World of Warcraft’s in-game calendar was added in patch 3.0.2 on October 14th, 2008. In the nearly 10 years it’s been in-game not many changes have been made to update its features or functionality. I’m going to take a quick look at its current features and then discuss changes I’d make to improve this useful planning feature.

In-game Calendar Current

World of Warcraft’s in-game calendar and events.

Currently, you can create two kinds of event. Guild events that show on the calendar for all guild members and allow them to freely sign up. Or events where you need to manually invite every participant. In our guild, we use events for our core raid as it usually has the same static roster and guild events for alt raids so that only those interested in attending can register.

This all seems easy enough, but for anyone not used to making events I’ve seen people get confused and make a regular event then wonder why no one has signed up. Of course, they can’t see it if they’re not invited.

A second problem we’ve been running into is you can’t invite guild members to guild events. We have a few people that routinely forget to sign-up for anything, but we can’t manually add them to the event unless it’s a regular event, but then no one would be able to sign up. You also can’t invite anyone that isn’t in your server group. So those off realm friends and reliable pugs have to be added to bnet and invited later.

The last issue and probably one of the worst. You can’t see anyone’s preferred role. Because I main tank I always know my runs will have at least one tank, but when looking at a list of classes that can perform multiple roles, I don’t often know what anyone else is planning on playing. Is that priest shadow? That warrior prot? I don’t know because the current interface just lists their class.

In-game Calendar Updated

The image below is a quick look at what I’d change. This is currently achievable in-game with an add-on, but everyone using the events calendar has to have that add-on and I know quite a few interface purists.

World of Warcraft improved in-game guild events calendar.

The first thing I’d do is add a bit more information to the event description. For raids especially it’s good to know what item level people should try to have and what voice program will be used. (This helps more when the guild member is new but is still helpful to have.) I’d also have an option to display the event start time in local time instead of server time. We raid EST but have quite a few members on the west coast and it would be helpful for them.

Following that, I’d let people choose their roles while signing up. Much like the dungeon finder, give them a checkbox and let them set their preferred role. This not only lets the person running the event know if all roles are covered, it also helps people with multiple characters decide which one they want to bring.

I’d also combine the features of the regular event and guild event so you can invite anyone. So if you make a guild event you could still invite guild members, for example, officers and give them mod privileges. I’d also allow off-server invites.

Do you use the events calendar? If so do you like it or what changes would you make?