New Message System Feedback Thread

[Tom]

Please post your feedback regarding your past week experience with the New Message System here. What I am most interested in is this:

What do you like better in the new system compared to the old one?
What do you like better in the old message system?

[Anaris]

I like better in the old one that no message you have received will up and disappear just because you lost a position.

Seriously, Tom, I think this is a dealbreaker.

[^ban^]

I second Tim on this.

[bluexmas]

I know that this is a "but that's the way it was" comment, but I feel like the old message system blends graphically into the game a lot better than the new one. The menus of the new system feel very foreign and unintuitive to me, but that may be just because I played for a long time (over a year) with the old one. I'd be interested to hear what newer players think.

[LilWolf]

I like better in the old one that no message you have received will up and disappear just because you lost a position.

Seriously, Tom, I think this is a dealbreaker.

It certainly makes the supposed upgrade look like a downgrade no matter how you spin it.

[Zakilevo]

Got to agree with Tim...

[Tom]

I think it is sufficient to point it out once or twice. I'd like to hear other comments, too.

[Indirik]

My first impressions were that it was a bit confusing. I had trouble finding the stuff I was looking for. Perhaps with time it might get better. Can the links to it be put back up while we write our feedback?

All in all, the system seems like it will be a good upgrade, once it's finished. It currently feels very rough, and lacking polish. It's a good "tech demo". It's lacking many of the bells and whistles that the existing system has developed over the years of hard use. Many of these things need to be added back in before it can be a replacement for what we have.

Here are some of the things that made the system feel awkward to me:

* The way the drop down menus work for selecting what you want to see feels very awkward. If you stray a tiny bit outside the popup borders with the mouse, the popup disappears. Then you have to go back up and grab it and try again. This can be very frustrating when you are in a hurry. This is even more annoying with the way the Participant popup works for personal conversations, as I described in the other feedback thread. (Did you see the screen capture I posted there)

* The Personal conversations drop-down shows that I have three active conversations. One is labeled "Conversation" and has no participants pop-up, and no messages. (The message writer screen shows me who the participant is.) The second is "Conversation with 3 other participants", and lists the participants as a popup. There are no messages in it. Will these linger on forever, or is there supposed to be some cleanup routine that just isn't working right now? Shouldn't conversations be auto-deleted once there are no messages in them? If not, can we be given the option to delete a conversation that has no messages in it? I can imagine that this list will rapidly get cluttered up with a LOT of old conversations.

* It appears to be possible to build a conversation using a group, such as a religion, and have that persist forever, even if some members of that religion have been cast out of the group or have left it on their own. For example, let's say I build a personal conversation from the membership of Sanguis Astroism that includes Glaumring and Hireshmont, and then Glaumring leaves. My character now includes people from disconnected groups, and is a conversation that I currently could not build again, as I am in no group that contains both of those individuals. Yet I think I will still be able to send messages to it, is that correct? If so, is this intentional? That's a very different behavior than the old system. Shouldn't there be some way to parse the recipient list to make sure that it's still valid?

* When writing a message to a personal conversation, the list of participants is only shown in a popup. You just get a long list of stuff like: "Conversation with 6 other participants". Can we just display list the participants, instead of hiding them in a pop-up? I predict that we will quickly lose track of what each conversation is about, leading to frustration and mis-sent messages. Also, is there any way that we can assign a name to a conversation? It would help to know that a specific conversation is about "Starting a war with Old Grehk" or "Help me get Kepler elected ruler". How about even adding a link to open a new window with that conversation loaded so we can see what has been sent to it? Just because a conversation has the same participants doesn't mean it's about the same thing. I may want to have several different active conversations with the same person or group of people.

* As someone else mentioned, the fact that your selected conversations are reset to "show all" whenever you switch the displayed time period (i.e. "today" to "past week") is super-annoying. Sorry, but that's a complete deal-breaker for me.

* I would love there to be some way to select a specific date range to view messages, like we had in the previous system. Even a way to see messages from "the past X days" would be immensely helpful.

* Is the message search option going to be implemented as well? I use that almost daily, and have really come to count on it.

* When there are no conversations in a channel in the mesage reader page, the text wraps improperly in the selection screen:

Council
(no available channels in this group)Duchy
all nobles of the Northern Isle

The word "Duchy" should start on a new line.

