News & Announcements - 5DEC14 - Private Chat, Player Score, Graphs

5DEC14 - Private Chat, Player Score, Graphs

Printed From: Illyriad
Category: News & Announcements
Forum Name: News & Announcements
Forum Description: Changes, patch release dates, server launch dates, downtime notifications etc.
URL: http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/forum_posts.asp?TID=6005
Printed Date: 19 Apr 2024 at 16:52
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.03 - http://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: 5DEC14 - Private Chat, Player Score, Graphs

Posted By: GM Rikoo
Subject: 5DEC14 - Private Chat, Player Score, Graphs
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 18:37

The Department of Much-Asked-For Changes brings you some new features and changes, presented in a hokey set of music-based headlines.

WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY?

(AKA PRIVATE 1-TO-1 CHAT SYSTEM)

We now have a private 1-to-1 chat system in Illyriad.

You will need to refresh your browser in order to get this new functionality to work.

How to Chat in Private

To start a private chat with another player:

Click on their name, and
Choose the "Private Chat" option from the pop-up.

On your screen, a chat window opens and you can begin typing into it immediately
On the other player's screen a notification popup will appear (like when a friend logs in), which asks the player whether they wish to Accept or Ignore the chat.

If they choose to ignore it, the pop-up disappears. The chat initiator is not notified that the other player has chosen to ignore and close the chat request.
If they accept the chat request, the chat window will appear on their screen with whatever text has already been typed by the sender visible.

You can have multiple chats ongoing simultaneously.
If you have a chat open and you choose "Private Chat" again it will bring the chat window to the front.
When you close a chat window, the text is gone and you can't get it back. The same happens if you refresh your browser.

Blocking Private Chat Requests

If you do not want to receive a players messages or do not like them you can block them in chat. It's the same "Block in Chat" function that is used for Global Chat.

To block a player:

Click on their name
Choose Block in Chat from the popup
You will no longer receive chat requests or see Global Chat from the blocked player

To unblock a player:

Go to the http://elgea.illyriad.co.uk/#/Communication/Chat" rel="nofollow - Chat Channels page
Press the "Unblock" button next to a players' name

System / GM Silences and Private Chat

Being silenced by the system or by a GM in Global Chat will also silence your Private Chat, and will make you unable to reply to or initiate Private Chat requests. You can still send and receive ingame messages and speak in Alliance Chat, as before.

This Private 1-to-1 channel, like Alliance Chat, is not profanity or spam checked for content; however it is does have spam throttle protection to prevent fast automated spamming (like global) and if you are trigger-happy in Private Chat then system will automatically silence you for an hour, as before. This silence will also apply to Global Chat.

Moderation of Private Chat

Private chat is not monitored by the GM team.

However... while your first point of call is to "Block in Chat", we will investigate petitions about serious breaches of the Terms and Conditions and Code of Conduct - and we will hand out lengthy silences and/or permabans for serious breaches if we receive a valid petition.

Examples of the kind of things that continue to remain an absolute no-no in *ANY* Illyriad-based communication channel (public chat, private chat, IGM, forum etc that is provided to you by Illyriad Games) are things like:

Communications which are threatening or abusive and are intended to harass, alarm, or distress someone on the basis of colour, race, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion, or sexual orientation
Identifying yourself as under the age of 13
Threats of violence or harm out-of-game
Sharing account passwords and login credentials

For more details please re-familiarise yourself with the http://www.illyriad.co.uk/Home/TermsConditions" rel="nofollow - Terms & Conditions and the http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/code-of-conduct-rules-updated-102911_topic31.html" rel="nofollow - Code of Conduct.

Current Silences

In celebration of the new private chat we are unsilencing all currently silenced players. However, behave civilly; as highlighted above, silences, whether auto-system or GM, now apply to both global and private chat simultaneously.and being silenced will prevent your ability to use either.

Note: While we have tested this we haven't been able to do full tests across the player base to ensure its battle-hardened, so we'd strongly recommend that you don't divulge any huge alliance secrets in this new system for a week or so, while we ensure it is secure in-the-wild.

