The new In-game(IG) calendar is pretty.  She wears nice pumps, and spins around a well-coordinated pink and white striped dress. And if you speak to her in a soft voice, she smiles, causing little hearts to sprinkle downward from the sky and landing around your feet.

She is a welcomed guest.  At least she was expected to be, and when I finally got in to Bleeding Hollow at 10:30pm EST, the first thing I did was open the door for her.

See, before last night, AUO scheduled all of their events with Group Calendar(GC).  GC is a good pal, lives with us, pays the rent on time.  A real reliable type.  Sure he has flaked out sometimes when there are changes to his wardrobe, but for the most part, he has been stable.  And really easy to work with.

I wish I could say the same about IG. 

I completely understand she is young and inexperienced.  I know she is still growing and will, like any young adult, go through some “life changes”.  I know that in six months, she may not even resemble that sweet, candy coated, young woman tempting you with a smile.

But I really, really, really wanted to invite her to stay with us last night.  I had a room all ready and I had even given GC notice.  He took it well and even packed up his room for the impending guest.

Except last night, under the moon outside of the Inscriber trainer in Stromwind,I knew we weren’t ready for co-habitation.

Yes she is everything I described, but she isn’t primed.  Her ability to keep up and met AUO demands is woefully inadequate and I could already see the panic in her eyes.

I called GC and told him his room was still available.

What’s missing? A couple of things, actually:

Guild Channel or Guild View: Currently, the way GC displays events is uses the Guild Channel as the common tread between all the player databases in the guild.  Thus, when you post an event, it populates to all the databases it finds through the guild channel.  Then the guild member can look and decide to sign up for a specific event.

IG doesn’t have this.  When you create an event it is limited to your calendar until you invite players individually or do a “mass invite”. 

A “mass invite” is your “guild invite” to an event, let’s say “SSC”.  Instead of using a data channel, like guild chat,to populate your guildies calendars, you have to send an invite to each toon (not account) for it to show on their screen. 

Mass invite brings the following options:

• Can specify the level range of the invitees
• Can specify the rank
• Can specify if it is just for your arena team.

Only guild members who meet the criteria  you set will see the actual event. 

Meaning, if you list that only level 70’s who are of rank “Raiding” and above will will the event, then your level 70 in the “Nub” rank won’t see it, nor your level 68 in the “Raiding” rank.

Okay, it is a little awkward, but I figured, I could deal with it.  After all, she is pretty, like Angelina Jolie pretty, and I really wanted to like her.

Let’s go back to my SSC raid.  I want to post a raid for this Friday and I want to let everyone see it, since may of our guys are off leveling alts and what not.  I create an event, list it as a raid, and then go to “mass invite”

Again, I want everyone to see so I try to list the level range from 1-70 and from the lowest rank up.  I click “create “and then am slammed with “ You may only invite 100 players to an event.” 

That is the deal breaker.

Being limited to 100 players doesn’t seem like a  big deal, but in my guild we have 96 70’s alone, not counting all our baby alts.  Meaning, that if I am leveling an alt and I happen to look at the calendar, I will not see the SSC raid and decide to go on my main.  This also means that if members want to create a silly event, like a Naked VC run for everyone, there isn’t a way (outside of doing an event for each 10 or 20 levels) to have everyone in the guild invited.  

For a guild to use IG in its current state it may need to do a few things:

• Restructure guild ranks:  Restructure ranks in way that members who are often invited to raids or pvp events can be invited.  However this will exclude others of lower ranks.
• Remove all alts into another guild and only leave mains.

Fastest way to fix it:

• Remove the “100” player limit needs to be removed and allow guilds to invite all their members. Or allow members to post events that will populate through the guild chat channel and then give members the option to sign up without being invited.

More work:

• Give an option where an event is guild specific  or a “guild view” and allow members to sign themselves up without having to send invites.  Then you have the 100 person limit.

Using a guild data channel this isn’t impossible.  Besides the fact GC already uses a guild data channel, IG does already does that feature built in. Sort of.

As a GM, you will notice something different than others, when you go to create an event, you will see another option besides “Create Event”  called  “Guild Announcement”.  Guild Announcements are a little different than a regular event and only the GM of the guild can create them.  This feature will be used mainly for events like a guild parties or meetings. 

It is a small text box where the GM can list time,date, title and description of the event, but doesn’t have attendees.  Why?  Because the event is sent through the guild channel or roster. Since it is thought of as an announcements , not an actual event, there are no invites nor is there a sign-up roster. 

Hence, you can’t use this feature to set up raids. But it show that there is a way to make an event “guild” specific without number limitations.

Great things about IG:

• All in-game events are listed. You will never have to ask if it is “AB” weekend again.
• Custom events
• Colorful and easy to read
• Can invite players outside of your guild to an event
• Native to the UI, so no mod needed
• It has Great potential
• Maybe will be incorporated into the Armory (cross fingers)

Currently there are several things I think are missing or not fully developed:

• Guild view events.  Restricting events to guild members and allowing them to sign-up on their own.
• Guild controls for the calendar.  As a GM, I don’t want to be responsible for posting every single guild meeting or event for AUO.  Many of my officers help with this and having the ability to give them access to that would be helpful.
• Mass Invite restrictions.  I know AUO isn’t the only guild with over 100 members and we are on the cusp of 100 70.  Other guilds are already over that and if you want to let everyone know, this won’t work.  Mass invites refer to the guild anyway, just remove the invite restrictions for this feature and we will switch.

Summary of the meeting:

I think she is a very nice and great girl, but still a little too green.  I can’t offer the room yet, but I hope I can very soon.

Image courtesy of jenikahycc

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