Player Council 2nd Term: Weekly Updates

[DeletedUser54192]

The EN Player Council Members for the 2nd Term are:
@DizzlJoe
@Kal Gordon
@Hyper
@ErikWijmeersch

The best way to reach us is though PMs here on the forum.

This thread will be for updates and announcements from the Player Council, so we would greatly appreciate it if any comments are made on the discussion thread. We understand that the 2nd Term discussion thread has not yet been made, so please bear with us and use the 1st Term discussion thread until we can organise the creation of a 2nd Term thread.

 

[DeletedUser48212]

Hello everyone,

This week Kal and I gained access to the inner council forum and discord rooms. We met the other representatives from all the other Worlds and are currently getting to know each other better. Ideas are being talked about to further improve everyone's Grepolis experience.

For now, if you have any ideas and or concerns, please use phi's old thread here.

 

[DeletedUser44867]

Speaking of forums.

please keep comments and ideas on the discussion and ideas threads, or in new forum threads. Comments/questions/criticisms/political manifestos are more than welcome, but we'd like them to not be on this particular thread.
let this be a place for inner council members to give updates so it does not become cluttered with other posts.
This way people can quickly find important information in this thread.
thank you.

 

[DeletedUser54192]

First off, I'm going to apologise for the lack of activity from the EN Council. Both myself and DizzlJoe have been indisposed recently, due to personal reasons. Not a great start, I completely admit that. Here's an update of what has been going on, and what is coming up.

Points of Discussion:

• Domination was a popular discussion focus early on. However, with it being implemented soon after our term started, the topic is effectively on hold while we see how it works in practice.
• Spam. Yes, the ever-controversial topic of spam. This has come up quite a few times, and we hope to find a way to prevent it without interfering with normal gameplay (many anti-spam suggestions that I have seen over my time in this game tend to mess up "sniping", in one way or another). Some possible ways of achieving this are in the works.
• Even after the changes to BP earning (0% BP for killing your own units, 20% for killing the units of anyone in the same alliance or a pacted alliance), this has been a hot topic. While the removal of self-killing is foolproof, "allybashing" (as it is often termed) is still very much present. More obvious than before, for anyone who watches people leaving and joining alliances, but it's not made it much harder. A battlepoint "cooldown" mechanism has been brought up however, as with the previous change to in-alliance BP, it would further harm internalising inactive players.
• Events (especially the frequency, and the actual impact of "improvements"), and the seeming lack of variety when it comes to "styles" of heroes, have also come up on multiple occasions.
• Improving the use of the in-game communication methods has also been brought forward, for example the possibility of being able to search through your messages rather than just scrolling endlessly.
• As well as the big controversial issues, other minor issues, such as clarification of the descriptions/mechanics of certain game elements (such as the Divine Statue) have been brought to the attention of the developers.

The sheer number of different topics (in many cases, there are multiple approaches to the same problem, or multiple problems/areas of improvement for a specific part of the game) makes it difficult to list them all. However we can be contacted in PMs here on the forum, if anyone has questions about specific topics, which we will answer as best we can (NDA-dependent, so please don't ask us what the developers have said, as the vast majority of that is confidential).

Coming soon:

• The first Skype call of this 2nd Term will be happening on Friday 13th July. With the sheer number of topics and solutions discussed across the council forum and the discord, not everything will be discussed in this first call. Prioritisation is in progress. The report back on the details of what occurs in this call will be released as soon as we get the clearance on what we are actually allowed to share or not share.
• While some of the topics mentioned above are minor and more a case of requesting to the developers (such as message-searching, description clarifications, etc), others are more complicated and may take a longer amount of time to resolve, and therefore comments on them and how to best solve them are still greatly encouraged.

Again, I apologise on behalf of the EN Player Council for the lack of recent communication. My inbox is always open for suggestions, concerns, or just general inquiries.

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Just a quick update for now. Not much to say, but thought it was worth touching base.

• The first GPC call of our term went ahead on Friday 13th July. When we have an approved summary of the call, I will update you all, but until then I can't discuss anything about it.
• I will request a new GPC discussion thread, as it was pointed out that the old one was locked and we were never given a new one for this term.
• From now on, I'll be aiming to do the weekly updates at some point during the weekend. (Exceptions will be made for special/urgent content, such as when the GPC call summary is approved.)

Thanks for not giving up on us, and if I fall behind in updates, feel free to find me in PMs or Skype and yell at me.

