Private Chat news - The Indie Game Mag

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

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.

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.

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 Chat Channels page
  - Press the "Unblock" button next to a players' name

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.

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 Terms & Conditions and the Code of Conduct.

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 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; e.g. 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:

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.

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.