Lift The 321 Member Guild Cap

[Dizeliun 0]

As the title suggests, I think the 321 member limit of a guild should be lifted for the following reasons.

 

In a guild you often have members with alts or sometimes even multiple alts, so the average 40man can upward of 80 accounts,

You also have your casuals and friends of raiders often taking up a majority of the guild itself,

You have the pvp players that fill slots,

You have the leveling players that take up a large chunk,

And you have the trials, the potential new blood for the guild

 

321 Member limit runs up fast when you plan two separate raiding rosters. This causes the guild to be split by having alts and leveling players in a separate guild which then have to be transferred to the main guild. In retail the guildcap was at 1000 players, if you want to provide the blizzlike experience I think this should be changed to reflect the proper cap.  Thank you for reading

[Garun 9]

No, it was 321 in retail vanilla, so it's not going to change.

[jcochran 1]

Actually, there's another very good reason for the 321 cap.

Did you ever wonder where the rather strange number of 321 came from? Once you understand that, then you'll understand why it exists.

The WoW client in vanilla gets a single message detailing the guild membership. So let's work from there.

Maximum length of a message to the client = 32768

Overhead of message = 10

Maximum number of ranks within a guild = 10

Maximum length of guild info message = 500

Maximum length of guild message of the day = 128

Maximum information per guild member = 100

Now the key is that the message to the WoW client can never ever exceed 32768. So let's calculate the maximum number of guild members we can cram into that message.  First, let's subtract the overhead and one time guild information. So 32768 - 10 - 10 - 500 - 128 = 32120. Which means we have 32120 bytes available for guild membership. And given the 100 limit, we now have 32120 / 100 = 321.

And that is where the guild member cap of 321 is set. In order to increase the guild cap beyond that, the WoW client would have to use more than 1 message to describe the guild. Which means that the WoW client would have to changed. And that is the one thing that we absolutely can not do. The guild member cap isn't some arbitrary number set by someone saying "This is what vanilla used and therefore we're going to slavishly use the same number." It's set by "This is what the software for the vanilla client expects and it has an inherent limitation of 321 that can't be exceeded without modifications to the vanilla client."

Is it possible to exceed the limit of 321 within the vanilla client? I personally would say "Yes" because it's unlikely that every guild member will use the maximum of 100 bytes for their entry (overhead + name length + message length). But if there's more than 321 guild members, it's possible for the 32768 byte limit to be exceeded by people simply editing their public notes. And having the server check each attempt to edit the user's public not to make sure the result doesn't cause the guild description to exceed the limit would be a real pain in the rear as well as being a non intuitive work around. For example, assume that "Joe" is someone who joined the guild fairly early and make a fairly descriptive public message "Tank, 300/300 mining/blacksmithing" and then as the guild grows, "Fred" who's a late comer decides to edit his public message to also read "Tank, 300/300 mining/blacksmithing" and instead of his attempt working, he gets an error message indicating that it's not possible to set that message. WTF?!?!? Fred is unable to set a message that's IDENTICAL to Joe's? Any bets on how rapidly a bug report is going to be created by Fred? 

So sorry folks, the 321 guild member cap is here to stay.

 

 

[Aurigon 2]

As a guild master myself, I would STRONGLY recommend considering the suggestion made by the OP.

Thanks to jcochran for his technical explanation, but having played on other private 1.12.1 projects since 2012 (Feenix, a bit of Nostalrius and Kronos) I can guarantee the 321 limit can be safely exceeded without any downside whatsoever. My guild had 600+ members on Emerald Dream, and nearly 800 on Kronos (see the screenshots linked) and everything worked alright, so I can state for a fact that's absolutely feasible. ED from Feenix, above all, wasn't even that much polished as a server, and still it allowed for guilds to grow much bigger than this. I think Elysium shouldn't be sub-par and have this limit lifted. Considering how buggy Feenix was, I'm confident it must not be that hard to implement at all. I mean, if Feenix managed to do it...

We only started recruiting two weeks ago, we don't spam invites, and we're only joined by those who see our advertisement and ask, and we're already at membership cap. Only two weeks.

Please, consider this and allow our communities to grow without enforcing level or activity restrictions on our membership, thanks.

[Storfan 24]

 

On 2017-05-14 at 9:38 AM, Aurigon said:

As a guild master myself, I would STRONGLY recommend considering the suggestion made by the OP.

Thanks to jcochran for his technical explanation, but having played on other private 1.12.1 projects since 2012 (Feenix, a bit of Nostalrius and Kronos) I can guarantee the 321 limit can be safely exceeded without any downside whatsoever. My guild had 600+ members on Emerald Dream, and nearly 800 on Kronos (see the screenshots linked) and everything worked alright, so I can state for a fact that's absolutely feasible. ED from Feenix, above all, wasn't even that much polished as a server, and still it allowed for guilds to grow much bigger than this. I think Elysium shouldn't be sub-par and have this limit lifted. Considering how buggy Feenix was, I'm confident it must not be that hard to implement at all. I mean, if Feenix managed to do it...

We only started recruiting two weeks ago, we don't spam invites, and we're only joined by those who see our advertisement and ask, and we're already at membership cap. Only two weeks.

Please, consider this and allow our communities to grow without enforcing level or activity restrictions on our membership, thanks.

Considering it messes with the 32bit integer I'm guessing they had to cut some corners somewhere. You dont wanna trigger a stack overflow and end up in invalid memory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDezeG_a-Gs

 

[jcochran 1]

3 hours ago, Storfan said:

 

Considering it messes with the 32bit integer I'm guessing they had to cut some corners somewhere. You dont wanna trigger a stack overflow and end up in invalid memory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDezeG_a-Gs

 

Actually no. If you read my post, you can exceed the 321 limit and usually not see any problems.  The 321 limit reserves 100 bytes per guild member. Those 100 bytes are to store the member's name, rank, public note, and officer's note. If not many public and officer notes are made, then the 321 limit is conservative and can be exceeded. But as the overall guild description size approaches the 32K limit, you will have issues either creating or modifying those notes. And those issues are highly likely to result in the submission of bug reports even if the server is handling things properly.

[Pottu 290]

Nostalrius had a higher limit for a while and it caused technical issues. I do not how ED and Kronos solved these issues or whether they happened so rarely that it hardly mattered but we're extremely unlikely to lift the cap because of said issues. We have seen them in action and they are not easy to fix.

You can always create another guild solely for alts, for example and use a custom channel for everyone to communicate in if necessary.