Discovery Gaming Community

Now, The comms channel is a funny place... 40% of it is legitimate communications between factions, 32% of it is people 'boosting transmission strength,' and the remaining 28% is slightly intoxicated zoners soliciting sex acts over the neural net... Wouldn't it be neat if we could sort through the junk and find the things that were really lookin' for? Ya know, the stuff that we're supposed to answer, or stuff that isn't just a blue message showoff ?

Well, howsabout we go and organize the place!

I was wondering what people would think about implementing a Sub-forum system similar to that of the new Factions section of the forum. The whole Comms forum would be divided up several sections, sorted out by the location of the party that is receiving the message... So, it would look something like this...

Comms Channel-

To Liberty - messages to factions and groups within Liberty

To Bretonia - messages to factions and groups within Bretonia

To Rheinland - messages to factions and groups within Rheinland

To Kusari - messages to factions and groups within Kusari

To Trans-Sirius/ Border Worlds - messages to factions or groups that operate across or outside of house boarders

Other - personal messages between pilots, along with all uncatagorized/ Sirius-wide messages

Now, there are six subsections that I would suggest for this new system; Liberty, Bretonia, Rheinland, Kusari, Trans-Sirius/Border World, and Other. In that respect, it pretty much perfectly mirrors the new Faction section, except that these subforums would not have further subforums within them (forumception) and would instead be all lopped together. So, a message to the Gaians would be in the same section as a message to the BAF, because they are both Bretonian factions.
Also, each section of the subforum would include communications to both official and non-official factions. So, if ya want to send a message to the Mollies, you can put it in the Bretonia section, even though they arn't official... yet.
Trans-sirius and Border worlds pretty much sums up alot of the factions that don't have a home, such as mercs and so on and so forth.
I would suggest that a 'Other' section be created for any messages that arn't directed at a specific faction, as well as messages between specific players that arn't particularly linked to a certain area in Sirius.

Now, you may be wondering why the messages are sorted by who they are to, and not who there are from. There are some quick and easy reasons for this.
1. It will help people's messages get responded to alot quicker, seeing as people would have a specific area to look in for messages that they are able to respond to.
2. It will help new players who are trying to get a feeling for the 'vibe' of their area of RP by allowing them to check out the back and forths within their areas of operation.
3. Why the bloody hell would we need to organize this by who they are from? I mean, you wrote the damn thing, you better know who it's from...

Now, if we were to adopt a system like this, what would we do with all the old messages? Honestly, I have no idea. Maybe we would put them in a 'archive' subforum. Maybe we would simply trash them. Maybe someone could get a cattle prod and force the Mods to search through the most recent twenty pages of comms, and archive the rest... Suggestions for this would be nice.

Also, I already see a potential problem with this system; By chambering off various areas of the comms channel, won't people be less likely to read the RP of others? My answer; Yes, some people might stop reading RP that doesn't immediately concern them. But, when you think about it, there's not that much effort required (only about 3 clicks of a mouse) to switch subforums, so you'd have to be PRETTY lazy to let this stop you from reading other's comms.

Questions, Comments, Criticisms and Thread Hijacks are welcome.

Tallyho!
-Az

I'd rather have one big, but easy to navigate subforum and use predefined strings such as [L] - to Liberty's factions, etc.

Having many subforums means you might need to look for something longer. And yes, boosting signals... That's lame to do it more often than every 24 hours but who cares in general? Not like it really hurts anyone.

I'd rather have News and Commerce forum sorted out where it's hard to navigate and find what is supposed be there. But admins (Athenian) are (is) slow on this even if it's quite old proposition now.

If you have a message to a specific faction, why not simply dump it into the appropriate faction forum? Also easier to keep track of things that way, in terms of how active factions are.

' Wrote:If you have a message to a specific faction, why not simply dump it into the appropriate faction forum? Also easier to keep track of things that way, in terms of how active factions are.

Hmm... I've seen a few attempts at this, and most were fairly well done. However, people tend to think of the faction forums as more of a place for internal faction affairs, not as a place for people not in the faction to send messages.

Oops, double post, sorry.

Well, I might as well use this to think about snak3s suggestion. I think that keeping the Comms channel forum as one big forum and simply adding in a specific addressing system could be very useful. However, the main problem with this idea is that most people wouldn't use it unless it was mod enforced, and even then a few new players probably wouldn't be able to figure it out. That being said, it would make finding messages that pertain to your char's RP very easy, which is good.

Holey Moley! Triple Post!?! What happened there?

I don't really like the idea honestly, because I think it would isolate players more. Much like defaulting local chat does. You don't hear comms chatter when going into systems anymore so it feels more quiet and lonely. Makes the game feel almost dead when there are hundreds online.

' Wrote:I'd rather have one big, but easy to navigate subforum and use predefined strings such as [L] - to Liberty's factions, etc.

I think this is better, then again this is a game so practicality really isn't the priority here.

There is nothing wrong with how the Comm Channel is set up now. Does it get spammed? Of course. 'Bumping' a thread doesn't hurt anyone, though I typicall just PM a link to the thread to the person it is destined for myself. I don't even see a need for header strings.

To: Liberty Navy makes it clear that it is to the Liberty Navy.

It seems like a lot of people don't like this idea because of the isolation factor, which I believe is a serious concern. One of the ideas I had in lew of this discussion was to have only two subforums, one for comms between factions and groups, and another one for everything else.

Another thing would be to institute a tag system similar to what snak3 said in combination with the normal thing of putting the faction name in the subject bar.

So, a message to the LSF would look like

To: LSF [L]

And so if I wanted to read comms to do with liberty, I would just search [L] and I would be informed.

' Wrote:It seems like a lot of people don't like this idea because of the isolation factor, which I believe is a serious concern. One of the ideas I had in lew of this discussion was to have only two subforums, one for comms between factions and groups, and another one for everything else.

Another thing would be to institute a tag system similar to what snak3 said in combination with the normal thing of putting the faction name in the subject bar.

So, a message to the LSF would look like

To: LSF [L]

And so if I wanted to read comms to do with liberty, I would just search [L] and I would be informed.

But can't search [L] because it would be too broad. Has to be 4 or more letters per keyword iirc.

And to the main idea; I don't think dividing the forums even more would help. Its pretty easy to find threads that are directed to you or a faction already. No need to divide up the forum even more.