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.
Hallo!
At first, thanks for this feature 🙂
And there is one momment. Will it be possible to share reports between all towns in alians?
You’ll have to make reports “public” to share them with other forum users of other towns. Maybe there’ll be a different solution at some point. However, as long as the link is not given to others, it’s quite difficult for others to see that report, so publishing the report as “public” and linking it in a forum should be fine.
Looks great, also the new layout.
These small things improve the game. Move on!
Hello zet,
shared forums is very good idea and I think there’s no need of fort forums too.
That would help towns org in many ways I suppose(i.e. less telegrams flooding for battle advertising and recruiting).
Just a comment about the new “vertical forum layout”, that I like, but that could be not friendly with netbook-users(maybe a enable/disable option like duels visualization?).
Last but not least, small mini map seems to be a nice feature, maybe useless, but I think it will give a more precise idea of alliance(i.e extension,distribution,members).
Waiting for implementation as usual.(hurry up please!)
@Colosseo81: I have a netbook too – to make the new forum window fit the screen, you’ll need to put your browser into to fullscreen mode (f11), but then it should fit nicely on the screen. Maybe I’ll make the window resizeable, I’ll have to see.
Zet,
Looks great, these changes are very welcome!
BUT, please do not forget another, even more important thing. BB-code toolbar for in-game forum and telegrams. It is a pain to manually code player and town shortcuts, etc. Simply adding the BB-code bar used for the player/town profile would (perhaps with some minor modifications) would be fantastic!
Shouldn’t be too hard to add, there is already a Greasemonkey script that does it (though it’s somewhat buggy).
I really like this, nice work 🙂 As normal my three nitpicks:
~ As D. Saint said, PLEASE introduce a BB-Codes on the forums. It would be so helpful!
~ Is it possible to change the size of every window based on the set Map Settings? This would be very beneficial for those on both small 1027×768 resolutions as well as large 1600×1200 resolutions.
~ Please do not let more than eight towns (the number of all fort towns in a county) share a forum. I very much like small alliances of several towns that share forts and work as one unit, however I very much despise large town recruiting 50 town alliances. I will be very disappointed if this leads to more mega “hugging” alliances.
Great Idea and really helfull.
I see one problem with buyers in town. They shouldn’t see the normal Town-Forum and many are closing their Forums for the time there is one in Town … would get worse if one have too handle that for the shared forums …
Fantastic feature! now alliances wil work out far better, I’m sure! Mor vertical space is good, because there will be more forums which would take the space. Id would be great if it were possible to open a hidden forum for the townleaders of the different towns. I’m not sure if you mentioned this.
Great work to be! 😉
Great job, guys!
I just wanted to suggest an BB code bar into the forum, which would make the posting easier and more comfortable. On of slovak guys has made a GM script – http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/59345
Thanks
DONT POST THIS
im currently watching a new player being ganged up on in the forums, framed and feathered,
this is not the first time.
im watching this happen as i post this.
im also watching how these oh so nice kids are not playing so nicely.
tomorrow this new player will some how be in fractured for attempting to defend him self, against lord know who.
and next week your forum is another player less,
..just like the last one..
i dont know,
some kids only think about small things, such as comics and games, but more adult think on the lines of “responsibility’s and liabilities”
on a more happy note.
im very interested in what that half hidden American map is gonna be.
that and
there is a big difference between owning twelve computers and having to maintaining them on a daily basis just to earn a living on put food on the plate
vs
owning a play station to be able to play the next gen of games.
blah blah, congrats with the new student, get some more plz, and fast.
spend some time with the clients, better then paying for a human resource manager.
Don\t really know there could i ask for this…
Here is a problem in fort battles.
Generals send commands in fort chat to named persons. Command is to move to target position. But there is no ability to see if this command resolved honestly.
So i’m asking!:
Will you made ability for generalss to make them see what is aim for moving for every own soldier?
General will click on soldier & see his move arrow.
Could you made this in next updates?
last question.
just read the new premium changes.
what is it actually?
a bulk buy (so to say)
or
market skimming? (Sony does this)
sounds interesting.(could work, loads o cash fast, but they are content for longer, and you aint bleeding the machine pound/dollar/Euro at a time)
Thanks for the forum change
What would be even better 🙂 is a chat between town alliances instead of County Chat.
I do not want (or have the possibility) to chat with so many peoples of the county, but it would be great to chat with partner towns. This would also help before and during a fort battle.
i dont like snitches, tattle tails cry wolf tactics.
but after the last post i left about the forum.
have you seen the fort names of late? never mind certain player names.
there are a few pictures flouting around the net if your interested, there are twelve years olds playing this game.
names may change, but people stay the same.
What are you thinking??
It’s utterly useless, and doesn’t has any avail.
Our needs is removeing the lvl 99 cap, not the rubbish.
me again, you dont really update this very often then?
anyway, i have just received a life time ban from the forum.
thats the third time now.
something about how im not supposed to post human rights, prisoner rights and employee rights,
cant beet them hit them or eat them,
dont you just want those good ol days back again?
any way, saw you on tv, looked really really nervous but i think you tackled that really well,
any way, im to build a site so i can crush this guy, and no its not a vendeta thing (thats would be childish)
its to prove a valid point.
two thumbs.
dudes, who did your translations?
there is swearing all over the new quests.
i remember when squaw was a bad word,,now this?
not cool.