1.27 forum changes
Two features that I implemented this weekend and a bit out of schedule are features that I believe of that a few players really really want these – at least those, who are running alliances in TW. So I hope that you’ll be happy to hear, that the ingame forums will finally get what they really needed (at least in my opinion): Shared forums and polls. Though I still can’t say if it’s really be in for 1.27 (though I hope), I want to give you a preview on what’s about to come.
Shared forums: Towns can invite other towns to their forums now. If the other town accepts the invitation, members of both towns can use that forum together. Forums can be shared with as many other towns as you want (we still might set up a limit however). Forums have a member list function where you can easily see who is allowed to read the forum, combined with a small mini map that shows the locations of the invited towns and where its members are currently on the map (kind of useless, but it’s neat to see – it might get dropped if it turns out to be a performance problem). The “secret” forums will keep its state across sharing, so if you have a secret forum, only councilors or founders can see that shared forum as well.
This sharing should give you all kind of possible ways to run an alliance – a leader town which has its own forums and invites other towns to one of their forums. They can move threads from their internal “secret” forums into the shared ones so that everyone can see what it’s about. Sister towns can keep in touch with each other and fort owning towns can communicate now properly with each other. Lot’s of possibilities. You’ll recognize shared forums in the interface by the round edged forum buttons. I am still playing with the idea to allow forum invitations on a per-user level, but that would have been too much for now.
Furthermore, the polls will enable you to do polls on the forums. You have a few choices here, whether it should be a multiple choice or single vote poll, if it is a public vote where everyone can see who has voted for what. Votes may have a time limit defined in days. It goes without saying that everyone can vote only once.
Another little modification is the way how posts are displayed:
The forums also got a small new feature: Pickable icons (as you might have noticed on the screenshots above). Councilors can now set icons for each forum if they want to – I’ll have to talk to an artist to get a few meaningful icons here, so don’t worry, there’ll be more.
When I’ve been looking through the forum pages for testing the features, I couldn’t help but changing the layout to look a bit more friendly – and I resized the ingame forum window so that it has more vertical space – no idea if this is a good idea:
Btw., some players suggested “Fort” Forums, however, we won’t do that since forts can be taken – and then, what should happen to the forum? The shared forums should enable you to do all the required management to take care of forts and allies as well. I hope that this will help you to organize your towns in TW.