* I really miss not being able to see the names of all the recipients in a group while writing a message to it. (i.e. when sending a message to all elders of Sanguis Astroism.) I may not necessarily remember who all the members of the group are when writing a letter to it, or remember how to spell a name, etc. I really, really, really want to see that recipient list somehow. I could open a separate message writer window and go start a new conversation with some members, but that doesn't tell me who is what rank in that organization. What if I forget who all the elders are, or if someone is a full member or not? If I'm not near a guildhouse, there's just no way I can check to see who I'm sending a message to, and that's just awkward.

* When creating a new personal conversation and selecting the individuals to include, it shows me their "Rank". Unfortunately, this is their realm-based rank. It is (almost) completely useless in just about every situation, and more so when writing a message to a guild or religion. It should display their guild/religion rank, and even their elder/full/aspirant status. Perhaps even their titles like "Marshal of the Awesome Army, Margrave of Keplerville, Coinmaster of Keplerstan". That's stuff that the old message system already displayed.

* There is a major bug in the "Notes" function. I sent a couple messages to myself, and they came through in the "everyone" channel in a secret society in which my character is an elder. The "Reply to Channel" link on the message also starts a new message to everyone in that SS.

* When you start a new conversation with some people in an organization (religion, guild, etc.), the names in the list seem to be displayed in a completely random order. They should be alphabetized by name.



Some good things:

* I like the fact that *every* message, including game-generated status messages, has a "Reply to Channel" link in it. Very useful.

* I like being able to easily isolate messages sent to a specific group, without having to use the Search feature. Makes for very easy threading.



Also, I have not yet tried the system from my Android cell phone. Has anyone tried it from mobile devices?

[fodder]

the expired grouping thingy... surely you can still start a new conversation using contact list? (didn't try it myself) if you can, then i don't see why the old conversation can't continue?

(for other feedback.. made it in the other thread)

[Eldargard]

The biggest piece for me is the feel. The old system felt more like letters being exchanged. The new system feels futuristic and impersonal. Like the recipients of messages are not people . Like a forum. I also prefer the simplicity of the old interface. I love the idea of the global mentoring system.

[Foxglove]

Things I like about the new system - the global mentoring channel in the new system is an excellent idea and should be a great help to new players. After playing around with the new system for a while, I also found that it was much easier to track down specific sent letters than it is in the old system.

Things that I prefer in the old system - the simplicity. When I first started playing I felt confident in writing letters to individual characters and groups (councils, religions, etc) within about a week of starting. From this admittedly brief go with the new system it doesn't seem anywhere near as intuitive to me. I'd even go as far as to say that the new system's way of selecting who you're writing to seems overly complex.

I also like that the old system allows you to preview letters before sending and gives a list of the recipiants at the head of the letter. That's useful on all sorts of levels, even at the most basic of giving a persistent reminder of the correct spelling of a character's name (just a shame that it doesn't also include their titles as it can be a pain to try to remember if someone is a Baron, Count, Earl, etc).

[Bedwyr]

I think there's a difference between the fundamentals and the features.  The new system does not, yet, have a lot of the features we have come to appreciate with the old system, but I don't see any reason why it can't have them, and why it wouldn't have them.

And the fundamentals of the new system will make life so, so, so much easier.  The way the Conversations work is delightful, and fits much more with how I envision correspondence should work, abstracting away the difficulties in talking to non-official groups that the scribes (or code) can and should handle.

[Indirik]

There's one thing I missed: letters no longer have a "reply to sender" option, only a "reply to list".

[Gustav Kuriga]

I think there's a difference between the fundamentals and the features.  The new system does not, yet, have a lot of the features we have come to appreciate with the old system, but I don't see any reason why it can't have them, and why it wouldn't have them.

And the fundamentals of the new system will make life so, so, so much easier.  The way the Conversations work is delightful, and fits much more with how I envision correspondence should work, abstracting away the difficulties in talking to non-official groups that the scribes (or code) can and should handle.

Well, if we count simplicity as one of the fundamentals, then obviously it doesn't have that. See post above yours.

[fodder]

There's one thing I missed: letters no longer have a "reply to sender" option, only a "reply to list".

could have sworn i saw both reply to channel and reply to sender... but one of them doesn't work.