 

[DeletedUser54192]

As promised, here is the approved report on the first GPC Skype Call of the 2nd Term.

Summary of the first Player Council term 2 event

(July 13th, 2018)

We are happy to report you about our work as Inner Player Council members and the first official event - a video conference - we had with the following participants:

Innogames: Thorsten Schankin (Product Manager), Bernard Graham (Game Designer), Anna Sieprawska (Lead Community Manager)
Inner Player Council: AnWePe (GER), Dark-shadow35 (FRA), firebloem (NL), morg (US)
Council Advisory Board: florian799 (FRA)

First, we learned a bit about the Grepolis team, the role of the members and the workflow of game development. This was very educational and much needed to understand how our community feedback plays a huge role in the future of Grepolis.

All ideas go through a rating process, where they are rated by Community Management and Game Design teams - their combined rating determines a priority order. Additionally, there are many other factors that influence which ideas get implemented - some changes require special research or affect other game elements. Ideas which have a big impact and are easy to implement (quick wins) are favorable. The final call depends on the difficulty of the idea vs. its benefits. If all goes well, the planning can start and about 4 weeks after the developers start working on the new feature, it can reach the live markets (including testing on beta).

After the Introduction we discussed various specific topics, for example the recent changes of Battle Points calculation, the increasing number of alliance switches and possible further directions to improve the concept. A part of discussion was also focused on Events. After sharing our concerns, we learned that the Events are being constantly adjusted to the new challenges, based on our feedback and analytics of market results, as tests outside of live markets cannot always point out all issues (for example that a community goal is unreachable on many servers). As for the number of Events and their impact on the worlds balance which many Players worry about, InnoGames puts effort on decreasing the individual bonuses and the power of tokens. In general it is very important to mention that the focus of game development is reaching real solutions and if there is one in which Player Council is involved then we will get approval and can share it.

Since Term 2 start Grepolis Player Councils have collected 80+ suggestions from different language versions and within Inner Council we rated these ideas from 1 to 5, to select the best ideas that we will discuss in more details. We also brought up a few of these topics during this call (by the way I have to make it clear that not all markets experience the same problems).

Selected main topics and suggestions:
- app (travel time check, culture overview, show number of incoming attacks, city search option)
- events (exclude new worlds, spacing out events)
- special buildings (War Council as alternative of Tower with +5% attack power)
- misc. (change title of own thread in forum, search function for reports and messages, improve heroes in simulator, turn on/off award notifications)
- morale (disable morale when the era of World Wonders start, remove morale effect from sieges)
- community (polls for world settings as default, generalized rules for game and forum, approval for GPC / community chats)
- premium (show sieges on own cities in command overview, remove deselection of filters when reloading overview)
- start phase (free world selection for new players, Christopholus as starter hero, Tutorial Overview for beginners, extend trial period of premium functions, new quests that encourage communication and interaction between players)
- unit rebalance (reconsider event myths’ cost and power)
- vacation mode (allow attacks until activation, 24 hours before activation Colony Ship couldn't be sent nor land like peacetime dynamics)

Until the next Call / Event we keep working on these priority topics on Inner Council forum that Devs follow and on adding the newer Community suggestions to the bunch. We are going to continue forum discussions from now on about same topic with all markets to be able to provide a varied and fresh feedback for actual issues. Thank you all who participated and helped us so far with your feedback and suggestions!

Grepolis Player Council


Note: I will still be posting a weekly update on either Saturday or Sunday. This is a special post, purely for the approved GPC Call Report.

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Hello everyone! As promised, here is the weekly update. While the call report was the biggest event this week, that doesn't mean that there aren't other aspects to provide updates on.

