SpacemanSpiff wrote: You made an argument against the proposal, I simply offered a counter-argument. No disrespect intended. Is it wrong to argue in favour of my own proposal?

Actually no, I stated my opinion and stated what the normal usage was. If you wish an argument against the proposal how about this...

1. Currently for communication to the whole alliance there is circular messages. Why is it not utilized more?

2. For individual messages there are pm's, and if you have not noticed there is a chat feature when writing a message to another player, which is quicker. I realize this is not real time chat like the chat room is but it works for one on one.

3. There is already a chat feature within game... button on lower left of game tabs under Player Menu. If you go into the chat room, you can actually make another chat room for yourself and your alliance members and invite them into it. No one else can get in it unless you invite them.

4. For leaders notes and such that they would like to keep there is already a place you can write your own notes and even prioritize them.

5. Not to mention the fact, that there are times of lag issue as it is, just imagine how much more of an increased drag on the system something like this would have.

I may have even missed a couple of things.

What I want the larger space for is to create permanent records and game analyses for the alliance that can be accessed by any member at any time. Circulars and chat are not useful for this because they are ephemeral. Notes are not useful for this because they can only be accessed by one person, and if you have things that need periodic updating it is crude and inconvenient to have to pm copies to everyone.

I also note that the first four objections are not about possible adverse gameplay consequences but rather elaborations on the original point that you do not see the use for more space. That's fine, no one would be forced to use the extra space.

The fifth objection is more serious because it does suggest there could be adverse gameplay consequences in terms of lag. I am not in a position to judge that so I leave it up to Zorg to judge that, since he is certainly in a better position to do so.

And to address Zorg directly, I note that 4 out of 5 posters (including myself) are in favour. 80% approval is something most politicians would sell their souls for

i also agree actually...implement it...

SpacemanSpiff wrote:And to address Zorg directly, I note that 4 out of 5 posters (including myself) are in favour. 80% approval is something most politicians would sell their souls for

The game is made up of a lot more than 4 or 5 posters.

But then there's the fact that not everyone can edit the internal page...

SpacemanSpiff wrote:The ingame internal alliance area is very small and therefore doesn't allow you to do much with it. I know there are free forum sites available but I think it would be better to have a good ingame alliance area, as players don't seem to like the offsite forums - in my experience from several alliances they are always dead. I used to play another game (not the other space game that everybody alludes to, but a medieval type game) that had a very good alliance area where you could create tabs and sub-tabs, and there was even a hidden tab that only the leadership could see. Now, this other game had much bigger alliances on average, and it was more ruthless and less forgiving than Zorg in that conquest was part of the game and players could actually be knocked out of the game by conquest so it required more intensive organization to survive, but I do think a bigger internal alliance area would still be useful in Zorg.

I have to agree. When I played Redacted, every Redacted had it's own internal forum, I don't see why each alliance doesn't have an internal forum. I'm still a noob and have no idea how to send a circular message, and so far they seem to be filled with useless chitchat instead of anything actually useful.

I don't know about yous, but I have seen a lot of useful and useless circs over my days and that just depends on what alliance you are in. I also do not think that an expanded alliance area is needed tbh as this game has much smaller alliances than some other games.

As far as permanent messages / notes / information goes...
Team mates can save notes for themselves in their own in-game notes
Also, there is a place for an alliance to have an external link to a forum or other type of website where this information can be easily accessed. Regarding the potential alliance forum, most of those can be set up so that only members can veiw "sensitive" information. No need for an expanded alliance page, internal or external. 5000 characters, in my opinion, is plenty to get the most pertinent information out there without putting an extra drag on ZE's system.

If you are that committed to making sure your team has all the important info, then link them to the ZE forums (for general gameplay tactics) and to your alliance's external forum for more covert operations.

And to comment on the lack of interest in these external sites, maybe if the team mates aren't willing to put in the extra effort for effective team communication, then maybe they should go somewhere else. In my alliances, I want team players, not just players looking for a tag to attach to their name.