Also, please petition any issues with the new Private 1-to-1 chat system ASAP.

THE ONLY WAY IS UP

(AKA POPULATION SCORE)

The population score has been behaving inconsistently with the other scores since it goes up and down, whereas the others only go up. It also mostly mimics population so is slightly redundant in its current form, but has some differences; eg it doesn't take into account population lost or towns lost through siege.

We are changing how it is calculated as follows: Each building level built counts for as many points as its level, and demolished buildings add no score.

So building a library level 20 would add 20 points and building a library level 1 would add 1 point. We are also including sovereignty buildings in the score, so a completed level 1 Sov Structure is 1 point and a completed level 5 Sov Structure yields 5 points.

All players' population scores have been set to the current level of buildings built.

Population score only going up is important for the next item:

AIN'T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH
(AKA ALLIANCE GROWTH GRAPHS)

Alliances now have growth charts similar to the player growth charts - with some slight changes.

There are 4 new Alliance current state charts:

Member count
Total population
Town count, and
Land owned

These reflect the current state of the Alliance based on their members, and Land owned is the combined count of towns and sovereignty held by the alliance.

The score, however, works slightly differently: Player's score in the areas only adds to Alliance score while the player is a member; the scores are sampled around the half hour so if you are leaving an alliance or kicking a player and want the score added to the alliance ensure you do it after the half hour.

We are starting all alliances at zero score so only events that occur after this release will be counted.

These will be visible within the hour.

OK, COMPUTER

(AKA NPC PREPARATION)

We’ve made some preparatory changes to a number of subsystems.

Factions have been assigned their own Faction Tickers which will work much like Alliance Tickers currently do, as a shorthand way of identifying Non-Player Characters (NPCs) that belong to a particular Faction
Alliances are now prevented from creating or changing their Alliance Ticker to be the same as one of the new Faction Tickers
Players are now prevented from either creating or name-changing to any player name that begins with the letters: “NPC”
New players entering the game now have their Tutorial resource caravans dispatched from the nearest Faction Trade Hub to their city, rather than from King Sigurd’s town ‘Council of Illyria’
Probably mostly of interest to the XML parsers and datafile users amongst you, but worth mentioning in case you find something a bit peculiar in your datafiles tonight (depending on how you parse and handle them):

“King Sigurd of Illyria” is no longer PlayerID 1, and is now a new NPC account called “NPC: King Sigurd of Illyria” with PlayerID 269072
The “Council of Illyria” town located at -3|-3 has a new TownID 329159, and will be going through some substantial population fluctuations to bring it up to the grandeur expected of a King
PlayerID 1 is now named “GM Stormcrow”. You can certainly send igms to SC, but be warned that he’s just as unlikely to read them as he’s always been :)

The following towns have transferred ownership from PlayerID 1 to PlayerID 269072 (ie they have moved to the new “NPC: King Sigurd of Illyria” account):

The Summer Court (TownID 44443)
The Hunting Lodge (TownID 313274)
The Outpost (TownID 314844)

TownID 1 has been retained by GM Stormcrow, moved to a new location and renamed. And yes, it still has a rainbow over it :)

ALSO FEATURING

We've added a slight background transparency to the chat windows, so you can see behind them in case you lose one of your new Private Chat windows behind Global Chat.

- added toggles for transparency. It can be turned off and on.
- added text re-size options. You can make your fonts larger or smaller!
- adding more options as the weekend goes along.

Trying to dispatch diplomats or military units from a recently exodused town now gives you the date and time they'll be able to move inside the "Computer says 'No'" popup.
The player sovereignty graph has been fixed for when players have more than 150 sovereignty.

We hope you enjoy these updates.

This will be posted on GM Rikoo's profile as well, so there is no excuse for not knowing the rules.

