Linkshell Management Recognition

[UllrHellfire]

Seriously needs to get fixed, nothing more frustrating than having to waste my time and that of some who can hand out the pearls because we have to re-form again.

Since joining my current LS they have reformed 4 or 5 times.

Lets make this happen, even if the only thing they do is add the ability to remove offline members.

I agree we need to do something about this and now!

[Keith_Dragoon]

Even if it is a complicated task why put it off until AFTER they FINISH the combat overhaul? That means this won't even be put to the grindstone until AFTER summer. This is what gets under my skin, they overhaul all of the staple features of this game except the linkshell. One of the most used if not THE most used feature of this game to this point.

Its almost as if they want us to suffer because out of all the other staple features, this is the ONLY one that has 99.9% of the vocal playerbase behind the idea yet this one goes completely unoticed. /sadpanda

My current stance on this topic

[Keith_Dragoon]

Sorry for double post but this almost fell to page 3 aswell.

[Alothia]

Just finished my 6th pearling since CE release. It's a pain in the butt. Please fix this, and soon.

[Gracious]

The primary complaint amongst members/leaders in most linkshells is that the tools are severely limiting and needlessly so. Recruiting and ousting members from a linkshell is counter intuitive at best. It is the case with most shells that they are constantly having to break and recreate their shells in order to purge their linkshell lists of people who have decided to leave on their own accord.

It becomes increasingly frustrating when new dev-tags are released and linkshell management is not among them. Some players have been so desperate for the recognition of this issue that they've posted the issue under "[Dev 1024] Crowd Control". There was a post made by Rukirii in that particular thread but the answer did not mesh with the information gleamed in "Letter from the Producer VIII" where Naoki Yoshida clarified that there were multiple specialized teams working on different aspects of the game.

I will personally be modifying/editing this post to present the progress so far in regards to this issue.

If you so choose, please check out and reply to the following threads, and incorporate your feedback here or in there, preferably both. After reading many of the posts already, it is clear that the issues are unanimous amongst the playerbase.



A very thorough post from Poppa which is so important I feel the need to include it in the OP as it seems I'm not the only one who has done the legwork necessary to research this particular topic.




Day#1 May 23, 2011 - Noticed a thread made by Keith_Dragoon
Day#2 May 24, 2011 - Created this thread
Day#3 May 25, 2011 - Posted thoughts from AngryNixon on common sense and Tonka on competency (pg.3)
Day#4 May 26, 2011 - Responded to statements against change by Kilta_Firelotus and Elexia. (pg. 4)

Guess it takes longer then 8 months to get this addressed. Very sad too since there is such a huge response of players that would like this fixed fast.

[Keith_Dragoon]

Still no love

[Rhomagus]

Day #10 May 1, 2011

Missed out on a couple of days there, my apologies. It was still pretty easy to find this thread and [dev1024] Linkshell Administration Options.. Which is a good thing. It's the primary reason as to why I wanted to get this thing started as there's no doubt there is a need for this topic to be properly addressed, the only problem is that it was being spread too thin amongst newly created threads and unfortunately, those threads would quickly fall to the third page perhaps even further.

The proper areas of the forums are being under utilized. The place where this subject belongs is in the UI section of the forums. There were a vast amount of threads created on the subject of linkshell tools but a lot of them barely get any recognition. I don't think it's because this isn't an important or wanted topic. I do think that people get caught up with things that are currently coming down the pipe from the development team. I'd assume it's because people feel that their opinion has more weight to it when they know the development team is working on a particular facet of the game. They're under the assumption that the development team is working on it now and they want to get their opinion in last second before the final release.

I'm a bit torn on this. While I do believe the recent Q&A topics consist of legitimate wants to address the issue, I have a feeling that, by the time dev-tags are made, the issue is already past the conception or planning stages and is in development. I can't say this for sure but it's a plausible option.

So with that frame of reference a question arises.

Are the dev tags meant to be used by the community to provide an efficient means of supplying the development team with their input...

or

Are the dev tags meant to be used as a communications tool by the community team in order to inform the player base what changes are being implemented.

They need not be mutually exclusive nor the only options, but let's assume option A.

If option A is true, the responsibility of feedback and input falls on us (the player base). We've been given the means to do so in a highly efficient way with the implementation of dev tags. This would allow the community team to prioritize certain issues and ready them for submission and translation to the development team.

