounted. What could possibly be open to (mis)interpretation in a straight-forward list of numbers on how each player spends their time?

But that's exactly the problem. It's just numbers and that will never tell the full picture. You're missing an absolutely massive amount of qualitative data.

The guy who is always online, always in guild chat helping the newbies understand their profession and put builds together, letting them know how Fractals work and linking them to helpful websites? He mainly reps his WvW guild because he needs to rep them while he can talk to everyone in his casual-friendly PvX guild without repping. And now according to your data he's almost never contributing, he may as well not be in the guild. So the leader skims through the so-helpful data they've got an immediately identifies him as someone to kick and your guild is down one of it's best members. (And may well lose many of the new/less experienced players now they don't get the same support from the guild as they used to.)

The new player who is eagerly giving you 1/2 of all the gold and materials they get and checking every day for new guild hall upgrades and looking forward to the day they can do even more to help? Their contributions barely register next to the 5+ year players dumping their spare ecto, so they get kicked to make room for someone who will "really" commit (but won't ever actually participate because they're mostly over the whole guild thing) and their dedication goes to their new guild. (Or is gone for good because they no longer feel willing to trust a guild that much.)

The guy who can't ever contribute much to the guild hall because he's spending all his gold buying WvW upgrades for your world & the guildies who play with him (in someone else's squad, not a guild party)? He's gone too.

Now I'm sure you're going to say a good leader would know all about those people and their contributions and wouldn't kick them. But if that's the case surely that good leader can just as easily keep track of financial contributions and to some extent time spend playing with the guild (whether representing or not)?

Most of the things you ask for is not going to be introduced, because they are all about types of behaviour Anet's doesn't want to promote. No, Anet's not going to help you enforce your desired types of behaviour on your guildmembers. It's all between people in the guild, devs will likely want nothing to do with that.

I'm going to concur with Donari. For some this may be helpful, although it's always alluded me why someone would want 500 people in their guild. Let alone alliances of more. But that's neither here nor there.

As a small guild leader, I have this information already. Just from interacting with my guildies. Hell, I know far more than just this about them, but that's the joys of small, close knit guilds.

Larger guilds...have larger multi-person support structure to manage for these reasons and can generally tell you who the regulars are, what and where they play, etc.

While I'm sure some additional data could be useful, this is a tad bit invasive and potentially misused - potentially unintentionally.