GM Rikoo

-------------
Illyriad Community Manager / Public Relations / community@illyriad.co.uk

Replies:

Posted By: mitu
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 18:52

awsome update

-------------
http://elgea.illyriad.co.uk/External/player.asp?PlayerId=166544

Posted By: Dungshoveleux
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 19:04

well I logged on this evening and now the map scrolls twice with one mouse click and any harvesting missions are doubled up which makes proper harvesting impossible. Is this just **me** using chrome?

Posted By: GM Rikoo
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 19:05

Dungshoveleux wrote:

well I logged on this evening and now the map scrolls twice with one mouse click and any harvesting missions are doubled up which makes proper harvesting impossible. Is this just **me** using chrome?

We might be having some issues. Please petition any major ones or send me an IGM with something that just seems.... off.

But, we're aware and will post any fixes.

GM Rikoo

-------------
Illyriad Community Manager / Public Relations / community@illyriad.co.uk

Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 19:10

Thanks. Private chat: awesome. And I'm sure there's some players who will be more than happy to be unsilenced.

I know this has been a long time coming!

Posted By: DaniSuper
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 19:33

Great work Dev team! A lot of great developments , thanks and kudos to you.

But I would like an option please where no one is allowed to send me a private chat request unless I have ticked the option. Just like the friend request ignore option that we have right now.

Lot of Pop ups appearing all the time about a certain player wanting to initiate a private chat can be bit annoying so ability to not see them at all would be preferable certainly :)

Oh and the option to remove transparency from chat window as well.

But other then the minor suggestion, thanks for the updates!

Posted By: Marty
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 20:13

I love the private chat, awesome enhancement.

Personally I don't think we need the blue/red/yellow/green sidebars in private chat. Not that it bothers me particularly, but it might save you some coloured ink? LOL

Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 20:14

Yay for these updates! Thank you GMs! Especially ThunderCat, we know you did most of the work as usual. Wink

Posted By: Diva
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 20:14

Ermagerd!! I LOVE NEW STUFF!! Keep it coming DEVS! And not sarcastically, but I'm sure we'll be getting some super new stuff toward the game itself.. RIGHT?!?!

-------------
"Um diva.... you are sort of acting like a .... diva...." - PhoenixFire

Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 20:32

Marty wrote:

Personally I don't think we need the blue/red/yellow/green sidebars in private chat.

I'd love an option to turn them off entirely, since it seems Devs are already working on making other things optional.

But is there a way that we can keep our option settings persistent? I have to clear cache at least once, and sometimes twice a day, and every time I do I have to go fix the optional settings on the Chat Highlighting.

Posted By: Dungshoveleux
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 21:14

the double click map scrolling after a single click and double click harvesting after a single click have fixed themselves...

Posted By: Eons
Date Posted: 05 Dec 2014 at 21:50

Thanks team. Love this update, but personally I am patiently waiting for something that affects gameplay.

Posted By: ubluntu
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 00:01

[23:56]<Phoenixfire> rikoo, can i change the transparency of GC?

[23:56]<GM Rikoo> You can soon, yes, we are working on that.

[23:58]<ubluntu> OOOH a soon that is right meow

[23:58]<ubluntu> var opacity=.95; $(".flora").css("opacity", opacity); $(".whisperWindow").css("opacity",opacity);

[23:58]<ubluntu> setting to 1 will turn it off (you paste that into the console)

Posted By: ubluntu
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 00:04

Sorry, totally forgot the important part. Thanks to all the DEVS for an awesome update!

Posted By: GM Rikoo
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 00:04

ubluntu wrote:

[23:56]<Phoenixfire> rikoo, can i change the transparency of GC?

[23:56]<GM Rikoo> You can soon, yes, we are working on that.

[23:58]<ubluntu> OOOH a soon that is right meow

[23:58]<ubluntu> var opacity=.95; $(".flora").css("opacity", opacity); $(".whisperWindow").css("opacity",opacity);

[23:58]<ubluntu> setting to 1 will turn it off (you paste that into the console)

While I fully appreciate ubluntu and his haxor l33t skills, we will have a fix for the transparency for those who cannot do this, or do not want to think about doing this.

