Fellowship Notifications

[Pauly7]

As we all know there are many problems with the Elvenar messaging system. Not least of them is the problem with messages getting lost amongst other messages, and important notices not being read by many people. Even within a single message thread important information is often buried beneath other replies.

The best solution would be a completely revamped and more modern messaging system, of course, but failing that my idea for the interim... or request of Inno, if you will... is for Arch Mages to be granted the ability to post important notices in the Elvenar News section, so a highlight would appear next to the trumpet icon. Members of that fellowship would then need to click it to make the highlight disappear and it wouldn't get lost amongst anything else.

I know that Inno probably wants to keep that notification area for themselves, but the reason that they would want to do that would surely be that they are aware of the issue of people not reading important messages. After all, Inno only puts a notification there once every week or two, on average, so I think it shouldn't clutter it too much if AMs are allowed to do the same - maybe a max of 2 or 3 a week, if they're worried about it being overcrowded, or server space.

 

[Silmaril]

Hence we have Chat for people to discuss items and the Message System for important announcements for the fellowships.

So this says that perhaps your Fellowship is not using these in the intended way.

We can confirm that we would not permit players access to the News system, for many reasons not least that this is a server wide notification system, not designed to be geared to a single Fellowship.

 

[Pauly7]

Hence we have Chat for people to discuss items and the Message System for important announcements for the fellowships.

So this says that perhaps your Fellowship is not using these in the intended way.

We can confirm that we would not permit players access to the News system, for many reasons not least that this is a server wide notification system, not designed to be geared to a single Fellowship.

I understand what you say in the last paragraph, but the messaging system is set up to have message threads, where people reply to conversations. To say that I am "not using it in the intended way" is an extraordinary thing to say. You might want to rethink that.

What we need is a better messaging system that allows messages to be locked and pinned to the top, but as that's been asked for a thousand times I thought I would take a different tack.

 

[Silmaril]

My thoughts were in my Fellowship we use multiple messaging windows with important news and directions and respond to these via chat to not then bury them. So thats where I was coming from with my comment. That way nothing gets buried in the messages and get deleted once no longer needed. I am aware a lot of Fellowships run it this way.

 

[Timneh]

Something that really needs to be looked at with the messaging system is not being able to scroll back to the first message if the thread gets to a certain numbers of posts. A lot of the members of my FS have their day when it is my night and if there is a message thread started that is important and a lot of posts are made while i am sleeping i can only read the last few when i wake up so i miss a lot of the conversation.

 

[Pauly7]

My thoughts were in my Fellowship we use multiple messaging windows with important news and directions and respond to these via chat to not then bury them. So thats where I was coming from with my comment. That way nothing gets buried in the messages and get deleted once no longer needed. I am aware a lot of Fellowships run it this way.

Right, and that's a useful policy, but it is just one of a number of work-arounds. Probably the tidiest work-around is to use an external chat server, though it would be preferable for the in-game option to be more useful. The work-around you mention relies on everyone sticking to a policy of not replying to message threads when asked and to use the chat window for conversations. As we know, the biggest problem with the chat window is that it deletes all the messages after 24 hours. It's also very cumbersome to syphon back through to find things that were discussed around a particular topic.

Imagine trying to share information in this forum, if people weren't actually able to respond directly to message threads and instead had to put their thoughts on that topic into a separate universal chat bucket.

Something that really needs to be looked at with the messaging system is not being able to scroll back to the first message if the thread gets to a certain numbers of posts.

I agree... and even if it's possible, the initial message is often lost. Some people have a habit of reading the first message they see when they open a thread and not seeking out the original point. At the least (again, it has been suggested before), the original post in a given message thread should stick to the top so that's what people see when they open the thread.

One more thought... I could write a book on my thoughts about the Elvenar message system... I would really like it if they fixed the bug (I'm going to call it a bug) that if a fellow deletes a message thread then they no longer receive any further replies to it. To add insult to injury, there's no way to add people back into it... or even to see who has deleted it.

 

[Silmaril]

Yeah or sure, I know we use Whatsapp on Forge as a very good work around for the Guild/s. Knowing people react well to a mobile ping.
Yes we get tickets or players who have deleted threads and cannot get back in and that has been flagged up even in the last week.

 

[Pauly7]

Yeah or sure, I know we use Whatsapp on Forge as a very good work around for the Guild/s. Knowing people react well to a mobile ping.

Discord is fantastic and has every single one of the features that Elvenar messaging is missing. It's also available as a mobile app so has the same benefits as WhatsApp. Problem is, not everyone wants to look at a separate program to see messages. I would also like to keep making the point about Elvenar's own system because it's what we should be able to use and, I'm sure, what the devs would have us use. It's received little or no improvements in all the time I've been playing - except for it being ported across to the mobile app... messaging on the mobile app still has all the bugs/problems it was launched with. FYI.

 

[Timneh]

There should be no need to use messaging systems outside the game and the fact that people do use them because the in game system is not good enough should tell the devs that they need to do something about it, god knows players have mentioned it enough.

 

[Silmaril]

I agree Timneh, hence we only use this for Forge of Empires as thats a different ball game to Elvenar with PVP needing pings sto get playerrs on the board.

 

[WinterLivia7]

the Elvenar in-game messaging system is so obsolete! I don't understand why we can't have a proper system where we can pin or highlight an important thread. And this isn't the only thing that's bad and not helping AMs in any way. Actually, AMs don't have any tools to check the FS. I don't like being forced to use an outside source ( be that Discord, Excel, WhatsApp). It's just not normal!

 

[Gargon667]

how many years did it take until messaging first appeared in the App at all? Let´s hope it takes less time till we get an upgrade for everybody

 

[Deleted User - 1829734]

I agree that it would be very helpful if AM could pin or highlight a mail message, even if it was just the first message in the thread. The in-game chat is also quite restrictive as others have said, if there's people from various timezones.

I also think it would be super awesome if we could include clickable hyperlinks, but I suspect that is a wish that may never be fulfilled heh