• While this isn't actually the GPC's responsibility, it appears that it's only going to get distributed to the community if we do it: the combat-related researches do not work on conquest servers in the way that a lot of the community believed. By this, I mean that phalanx, battering ram and presumably divine selection, should not benefit an enemy siege on your city if you have them researched. This change was made back in 2014, however the vast majority of the Grepolis community don't seem to have been informed of it. It was posted on the DE forum's changelog, however it was missed out in the translation to the EN changelog. It seems as though none of the other markets were made aware of this either (NL and HU markets have both confirmed that they were not informed of the change, and no other market has said that they were made aware of it). This revelation only occurred as a result of a discussion of an old suggested set of changes to common researches (combat researches, recruitment researches, breakthrough, and stonehail). This information may be posted on the wiki at some point, however it is unlikely that they will announce it, given how long ago they made the change.
• "Allybashing" (teammates killing each other's troops for BP) is still being debated. While self-bashing was prevented by the change to the BP system, players can simply leave and rejoin alliances to get 100% BP from teammates. The idea of some sort of cooldown to prevent/reduce this behaviour is being discussed.
• The number of events has been brought up again, this time with the idea of excluding new worlds from events, due to the negative impact they can have. (For example, a troop-sacrificing event happening in a newly-opened world can stagnate fighting, as it did on en103 Carystus for last year's Pandora's Box.)
• Gold trading has come up as a recent discussion topic as well. It was kickstarted by a new type of beginner package being advertised on the most recent NL world: as well as advisors, construction/recruitment bonuses, and resource production bonuses, the "Divine Starter Pack" offers instant resource tokens, similar to those available in recipe-style events. This apparently crippled the gold trading on that world, as most people who would buy a lot of resources early on, chose to buy the packages instead. This has continued into discussions on what else people are offering in exchange for gold: cities are being sold for gold, under the pretence of gold trading, and some players have gone as far as offering to spam a customer's enemies in exchange for gold. Both of these are actually against the rules of the game, but because the gold has to change hands via resource trades (even if it's minimum resources for maximum gold), there's little way of proving when it actually happens.

That's all for now. I will likely be opening topic-specific discussion threads on certain concepts/ideas, both ones mentioned in this update, and ones that have been in discussion for a longer period of time. Thanks for reading!

 

[DeletedUser54192]

This week has been a little slower. Discussions are still taking place on a variety of topics, but there is nothing huge to report back on, this week.

• The old proposed research changes (stonehail and breakthrough changes, plus the idea of splitting existing researches into two parts, such as phalanx into a land offence and a land defence pair of researches) is in discussion again. I will try to get a thread up on that in the next few days.
• The topic of rebalancing fliers has come up once again (I have seen this come up several times since I joined the externals), mainly from a conquest world's perspective.
• Gold trading is still in debate, with a wide variety of opinions on what should and shouldn't be allowed according to the rules, or what changes could be made to even out the playing field, or improve the process.
• Events are still in discussion. Once more people have had a chance to comment on their experience of the Pandora event, I will summarise the feedback and post it on the Council forum where the developers may be more likely to take notice.
• The idea of rebalancing/redesigning special buildings, particularly the Tower, has come up recently. As most of you will know, Towers are by far the most used of the right hand set of special buildings on revolt, only really losing out during WWs when alliances that are interested in building Wonders often change their Towers for Merchant Houses or Divine Statues. At the same time, there is very little reason to ever build a Tower on Conquest, due to the meta of defending via sniping or by breaking sieges, rather than any sort of defensive stacking. Ideas include changing tower mechanics on conquest (perhaps preventing them from helping in the defence of a siege), making a replacement special building for conquest worlds in place of the Tower, or strengthening the other special buildings from that set to make them into attractive alternatives on revolt worlds. I may set up a Special Building discussion thread for this and other ideas, in the next few days.
• Due to a lack of Council feedback/interaction on some markets (either due to council members not sharing updates, or for markets where they do not have council members), a suggestion has been made to have a mutual GPC-Community discussion forum for all the different communities to receive updates and give feedback.
• On a different note, it has been suggested that players should automatically be able to change their own thread titles without needing forum moderator rights: the idea being that this would reduce the demand on an alliance's forum mods, and make it easier for players to organise their own offence/defence threads.
• Some changes have been suggested in relation to Vacation Mode, to try and make it less restrictive or smoother as a process.

That covers the vast majority of what I can discuss about this week's work in the GPC. I will do what I can to set up threads for specific discussions on key topics over the next few days, real life permitting.

As always, if you have any questions, feedback or complaints, you can use the stickied discussion thread in this forum section, or my inbox is always open. Thanks for sticking with us!

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Hey everyone. Back again with this week's update. A lot of the discussion on the council forums has been on the same topics as last week, but I will outline what I can in terms of what has been said since last week's update.