But thanks in meanwhile ublu! :)

GM Rikoo

-------------
Illyriad Community Manager / Public Relations / community@illyriad.co.uk

Posted By: abstractdream
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 01:56

Right...console? Is that a stereo?

Anyway, thanks GMs and DEVs. I really appreciate the details. Added value is always welcome. Now, can we get some
PATHFINDING!

That is all.

-------------
Bonfyr Verboo

Posted By: Albatross
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 16:05

abstractdream wrote:

PATHFINDING!

How do we get to the end of that?

-------------

Posted By: GM Rikoo
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 16:59

Updates here, so players will see them when refreshing the forum:

Go to http://elgea.illyriad.co.uk/#/Communication/Chat

-- transparency can now be turned off or on with a toggle.

-- Text is re-sizable.

GM Rikoo

-------------
Illyriad Community Manager / Public Relations / community@illyriad.co.uk

Posted By: Rupe
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 19:53

My private chat window scrolls with the map. Is this just me?
i would like to anchor it below A/C

Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 19:57

It would be nice to have the option to make the private chat window "stick" on a certain part of the screen. As it is, it is easy to lose one when I scroll in the game for another reason.

Posted By: abstractdream
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 21:04

GM Rikoo wrote:

Updates here, so players will see them when refreshing the forum:

Go to http://elgea.illyriad.co.uk/#/Communication/Chat

-- transparency can now be turned off or on with a toggle.

-- Text is re-sizable.

GM Rikoo

I'm on iPad and this doesn't seem to work as intended. The toggle works but it doesn't stick. Am I just doing it wrong or is it not useable on tablets?

EDIT: Well, now it works..lol. SMH

-------------
Bonfyr Verboo

Posted By: Lil D
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 22:32

I think that the change regarding the global "population" rank is ill-conceived. The new numbers have nothing to do with what was considered "population" for years (at least for the time since I joined Illyriad), which is "population = food consumption". Also now "population" is used inconsistently in the game. The "Pop" column on the "All Alliances" page, the "Population" column on the Leaderboard, the player's towns overview's "Pop." information, the "Pop" growth graph, and maybe some other pages all use "population" in the familiar sense. So please rename the new ranking "builder's ranking" if you want to keep the math as it is and bring back the population ranking. There is no "the only way is up" for a "population" ranking. Inhabitants come and go with the change of living conditions (room, labour) they find in a town.

Also a player could easily push her score if she really cared. It is as easy as building a level 1 sov structure, demolishing it, rebuilding it, demolishing, ...
Each cycle needs approximately five minutes and adds one point to the score. Of course one could do that with 10 sov plots simultanously and in 10 towns in parallel. That gives a raise of a hundred points every five minutes. So in the long run the new ranking just tells who has the greatest patience in clicking around on the sovereignty page.

Posted By: GM ThunderCat
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 22:53

Lil D wrote:

We are renaming to Build score and will be showing current population in places it isn't currently

Lil D wrote:

Also a player could easily push her score if she really cared. It is as easy as building a level 1 sov structure, demolishing it, rebuilding it, demolishing, ...

Which could be said similarly about trade, attack, defense, quest, magic - you get category points for doing things in game related to that category. Tech would be a bit slower, but you can keep going by having a city razed and starting again on the tree, equally people that capture high tech cities will have less research to add to the points.

Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 23:32

GM ThunderCat wrote:

Lil D wrote:

[QUOTE=Lil D]

Also a player could easily push her score if she really cared. It is as easy as building a level 1 sov structure, demolishing it, rebuilding it, demolishing, ...

My understanding is that part of why a sales tax was added was to discourage people from doing exactly that with their trade scores -- essentially trading items back and forth with their alts, which created highly skewed trade scores. The introduction of sales taxes at least imposed some sort of cost for doing this.

I think that scores work best when there is some "cost" associated with achieving score in a particular area -- whether it is the cost of resources to build things, the cost of maintaining (and rebuilding) diplomatic and military units, or the "cost" of mana used in casting spells.

