[Discuss] Any plans to introduce a new island?

[LilWolf]

Tom Vogt wrote:
> Quick fix: Tell people not to message the whole realm with every piece 
> of nonsense.

That doesn't work. They'll just ask for support from the others 
responsible for nonsense messages and steamroll over the dissenting 
voices and the silent majority that doesn't care about anything but 
getting their hands on the latest orders. They'll say that's what the 
message system is there for. Some people use it for long OOC talks in 
front of the whole realm that have nothing to do with the game(e.g. 
they're getting to know the players behind the characters in front of 
the whole realm), because that's the only easy mechanism the game 
provides for discussion with other players.

>
> "whole duchy" should be more than sufficient if you just want to talk.
>

The thing is, for most people, the "whole duchy" does not reach the 
right people so they don't use it. Picking individual recipients every 
time you send a message in a realm with 80-100(not to mention 150+!) 
nobles is a cumbersome task so people avoid doing that as much as they 
can. This leads to most people sending everything to the whole realm, 
unless it's just a single person they want to talk to.

It just boils down to the issue that the message system does not handle 
discussion within a small group very well and people are trying to use 
it as some sort of a forum that allows free discussion about everything. 
It's a lot of work sending messages to small groups and people don't 
want to see a lot of trouble just to send a message.

Now, we did talk about this a while ago on IRC and a few ideas were 
thrown around. I remember most notably personal message groups. The king 
can already form message groups, why not let an individual player to 
form a few private groups that only he himself can see and use? Maybe 
allow message groups such as that to be forwarded as scribe notes to 
others for easy replication and inclusion in the group? I don't know how 
hard it would be to implement or if it's even possible, but it would 
probably cut down on the amount of messages people send to the whole realm.

-- 
Join the Last.fm group for Battlemaster
http://www.last.fm/group/Battlemaster