• Events are still a hot topic, be it the frequency of events, the type of events, or the power level of the rewards that you can get from them. We have had some developer feedback on this discussion, but we are waiting for a response as to whether we can share the details.
• Vacation Mode is also still in discussion, primarily due to conflicting opinions on what is fair/unfair to the VM player or their enemies. (We would not want a change which introduces a way to abuse VM.)
• Gold trade has had a little continued discussion, but no major new content.
• The ideas of a shared GPC-Community forum for all markets, a common set of external forum rules, approved GPC-Community discord/skype chats (currently not allowed in servers such as EN because we aren't allowed to advertise Skype/Discord chats in-game or on the forums as they aren't moderated by InnoGames), and introducing a polling system for world settings have gained further support.
• The status of the soon-to-be Domination worlds on servers such as NL has been clarified by Inno staff.
• On the GPC Discord chat, we have been discussing the pros and cons of the changes to the Pandora event, as well as about the topics being covered on the forum.

I know this is a little shorter than previous updates, however that's all that has been done that I am at liberty to discuss. I apologise for not getting the topic-specific discussion threads up during the week as I had planned to, but I've been quite busy. I will try to get that done soon.

As usual, both the discussion thread and my inbox are available for anyone with any feedback about the topics mentioned above, or any other GPC-related issues. Thanks for reading!

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Hello again everyone!

This week has been more interesting and eventful than previous weeks, so hopefully this update isn't quite as boring as the last few.

First, I'd like to welcome @TaskCo1 and @Fluvisol to the EN Player Council (replacing @Hyper and @lyndya1). Those who have been following the threads in this section will already know of this change, but we hadn't had an official announcement of it yet so there you go. Now, onto the topics that we have been discussing this week.

• We're back onto spam again. Spurred by a conversation between the DE CM and members of the DE Community, we've started working on trying to find a viable solution. We will be taking (and have taken) ideas from the recent thread here on EN on this topic to the Council discussions with other markets.
• I've brought up the discrepancies between markets, with the aim of finding out the reasons behind these differences, and making it fair for all communities. EN is one of the only, if not the only, market with a Do Not Suggest list as part of their ideas forum, while DE is actively encouraged to suggest new heroes and gods (both of which are on our DNS list). DE was given the opportunity to design a hero (Eurybia was the result), which wasn't told to other markets, and was certainly never offered to any other markets so far as we know. EN is forbidden from promoting Skype/Discord chats, while other communities such as DE have no such restrictions and their recent spam discussion with their CM was hosted in part on Discord. Furthermore, NL is used as a test market for updates, even though there is a market (beta) that exists specifically to test new features and updates. These points have all been raised, and when I have answers and the permission to publish them, I will.
• We had the opportunity to discuss some ideas for the reward for winning a Domination world (in the same way that players receive a permanent +50 favour storage for winning a WW world). I can't discuss details, but I thought it was worth a mention.
• We've now been given permission to share a recent insight on the developer's plans for the ways in which events will change over time:

1. The [battlefield and recipe] events will continue to exist, I am changing the rewards on them to reduce its power, as it happened on Pandora. Some events will take longer than others, Pandora is a new event, so it is very easy to reduce the rewards drastically. But the other events should have a nerf to the rewards, yes.

2. [About concerns over the shooting events giving up to 6 Divine Senses tokens, which are considered overpowered by some.] ... the divine senses will not be part of the collection reward anymore, I still haven't decided what to add in its place, but Divine senses should become a very special reward given out occasionally.

3. [In response to a question about the idea of creating another Grepolympia-style event.] ... we are not planning on doing that again for a while, events are not currently our focus.

4. [As to whether the Persian Conquest event would return at some point.] We wanted to bring that event back for a while, but it turned out a lot more complicated than expected, so we decided to move away from it.

5. [In response to the idea of bringing back the old hunting-style events from very early on in Grepolis.] I think that is for sure something cool to consider, but like I said events are not currently in out focus anymore, we will do adjustments and minor improvements, but working on a new event or bringing back something old is not our focus right now.

[In response to a separate question about the dramatic weakening of some Pandora rewards when it had been said that events would be slowly weakened.] It was intended yes. Like I said above, as Pandora is a new event it is quite easy for us to drastically change things, the other events will have a slower nerf. But this will keep happening to most events, and the speed wont be constant between events.

I hope that this provides a good insight into how the developer is planning to work on events in the future. This was stated last week, but we weren't given permission to share it until this partway through this week.

Once again, thank you for sticking with us. I hope that, with the fresh additions to our council, we will be able to improve on our interaction with the community to make sure that your questions are answered (NDA permitting), and that you are kept up to date as much as possible as to all changes and events. Have a nice week!