One problem with using sov buildings to count in the build score is that the cost of building sov buildings, especially at level 1, is almost nothing, either in terms of time or materials.

It is true that some other score categories are too easily manipulated -- raising diplomatic score by repeatedly scouting or spying a "friendly" city springs to mind here; at least in the past you could get diplo score even by diploing yourself!

However, just because other scores are easily manipulated doesn't mean that we should add more easily manipulated (and therefore relatively meaningless) categories.

I don't know for sure how big a problem this will be with regard to the "Build" score category. I'm willing to wait and see. But certainly I think it is worthwhile to note the concerns and watch to see if there are problems.

Does anyone have creative solutions to propose? One idea would be not to count level 1 sov buildings in the build score. This would not be a perfect solution, but at least building to level 2 requires more of a commitment of time and materials.

Posted By: Brandmeister
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 23:36

A cottage would be the best way to up the score. 60 seconds to build, and 150 seconds to demolish, at 4 population. A patient newbie could generate 68.5 population per hour. But that would still take almost 3000 hours to approximate a 200k population account. Now if they used 5 cities, that's like 600 hours of clicking.

I say give them the little win.

Does anyone actually take the scores seriously?

Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 06 Dec 2014 at 23:41

Brand, I think that the "build" score uses absolute building levels. So you would need to repeat cottage build and demolish 20 times for a level 20 building. With 30 level 20 buildings in a city, you would need to build and demolish cottages 600 times. Assuming 10 convenient slots in 2 cities, that's 20 slots, or less than a day's worth of clicking.

I wouldn't do it either, but it would not be difficult.

Posted By: GM ThunderCat
Date Posted: 07 Dec 2014 at 01:16

Rill wrote:

So you would need to repeat cottage build and demolish 20 times for a level 20 building.

That's for the level 20 of a building.

A building from start to level 20 is

1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20 = 210 points

And a city with 25 resource plot and 25 building plots and 1 wall at level 20 is

(25+25+1) * 210 = 10,710 points

A level 5 sovereign structure is:

1+2+3+4+5 = 15 points

A city can support 20 of them:

20 * 15 = 300 points

So fully levelled city with max level 5 sov structures and assuming no reconfigurations would be

10,710 + 300 = 11,010 points

So in your example you'd need to repeat cottage build and demolish 11,010 times

*edit corrected Sov maths

Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 07 Dec 2014 at 03:47

Thanks TC, I didn't think through the counting of the previous builds part. That helps me understand better.

Posted By: Artefore
Date Posted: 07 Dec 2014 at 04:09

GM ThunderCat wrote:

Rill wrote:

So you would need to repeat cottage build and demolish 20 times for a level 20 building.

That's for the level 20 of a building.

A building from start to level 20 is

1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20 = 210 points

And a city with 25 resource plot and 25 building plots and 1 wall at level 20 is

(25+25+1) * 210 = 10,710 points

A level 5 sovereign structure is:

1+2+3+4+5 = 15 points

A city can support 50 of them:

50 * 15 = 225 points

So fully levelled city with max level 5 sov structures and assuming no reconfigurations would be

10,710 + 225 = 10,935 points

So in your example you'd need to repeat cottage build and demolish 10,935 times

Ohhhhhhhhhh......

-------------
"don't quote me on that" -Artefore

Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 07 Dec 2014 at 06:03

I think a city can have a maximum of only 20 sov structures though. Unless something has changed?

/me looks hopeful

Posted By: GM ThunderCat
Date Posted: 07 Dec 2014 at 20:48

Rill wrote:

I think a city can have a maximum of only 20 sov structures though. Unless something has changed?

/me looks hopeful

Yeah my whole sov maths was pretty wrong, it was late :)

Corrected

Posted By: Eons
Date Posted: 08 Dec 2014 at 00:47

Can we be hopeful in this particular case?

