Reworking the idea:
- Message sending and receiving is limited to towers in your range.
- Additionally, you can keep a low, limited number of towers on "permanent link", and communicate with it over vast (but not unlimited) distances, i.e. you are considered to be "in range" to these towers not for 10 miles, but for 100 miles (or such, all numbers are subject to change).
- Towers can reach other towers belonging to the same realm.
- Messages can be sealed to one character. Such messages can be sent locally or through permanent links (which is the same thing, remember permanent links are considered to be "in range").
- Messages can also be sealed to one realm. Such messages can be sent locally or broadcasted, where every tower that receives it will re-send it, provided it can unseal it (i.e. is in the same realm).
This way, fragments of realms that are disconnected from the main area are also disconnected for communication. This will be especially harsh on the island realms. I am thinking that maybe towers can also have permanent links, one or two, for such things.
Etc, etc, etc.
Speaking really bluntly, I absolutely hate this whole concept. We need to make communication easier and more free flowing, not more difficult. The ability to communicate breeds interaction. The more freely people can communicate, the more they do it. The more restrictive communication is, the less they will do it. It's true in the real world, and it's true in a game.
Tom, I know that the idea of location-based, limited ability to communicate has been close to your heart ever since the game was conceived. It might seem like a fantastic idea on paper, but it just doesn't work in a game that has interaction at its core.
De-Legro is completely right when he says this:
More to the point there are serious limitations to the system that I think are detrimental. Diplomacy becomes a matter of travel, which always sounds fun and appropriate, but experience would suggest just makes it tedious. Knights on missions are no potentially longer able to talk to their liege, making the knight game even less attractive then it already is. You also tie remaining in the conversation to location.
Also, the tower idea will mean that to spread a particular message over distances beyond a tower's range, it has to go through a number of 'relays', presumably being received by a character who then has to send it through their tower to broaden the distance it's sent. Again, while this might sound like a fantastic idea on paper, in practice it'll be tedious. You could get around the tedium by automating message relays so that a tower auto-rebroadcasts any messages it receives, but it's just propping up a communication system that isn't ideal anyway.
Additionally, it solves the problems of vassals/lords communication (and to make things easier for new players, when you take a knight offer you would also automatically get a link to that settlement) as well as galas and tournaments (everyone simply comes in, establishes a link, and then everyone can talk as they like).
Yeah, but how do you get people to come to a tournament or gala in the first place? I've attended tournaments and galas that have characters there from all corners of the map. Trying to inform such a widespread group of people that such events are even taking place would be a major task under this new system of localized communication.
As I've said, my take on it is that communication needs to be free-flowing, easy, and uncomplicated. The threaded conversations are an abomination that needs to go. As has been said by people since the game started, 'message mining' to get down through messages in a conversation is a royal pain. I know there are some people who are used to it since it was common in the early days of the internet, but it isn't suited to the modern audience.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - there's no need to reinvent the wheel. I understand the desire to innovate, but all that's really needed here is something more akin to the Battlemaster message system with improved flexibilty. Keep the realm-wide conversation so anyone in a realm can send messages to anyone else, giving the conversations titles so that each one is easy to locate. Also add the 'mark as read for all my characters' button that has been requested ever since the game started.
Keep the contacts list, but allow people to customize it to their own needs by letting them add names to it rather than just making it so people are automatically added. So a character's contacts list would start blank and then the player chooses who to add to the list. That way it stays a manageable length and lists aren't cluttered up with people that a player has never heard of. Then allow people to create conversations between people on their personal contacts list, and allow other people in that conversation to invite others into the conversation. That way, contact spreads in an organic way with characters introducing someone to someone else, and they then decide whether they want to keep in touch with each other by adding them to their personal contacts list.
That way, you have both a broad means of communication (the realm-wide channels), and a more selective and targeted way to create conversations (contacts list).
