Hi, I've been playing Call of War for nearly two years, now. I have seen it's many ups and downs. I've made numerous suggestions over the years (ignore my forum rating) but here's one that I'm not sure I've ever mentioned before. It is very necessary. It concerns an annoyance in the Messages & Trades section of the Diplomacy system.
In longer games, or with playing with many people that are ... talkative ... the numbers of messages can add up tremendously. I have seen many hundreds of messages accumulate even in some matches lasting only a couple months. While the need for making messages is important and the diplomacy system is integral to game play, the ability to delete messages has been a very tedious procedure.
You can only delete a single message at a time and each time you do delete, you have to wait a small amount of time for the deletion to get processed. Then, to slow you down more, if you were trying to only delete old messages, the act of deleting any message forcibly scrolls you down to the most recent messages so you have to scroll back up to repeat the process for the next single message.
Both the deletion pause time as well as the re-scrolling causes the act of cleaning out old messages to become a grueling experience.
Now, I know that the messages need to be scrolled to the bottom after a deletion occurs (or any new trade, posted). And I know that there must be a short pause to register the deletion of a message. These things are apparently unavoidable. But if we were to implement a checkbox system, then we can side-step the tedium.
Similar to the checkbox column of the Province List, adding checkboxes to each message would make it simple to delete multiple messages at the same time. So, you could click on several messages' checkboxes and then hit the new "delete checked messages" button that would be added alongside the group of buttons labeled "All", "Messages", and "Trades".
There would also need to be a "Delete All" button added. Of course, for my suggestion to be a reasonable new option, there would need to be a modal confirmation popup for every delete command (e.g., "Deleting these messages cannot be undone. Are you sure you wish to delete the selected messages? <YES> - <NO>")
Instead of a "Delete All" button, it may be just as good to have a "Select All" button, instead. This would reduce the chances of an accidental deletion which, despite the confirmation, can still occur through human error. In addition, there could be buttons that "select" only messages or trades, similar to the existing buttons but they select them, not just "show only" them. So, the list of buttons above the message area could look something like this:
<All> <Messages> <Trades> | <Select All> <Select Messages> <Select Trades> | <Delete Selected><Delete All>
I used strikethrough on <Delete All> as that may be too dangerous to keep when the <Select All> + <Delete Selected> combination would accomplish the same thing while adding an extra layer of protection against accidents.
In addition to the proposed functionality of the message system, it would be nice to a similar yet simpler one for nations listed in the "Conversations" group. With checkboxes added to the conversations, the buttons would be a shorter list, but a couple new ones would also be handy...they are self-explanatory and the list would look something like this:
<Select All> <Select Allies> <Select Enemies> | Delete Selected><Delete All>
One more thing: It would be nice to be able to delete coalition messages. This shouldn't make it that others in the coalition lose your messages, so I don't understand why this hasn't been implemented, anyway.
In longer games, or with playing with many people that are ... talkative ... the numbers of messages can add up tremendously. I have seen many hundreds of messages accumulate even in some matches lasting only a couple months. While the need for making messages is important and the diplomacy system is integral to game play, the ability to delete messages has been a very tedious procedure.
You can only delete a single message at a time and each time you do delete, you have to wait a small amount of time for the deletion to get processed. Then, to slow you down more, if you were trying to only delete old messages, the act of deleting any message forcibly scrolls you down to the most recent messages so you have to scroll back up to repeat the process for the next single message.
Both the deletion pause time as well as the re-scrolling causes the act of cleaning out old messages to become a grueling experience.
Now, I know that the messages need to be scrolled to the bottom after a deletion occurs (or any new trade, posted). And I know that there must be a short pause to register the deletion of a message. These things are apparently unavoidable. But if we were to implement a checkbox system, then we can side-step the tedium.
Similar to the checkbox column of the Province List, adding checkboxes to each message would make it simple to delete multiple messages at the same time. So, you could click on several messages' checkboxes and then hit the new "delete checked messages" button that would be added alongside the group of buttons labeled "All", "Messages", and "Trades".
There would also need to be a "Delete All" button added. Of course, for my suggestion to be a reasonable new option, there would need to be a modal confirmation popup for every delete command (e.g., "Deleting these messages cannot be undone. Are you sure you wish to delete the selected messages? <YES> - <NO>")
Instead of a "Delete All" button, it may be just as good to have a "Select All" button, instead. This would reduce the chances of an accidental deletion which, despite the confirmation, can still occur through human error. In addition, there could be buttons that "select" only messages or trades, similar to the existing buttons but they select them, not just "show only" them. So, the list of buttons above the message area could look something like this:
<All> <Messages> <Trades> | <Select All> <Select Messages> <Select Trades> | <Delete Selected>
I used strikethrough on <Delete All> as that may be too dangerous to keep when the <Select All> + <Delete Selected> combination would accomplish the same thing while adding an extra layer of protection against accidents.
In addition to the proposed functionality of the message system, it would be nice to a similar yet simpler one for nations listed in the "Conversations" group. With checkboxes added to the conversations, the buttons would be a shorter list, but a couple new ones would also be handy...they are self-explanatory and the list would look something like this:
<Select All> <Select Allies> <Select Enemies> | Delete Selected>
One more thing: It would be nice to be able to delete coalition messages. This shouldn't make it that others in the coalition lose your messages, so I don't understand why this hasn't been implemented, anyway.