Posted By: Eons
Date Posted: 08 Dec 2014 at 00:56

/me looks hopeful

Posted By: hrandjt
Date Posted: 08 Dec 2014 at 01:02

I like the concept of the change in building scores but I'm not sure that the 1 point per level of building is optimal. I think it would be more appropriate for it to scale more closely with build time rather than level. Either way I'm not going to spend too much time worrying about it.

The private chat feature is awesome. I like that it's much more immediate than having conversations via mails.

I feel churlish asking after a cool new feature has been added but I would really like to see a way for private communication between more than two people. Be it through mailing lists, allowing for adding extra people to the private chats or improvement to the forums.

-------------

Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 08 Dec 2014 at 09:14

Are the options for turning private chat no-transparent not yet functional? They're greyed out on my screen and while I can turn the button from on to off, the transparency isn't actually changed.

Posted By: Albatross
Date Posted: 08 Dec 2014 at 11:15

Perhaps the creative solution is to have a points score proportional to the actual resource spent, plus a nominal rate for standard build time -- all calculable from existing data. It's a step away from the simple (and generally desirable) abstractions already in place, but reflects "work done".

If people find more efficient ways of getting this work done, their scores will go up more quickly.

-------------

Posted By: GM Rikoo
Date Posted: 08 Dec 2014 at 12:46

Berde wrote:

Are the options for turning private chat no-transparent not yet functional? They're greyed out on my screen and while I can turn the button from on to off, the transparency isn't actually changed.

It is fully functional. Give it a restart, try a new browser or sign in and out.

Let me know if it still doesn't work.

GM Rikoo

-------------
Illyriad Community Manager / Public Relations / community@illyriad.co.uk

Posted By: kodabear
Date Posted: 09 Dec 2014 at 05:02

the Private chat is grey to me

Posted By: Berde
Date Posted: 09 Dec 2014 at 16:57

Yep. That's what I'm getting. I Petitioned it.

Posted By: Albatross
Date Posted: 09 Dec 2014 at 17:32

The controls are actually active, but they don't affect anything.

The 'fieldset' box has "opactity=0.5" set manually, which makes it look inactive.

Incidentally, you can choose to chat with yourself.

-------------

Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 09 Dec 2014 at 17:49

Alba, if you are that lonely, I will chat with you!

Posted By: Albatross
Date Posted: 10 Dec 2014 at 00:57

Rill wrote:

Alba, if you are that lonely, I will chat with you!

If I wasn't lonely, would you chat with me?

-------------

Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 10 Dec 2014 at 01:05

Albatross wrote:

Rill wrote:

Alba, if you are that lonely, I will chat with you!

If I wasn't lonely, would you chat with me?

Of course! Ring me up!

Posted By: Albatross
Date Posted: 10 Dec 2014 at 01:13

Rill wrote:

Albatross wrote:

Rill wrote:

Alba, if you are that lonely, I will chat with you!

If I wasn't lonely, would you chat with me?

Of course! Ring me up!

Ha. Good answer. Well dodged :o)

Perhaps you could stress-test it by having as many private chat windows open as possible...

-------------

Posted By: Rill
Date Posted: 10 Dec 2014 at 01:42

Someone else already did it, Alba. I think it was Martilicious who had like 10 going. I'm just not that popular, I think the most I've had going at once was 3.

Posted By: Marty
Date Posted: 10 Dec 2014 at 07:25

Rill wrote:

I think it was Martilicious who had like 10 going.

I sure did! Don't recommend it though, too hard to see the actual game underneath :D

Posted By: GM Stormcrow
Date Posted: 13 Dec 2014 at 19:31

Marty wrote:

I sure did! Don't recommend it though, too hard to see the actual game underneath :D

There's a game underneath the chat system?

Who would have thought! Tongue

Posted By: Marty
Date Posted: 13 Dec 2014 at 22:14

GM Stormcrow wrote:

Marty wrote:

I sure did! Don't recommend it though, too hard to see the actual game underneath :D

There's a game underneath the chat system?

Who would have thought! Tongue

I know! It was a shock.