I usually just lurk on the forums for this game. But I just had to register to give feedback to this latest game update. I have officially seen everything now.
Email, and other closely related message systems, have been around in one form or the other since the early 1980's (maybe even earlier), but long before the web or smartphones. I bet I have personally had over 50 different email accounts between various: schools, jobs, hobbies, games, web sites, list servers, BBS chat boards, and so on. So I just want to congratulate Inno Games to be the first software developers ever in the history of messaging to build a messaging system that comes complete with its very own self-generated SPAM. What mail or message system would be complete without its own built-in spam message subsystem that sends you a 100% completely irrelevant and unwanted message every single time one of your 80 guild members tries to delete a guild-wide message from their inbox? How did we every survive without this annoyance...err I mean
new feature?
And let us not forget that it is not actually "delete" but "leave". This is despite 100% of anyone who has every used any kind of electronic messaging system anywhere before playing FoE being completely used to the concept of
deleting a message they no longer wish to retain in their inbox. Oh wait ... yeah that's right it is not actually an "Inbox", but rather it is a clusterfudge of an identity-crisis, a ization of an inbox/outbox.
Software Engineering and system design is supposed to start with gathering reasonable user requirements, and end with field testing, and user acceptance. Reading just a few replies on this forum topic easily indicates that the developers at Inno Games should ask for a full refund on the software engineering degrees. Beta users obviously raised prudent issues, which were ignored. And now the rest of us regular users are punished with a bunch of
"new innovations" that really should be filed under "if it ain't broken, don't fix it!".
Messaging systems have been around now for more than 3 solid decades, and their are very goods reasons for the old tried and true constructs
• It is called a freaking "subject" or a "topic", not a "group". A "subject" or a "topic" is a generalized, short summary of
what people in the conversation are talking about, while a "group" is the collection of people
who are talking (or listening) in the conversation.
• Users
delete messages in order to remove remnants of an asynchronous conversation they no longer care about and to simplify the process of locating other remnants of asynchronous conversations they do care about. Users do not
leave an asynchronous conversation, they
leave synchronous conversations like interactive chat rooms or channels.
• No one else in the entire universe cares, or should care, when any user any where in the world deletes a message to clean up list of messages they want to manage. If 80 guild members each delete 1 guild-wide message under this new message system, a total of 3,160 "so-and-so left the conversation" messages are generated in the collective inboxes (which are not actually inboxes) of all guild members that have yet to leave the conversation. Meaning the first person to leave generates 79 messages that need to be read (one each by th eother 79 guild members), the next erson to leave generates 78, and so on down to when the second to the last person decides to leave the conversation.
You do require college-level education to design game updates don't you?