If option B is true, once a dev tag has been made, the issue is probably already in the testing phases. By then, it's really out of our hands. All we can do is complain about it's implementation and hope that it is changed. I'm assuming that this has been the rationale behind the seemingly quick implemented target lock control schemes that we've been seeing.

At the end of the day, even considering both options, it's in our best interest to responsibly address particular topics accordingly. I don't think that means not creating multiple threads on a similarly related topic though. I'm also of the opinion that the reason multiple threads are created in the first place is that sometimes the current threads don't represent a particular players point of view. So in lieu of posting their opinions in a sea of counter arguments, they decide to create a new topic entirely in hopes of garnering responses from people of the same opinion. This is the conundrum that we come to when creating thread topics on issues we consider important.

Is the sheer number of posts in a thread a sign of the issues importance?
How many posts are the community team reading before formulating an opinion?
What makes a good opinion?
Are there examples where a valid argument was made but not heard in a thread full of invalid arguments for an opinion?
Can these very specific English opinions be properly translated into other languages?

and so on...

There is a vast gap between our individual opinions and how they are finally communicated to the development team. It's a monumental task to properly prioritize these issues and at the end of the day, that may not be up to us or the community team. The development team has what they need to work on, and should be diligent in the tasks appropriated to them. I think the majority of frustrations from this particular issue on linkshell management is that it seems to have been inappropriately prioritized. I think there are many contributing factors as to why it has been inappropriately prioritized but that's a discussion for another day.

Regardless of how topics are prioritized to the development team, we can discern what's in our control and what's out of our control. Through that we can choose what the best courses of action can be, that are in our control, to create a desired outcome. There is a valid argument for the opinions not being heard, but has that person supported their opinion rationally? Have they exhausted all routes and research before creating a new thread to be sure someone hasn't already refuted their position or made their points already? Is their tone reminiscent to how an adult would converse with another adult? or does the new thread topic offer new insight into a particular aspect of an issue? As a community we should carefully contemplate these things before creating a new thread. It may help the community reps condense issues more efficiently and whatever makes that part of the communication process more expedient is in the best interest of all parties involved.

What I would like to do now is to guide you to a post made in the appropriate forum for this topic.

This not only shows that I am not the first to be baffled about the priority of this issue, but that it's not something that just cropped up just last month. Nicodemus created a topic in the UI forums and also appropriated his own dev tag. Depending on the context you could view his dev tag number as a criticism on the urgency for this issue or that the issue seems to not exist. Without further ado, here's what Nicodemus wrote:

[dev0000] Linkshell Commands

I've dug through the forums a bit and read the letters from the Devs - and very little communication seems to be forthcoming about changes in, commands. The biggest culprits are:

/lscmd Invite? Kick? Promote? Leave a Message After the beep?
/chatmode Why not allow chat to switch betwen mutliple linkshells if not
/ls1
/ls2
/ls3 ...directly?


But the real question is, how do we highlight this to the devs? This is nowhere in the "in development" section of the forum so there are no tags that I can (legitimately) attach, and honestly I think it's a relatively quick fix.

Ideas?


~Nico

This thread was created on April 14, 2011 and at the time of this writing is located on page 3 of the UI forums. So if you really care about this issue I'd also ask you to post in the threads found there as well. Mods/GMs/ and Community Reps have asked us to post in the threads found in General Discussion but I think it's safe to say that this is a User Interface problem so that would also be a good place to post.

[Zenge]

Indeed this is a major issue. In the pass 3 days after the repearling of a LS, we are still inviting the members from other shell and it's really troublesome asking them to meet a certain time or place to receive one.

[EgweneALvere]

I couldn't let this fall to the second page.

Bump!!

[Wooba]

I'm sure it has been stated numerous times already, but Linkshell Management is truely a nightmare in this current state. It is really baffling how Square has gone this long without addressing such a simple problem. My Linkshell has had to create a new shell and reform at least 3 times now, and everyone is getting sick of it. Linkshell/Guild Management in an MMO should be something that is easy to do, and shouldn't take days worth of planning and explination just to clear out inactive members. It should be as simple as a Left Click in the member list, followed by clicking Remove.

I don't understand how this has been ignored since September. It has always been a problem, and Square hasn't even recognized it as a problem. I'm greatful for all the planned changes, and am looking forward to them, but I'm not looking forward to creating /Meh again to get rid of all the people that don't play anymore. Something so simple as this really shouldn't take this much time to bring to attention, certainly not with the number of topics created about the issue.