Hello.
After the recent server mergers took place, a number of characters in both the guild roster and the community roster appear to be ‘Ghosted’.
By Ghosted, I mean that there is an entry in the roster for the character, but it appears to have no name, and it cannot be clicked.
If we check the old guild roster, using the chat command /groster - there we see that the characters are still showing as normal.
In the Guild and Community which I own and manage, some of the Ghosted characters are on moderator or admin ranks (officers). Those characters display only the golden crown icon on their roster entries.
I contacted a Games Master via the in-game support interface about this bug some time ago. They informed me that there was nothing that they could do about it, besides remove the Ghosted characters from the Guild/Community, if I could provide them the names of the characters which were Ghosted. - It would take me quite some time to figure out which ones are Ghosted in the guild, and there is no possible way for me to know who the Ghosted characters are in the Community.
They also informed me that the only other way to resolve this issue - would be for those Ghosted characters to log in to the game. I asked, could they log those characters in to fix the issue, and they declined to do so.
Now, after some time, one of my friends has come back to WoW and he finds that his character is not displaying in the character display screen. So he cannot even log in to that character, it simply is not there. I checked the roster in-game and I note that this character is one of the Ghosted characters. I advised him to contact a Games Master via the support interface, from one of his other characters to report this. I am sure he will do so.
However, for those other people with Ghosted characters, who have not been online for some time and do not know about this issue, it appears that their characters have been deleted or removed somehow. If those characters are of lesser importance to those players, then they might not even notice at all, until or unless they come to play on them at some point and find them missing.
I would like to appeal to the Games Masters and Developers here to dive deeper into this issue and to get it resolved. Without waiting for certain people to log on to the game to write support tickets, if they happen to notice their characters missing at all.
It doesn’t help that the new Guild & Communities interface is just an addon, which I note as very lazy coding work by the Developers. Because it just shows badly to those players who do not know they can still access the old guild roster.
Sadly, also, because the new Guild & Communities interface (addon) is so poorly implemented, I still find it much easier to use the old guild interface to manage my guild. Why can’t you just merge the code from the old guild interface with the new interface, so that the roster behaves as it should? This would then clear up some of the issue at least.
The new Guild & Communities interface is so dreadful that it is not fit for purpose.
Yes, it displays a chat log, woop-ti-do. But at the cost of roster manageability.
To manage my guild roster, I use the chat command /groster - then click the drop-down menu to display Players status, - then click the Level column to bring the highest level characters to the top of the list. Then I click the drop-down menu once more and display Guild status, - then click the Rank column to bring the higest Rank to the top of the list.
This is how the guild roster SHOULD be displayed, with highest rank to the top, and with the characters in level order within the ranks. Double categorised - if you will call it that.
But in the new Guild & Communities interface, it defaults the list to Last online, and does not double categorise the order of the list, so the characters Always display in an unorganised manner, no matter which column you click on… Which cannot be managed to any degree when the guild or community is large.
I hope that this gives the Developers some in-sight to how the interface is or could be used, or to how it could be made more useful. (as it used to be).
To conclude this post, I would like to say that the most recent changes to the interface have simply worsened it. That goes for the new auction too - “let us cancel auctions as we used to”, is all I will say about that here since this post is about the Shoddy Guild & Communities interface and Ghosted characters.
Will the Developers please, sort themselves out and get back to coding the game right - testing it thoroughly, and making sure it works before implementing their new work into the live game.
Thanks.