The guild I lead is just a bunch of my friends in RL. As such we have no hierarchy of ranks. This lets me use the guild ranks to identify what kind of character each member is. We have a rank for Art, Twink and Bank.

It's worked well for our group for a year and a half. That said, we're a small group of people (about a dozen) and none of us cared for an actual ranking system.

There IS one rank, however, that we use for fun to punish people. When someone does something really stupid in a group run (priest that runs in and fear guys, claiming that Fear was next to Fade), they get demoted to this rank. Just for fun, really. It's a good chuckle.

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We use the guild notes to specify if someone is an alt
If the toon is your main, only your name is displayed. If it's an alt we just use "Alt-whoever"

Our guild is small enough that most people know which alts belong to whom.

When all else fails and you don't know who just said hi in /g...just say hi back

I think Blizzard could spend their time elsewhere instead of developing a tool we already have

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I vote for actually let guilds see more then 500 damn names. If the Armory site can do it than it can be done in-game.

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In most guilds I've been in, there's usually a rank of "Alt" below the other important ranks. And then hopefully your guild leaders are on the ball, so they remember to add your name to your comments.

I sure would like to have a built-in system for tracking alts though. A whole lot of my old friends have started new characters (I myself have 8 others besides my main) and I can't keep track of them all (and don't even know some of them). It would be nice if on a person's label (the name that floats above them) it said something like "Schmucky (Alt of Thatguy)". Naturally, this would have to be a feature that you can turn off.

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As the guild leader, the way I over come this is 2 part - 1st I set the guild notes to say that either a toon is a Main, or the name of the main character if its an alt. Then I also have a special rank for alts. It allows me at a glance to see who is on a main or an alt.

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The "better spend [someone's] time doing [something else]" argument is very weak. If we are talking about a single person with limited resources, then that argument can hold. But, when you try to expand that to large corperations with a much larger resource pool, you really have gauge what percent of their resources it would take to develop this or that. It becomes a much more complicated scenario where you actually need some hard evidence in order to support that claim. I guess I just disagree that this is common sense, at that level.

In this case, we do not already have a tool for this. We have a work-around--a catch all, I suppose. There is a much better way to do this. And, it wouldn't take any significant amount of time away from Blizzard's WoW department to develop it, either. Especially since they have examples from which they can work.

Name Tag - http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/downloads/addons/guild/name-tag/

I know that I had a mod a looong time ago that allowed you to combine guild members into a tree view. It worked a little like this.

+ Larry

[expand]

+ Larry
- EvilLarry
- SmartLarry
- SillyLarry

... where Larry is a main and EvilLarry, SmartLarry, and SillyLary are all his alts. Any online characters were highlighted. It was very helpful, but I cannot remember the name.

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Erm...l2addons

plenty of guild organization addons, note-making addons, etc

blizz doesn't need to waste time on simple things like this.

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A number of guilds are running the AKA addon which identifies alts in chat.
http://ui.worldofwar.net/ui.php?id=3747

Players can choose a nickname which appears in chat regardless of which character they are logged in with.
It also provides expanded "who" information for those character.

Doesn't do much good if you're the only one running it, but if you can get the alt-a-holics to run it, it helps keep everyone straight.

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I personally use an add-on called guild greet. it allows me to say hello to people when they log on and also lets me identify who is the "main" and who are their alts, so I can identify this easily.

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Umm this is another total non-issue. Make guild rank just for alts, called "Alts." Put alts in there. Put main name in comment. Done.

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Just curious, but is this really true?

....but if your alt is in the guild, your guild has a right to know the other guild members you play....

Whay does a guild have this right?

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Altminder for the win.

I have several (hundred) alts myself. When a new one comes into the guild, my public note is set to "Alt Usul"

Everyone who runs the mod has a macro /altm extract guild they click...and suddenly my name appears next to my alt's.


Kinda like Shenanigans(Usul): Hi.

Works great, minimal overhead, and a great addon to keep everything straight!

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Simple management technique that IMO all guilds should use, that will help with this and many other issues:

No anonymous members. Period. The guild gets your real name or you don't get an invite.

Put their name in their note and be done with it. All alts get the same name.

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Great mod just for this: AKA

http://ui.worldofwar.net/ui.php?id=3747

We have it as a semi-required in guild addon for the most part, and it is very nice. Shows you not only the nickname, but the professions, alt professions, etc.

Says it is out of date, but I am running the latest version just fine.

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My biggest problem is that I don't really have a "main". Thus my alts get tagged with "Alt of YYY" and no one has any idea of who YYY is. It's not until I log in with my currently most played character that they actually realize "Oh, YYY is actually ZZZ!".

Oh well, the only people who get really confused about this are the n00bs to the guild who weren't around when I was playing on YYY 8 hours a day. :)

I also have a few alts that aren't tagged as being my alt. That way I can watch whats going on without people knowing there is an officer around.

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Quote:
it's really helpful to know that that 23 mage on right now is actually a well-geared 70 warrior who can tank your instance.
-------------------------------------------------------

Ever think that "Well-geared 70 Warrior doesnt want to tank your or anyone else's instanced at that time? Perhaps thats WHY he or she is playing an Alt.

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Maybe that well geared 70 warrior is playing that alt precisely because he doesn't want to be bothered with requests to tank instances right now? ;)

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Same as 1.
Very small guild and each rank is a RL name.
There aren't that many of us, but it was really
hard to remember all the alts before we did that.

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Shame there aint anymore PALS addon :
http://www-en.curse-gaming.com/downloads/addons/chat/pals/

It was the best one around not depending on other players.

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