Quote:
Originally Posted by Combat Wombat
I am not sure what is up with all the whining about private messages and stuff when theres a million different kinds of chat clients that handle the kind of high volume and fast back and forth communication everyone seems to want (aka what forums or forum PM's are not for)
I would recommend a good IRC client or someting like ICQ if you want to send people messages while they are't online. Or shocker here I know use email 
I love the new forums,everything about them seems to be an improvement over what we had except maybe the color but I understand reasoning behind that change. Could use some more arcade games though, maybe something I am better at  |
You must have never played dominions 3 multiplayer.
People have a need for a single layer of abstraction for communication. It's either e-mail, or the board PMs. Most people are loathe to post their e-mail addresses on public boards for fear that it'll get picked up by spam bots. So if you're an admin, you could go around and send PMs to everyone to collect their e-mail addresses, and then send another round of PMs with all the addresses and who the players are.
It's just much simpler to use the PM system for in game diplomacy. Everyone knows the username of the players in the game without revealing their e-mails to the entire world. You can setup the PMs to e-mail you when you get new ones. The PMs (well they used to before a very small cap was imposed) be a good place to store relevant history for a given game, allowing you to look back on trades, alliances, and agreements you'd setup earlier. You also have all your game e-mails stuck in one place, instead of cluttering up your POP3 client's inbox.
Personally, I think the new forums have more cons than pros, and what pros there are seem highly irrelevant like all the scoring system stuff that just eats up vertical space and clutters the boards. Given the choice, I definitely prefer the old forums.
Jazzepi