Most guilds tend to track player characters differently depending on whether or not it’s a main or an alt (in my guild, we refer to these as “primaries” and “secondaries”…because, well, we like to complicate things). For many guilds, mains are treated differently than alts – voting rights, loot rights, guildhall rights. If someone leaves or is removed from a guild, then an officer typically has to go through the entire guild listing to hunt down all of the different characters that belong to a particular player in order to keep the roster clean.
I’ve had to do this function in multiple games and I can say that within Everquest II, this is a pain. In Everquest II there is no indication of which character is a main or alt. This in itself isn’t really an issue since no games I know of actually make this distinction. So long as there is a notes function that I can sort by, I can set up the roster to take care of this concern for me.
In Everquest II there are notes, but these are a function within the same column as character names. We cannot actually sort by these notes.
Ideally, Everquest II could have mimicked the old Everquest method which had a separate column for “Notes” in the guild window which could be filled in by officers. Since you could actually sort the entire list by just the Notes column, it was very easy to enter “Kendricke Primary” or “Kendricke Secondary” in the Notes column to very, very quickly identify all characters for the same player.
Even if such a thing were not something SOE would want to include as separate column, I think there could be tremendous value in something as simple as allowing the current guild window to be sorted by the “Notes” and “Officer Notes” fields.
What other features could be implemented to help players track their rosters a bit easier?
The Kendricke Tracker 
Yeah, we’re small, and we don’t raid, so we let members move just one character out to a raiding guild, so we only purge alts when we’ve booted someone. This has happened maybe twice since launch. (Like I said, we’re small.)
Sorting on notes is a good idea, though our notes aren’t formatted to take advantage of it. We tend to write, “Alt of Toldain” in them. I hope your idea is used, but it would mean having to plow through all the notes and reformat them.
I’d love to see guild rosters as a sort of tree structure, where you can actually attach a character to another character, with a little +/- sign next to the primary character allowing you to expand/contract their sub characters. When kicking a player from the guild, it could ask “Remove all of this player’s characters?” If someone quits, have the game auto append a note on any sub characters that says “belonged to former member Kendricke”.
I liked EQ’s method of having a public and private notes field. Every game should have at least that.
EverQuest has an “Alt” checkbox in the guild membership list. So there’s at least one game that makes the distinction. You can choose to hide/show Alts, allow them guild bank access, etc.
EQII can make a special rank for alts in the guild.
Those type of fixes are good for determining which characters are alts to begin with. The problem is that the EQII rank system can’t tell me which of those alts belong to which mains.
I have nearly 300 characters in my guild (over 70 unique accounts). If player X leaves, I have to go through over 200 character listings in the “Secondary” rank line by line to find all of the characters which list a note stating “Secondary of X”.
What Tipa said 🙂 My EQ2 guild just used to have special ranks for alts. Like an officer alt rank and a member alt rank. Kept things simple actually and you could tell by the icon. The notes field then became used to say who the main was.
Our Guild actually uses a Secondary rank already to track all of our alternate characters. However, we have 86 unique accounts in our guild which together have 278 characters between them. That means we’re talking about roughly 200 characters listed as “Secondary” within our roster.
If we want to track down all of the alts for a specific player, we have to track through each of nearly 200 character listings line by line to read the notes field under their names.
Finding alts is not the issue. Finding the specific alts which belong to a specific player is.
Whilst on the topic (I forgot to say), I liked Tabula Rasa’s and Sword of the New Order’s conventions of having a family name (i.e. a surname or first name) which meant that every alt was easily recognisable by other players.
I have to admit that it would have been nice to sort by player note in EQ2, but at the same point it time after jumping around to a number of different games lately, I have noticed that EQ2’s guild system really is quite good, and much more polished than a number of other games out there. It is one of the features that I think they have pretty much every other game out there beat at. (Which isn’t to say I don’t like certain features that other games had, such as Warhammer’s calendar.)