Guild Communication Tools Desperately Needed...

Thank you for the kind suggestion.  🙂

Unfortunately, that's not an acceptable solution...  No one should be forced to require third-party apps just to be able to communicate with one's guild members. That should be standard functionality built into the game, and it should have been included when Guilds themselves were realeased.  Relying on third-party apps only seems to absolve EA from their responsibility to provide the necessary tools guild leaders require to manage and run their guilds. They gave us guilds, but then tied our hands...

This inabaility to communicate with guild members who can not see guild chat is having a very real impact -- and not just in my guild, I'm sure.

Just today, I had to remove a member who could not see guild chat, so they were unable to follow the raid rules that we had established (as a guild consensus), repeatedly violating them. We had no choice but to remove an otherwise fantastic, active, contributing guild member because of no fault of their own they couldn't see guild chat. And would not have even known about a third-party app to download and use ....... because they would still have been unable to read about it in guild chat.

Frankly, this is ridiculous and beyond frustrating!  😠  

Guild description fields that are beyond tiny and don't really allow any pertinent information to be displayed.

Guild chat that can't be seen by certain members.

No ability to control raid activity (such as set "zero damage" timers, prevent members that are in violation of whatever guild rule they broke from further raid activity for x time, etc)

No ability to communicate with Officers outside of guild-wide view.

No ability to e-mail a specific member, or all members.

No ability to select what "achievements" get displayed in guild chat, or what can be removed from being displayed.

PLEASE, someone at EA, for the love of all that's holy, fix this....?

Our guild is facing these same pain points.As I am certain most guilds running Heroic Rancor, as that generally means raid rules. The original poster contributed a number of ideas that would be great to have. I see the legal restriction against open communication to under-age users still blocking most of that. I'd like to propose something that would avoid that limitation and still provide the core of what we require. It hurts our guild, and your victims, to constantly kick people from our guild just because they don't see chat.

What I would like is something along the lines of a Privacy Policy disclaimer that can be placed in-between the Guild Events room and the Rancor/Tank/Territory rooms. In it you could list your raid rules and you would have to acknowledge them before continuing into the raid/battle room. This approach guarantees every member sees the rules. A wish list item would be a forced 5 second timer or something of the sort the first time viewing the rules after an update to them.

In an ideal world, the verbiage would be free-form by the guild leader/officer, but if that has legal restrictions, you could take some of the standard options used by guilds and make them set options that can be chosen by the guild leaders. This would also be a great place to build in a clickable link to the guild's website, if they have one. Again, legalities permitting.

This would be an optional thing guilds could choose to activate (and subsequently configure).

I see this being something that should be fairly easy to implement and solves 80-90% of our problems. And it would be something that could be easily tweaked over time (such as adding new "rule" options) as deemed appropriate.

We use Discord for communication, and have the invite link to it in our guild description. But getting people into that system is still problematic. It isn't a solution to our problem. It just allows some of us to communicate more effectively.

My guild's rules:

0 damage for the first 24 hours

Optional request to hold back if you have 7* Han Solo

What other guild rules are common?

I am a novice at level 84 with few six and seven star toons. I agree communication should be in game, line app doesn’t work for me.  Can you explain what is meant by zero damage in the first 24 hours?  Do we just let the raid sit until everyone has had time to join in? So nobody plays the first 24 hours?  If so, why?

My 2 guilds are not top 50, so I am getting raid rewards as  #16 contributor even though I can’t do much, yet.  Less than half of the members even enter the raids.  Still, some members chat that they missed the whole raid when Rancor ends within hours, so maybe rules are necessary.  I just haven’t found an explanation of what those rules require from me as a member.

another good reason for better in game communication.  Guild leaders could kick out anyone chatting inapropriately, protect younger members.  Third party apps woul be more dangerous, not less.

Your guild may not have raid rules, but it sounds like they could benefit from them. I believe you correctly guessed the zero damage rule reasoning. The method is to take your weakest single character into the raid, solo. You get a warning error that prevents immediate entry, but retrying allows you in with a single person. You then attack a summoned guard (if you even get a turn to attack) so that you die without registering any damage to the boss. That registers you as having participated in the raid. The 24 hour component gives every guild member the reasonable opportunity to register no matter their time zone or work schedule. The moment the clock ticks to that 24 hour mark it becomes a free-for-all. For Heroic Raids, there is no character refresh so there is a 48 hour countdown clock built-in. That makes it easy to coordinate this rule. The result is that many guild members (1/3 - 1/2) will "tie" at 20th place or so with zero damage and get the guild coins, gear, and other rewards, rather than getting nothing. That makes your guild stronger and over-all happier.

This rule generally isn't useful pre-heroic, but our guild is in a middle zone right now where we crush the 6* Tank Tankdown in a few hours, but can't quite handle Heroic yet. So we have the 24 hour rule and have to take greater effort communicating the free-for-all time. That is a short term issue that will end soon.

FYI, a secondary reason for the 24 hour rule is it allows for better coordination of concurrent damage. Phase 1 of Pit and Tank is significantly easier to register damage on than the later phases. Everyone performs best there. Since damage isn't registered to the server until your battle finishes, this allows everyone (who battles right at the 24 hour mark) to fight the same, easiest phase. To better explain, I have a team that always solos the entire Phase 1 of The Pit. So that is about 2 million damage that I do there. They then die rather quickly in Phase 2. If you get 10 people doing the same thing starting right at the 24 hour  mark, then when they finish their battles you have done 20 million damage. With enough strong players in Phase 1, you can finish an entire raid without anyone ever laying eyes on phase 3 or 4. So this technique helps make Heroic a little more doable for less powerful guilds.