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Hello everyone. A little slower this week, however what discussion there has been can be explained a little more than some of the previous discussion topics.

First, as a number of you will know, @DizzlJoe and @ErikWijmeersch were removed from the EN Council on account of inactivity. The status of any replacements are currently unknown to the three of us currently in the Council, however I'm sure @Baudin Toolan is working on contacting the appropriate people so that we can be back to full strength as soon as possible.

Now, onto the discussion topics covered this week:

• Spam is still being discussed on the discord chat. No further forum work on that as we are watching and discussing our communities' different opinions on this topic.
• A request was made for a more secure email address change. This was made by an NL council member in response to several fairly recent incidents on NL where players' accounts were hacked, the email address changed (the current system for an email address change doesn't require a confirmation from the old email address), and the account restarted using the new email address. A couple of different suggestions have been made with regards to making this more secure, including preventing account restarts within a certain time limit after an email address change (by which time it would be known that the account had been hacked), or requiring a confirmation from the old email address to swap to a new email address.
• An alert delay was suggested, which is tied into the issue of spam (more specifically send-and-recall spam). The idea would be that players could choose not to receive an alert until the command has been travelling for long enough to not be cancelled. This included an idea for changing the "setup" time for attacks (the base travel time between any cities onto which unit travel time is added), in order to make it so that players on higher-speed worlds could not have have attacks landing that could still have been recalled at that time.
• An idea from the US server was brought up, about introducing methods of reducing the hero assignment time. 4 different options were suggested: a token to improve the speed with which heroes arrive in a specific city, the ability to halve the remaining assignment time with gold, the ability to instantly complete the arrival with gold, and a new special building that could decrease hero assignment/healing time for that city. The gold options received negative feedback due to the power of gold-assigning certain heroes (heavy golders could move Aristotle much more quickly between cities for better recruitment times, or bounce defensive heroes between multiple cities under attack rather than choosing one to receive the benefit) which it was felt would remove a part of the strategic element of hero use. The token idea was positively received by council members, with different ideas on how to implement it. A special building seems an interesting idea, although not a strong one given that there is already imbalance among the special buildings and adding an extra one could increase this imbalance (the idea could be rather strong or rather weak, depending on the percentage decrease of times, and which group of special buildings it was added to).
• Worryingly, the topic of inequality between markets appears to have been avoided by the InnoGames staff in the Inner Council forum, as there has been no staff reply since it was posted on Friday last week, and at least one member of staff has actively contributed to a thread made after this topic was. It has received support from a number of council members (including DE, who did not initially realise the depth of certain differences between DE and EN), and we will continue to push for this as we believe it will improve the entire community-developer interaction, as well as the GPC's ability to put forward a wide range of community ideas to the developers.

My inbox and the discussion thread are both always open for those of you with concerns, comments, or constructive criticism. Thanks for reading, and all the best for the coming week!

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Domination Update!

I know it's only been a couple of days since the last update, but given that people have been constantly asking me when this new endgame is actually going to start being tested/used, I thought this should be shared straight away.

The first guaranteed Domination-endgame world has been announced on the Beta market. This is what the developers have spent the majority of their time on for the last few months, and was one of the major achievements from last term's Player Council. They've also released a wiki page describing the endgame.

• World Announcement post.
• Domination Wiki page.

Thanks for your patience with this topic, and enjoy the rest of your week!

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Hey everyone. You've already had the biggest piece of news from this week, but here we go.

• A Domination world (Sandbox 10) was released on the beta market. The aim for this is to test the Domination endgame quickly, so that it can hopefully be implemented on the 3 worlds with no endgame on NL and a couple of other markets, and hopefully after that we will see Domination appearing on the other live servers. (See post above for the detailed update and relevant links.)
• The issue of the controversial war package (with 18 Heightened Senses tokens soon after they announced and implemented a decrease in in-event availability of that token) has seen common reactions from all communities. The council has stated to the developers and staff in no uncertain terms that this was an unacceptable move and that it should not be allowed to continue. We had a mixed response to this issue: while the developer and LCM stated that our opinions are just that, and they won't always act on them, the lead developer has agreed to review the packages and decrease the amount of Heightened Senses available in packages to bring it in line with the decreased event availability (but they will not be removed completely from packages).
  • In response to statements made by multiple council members that we were being held responsible for negative decisions made by Inno that we had no part in or power over, the Lead Community Manager stated that players should understand that, while Inno comes and asks the Player Council for their advice and opinions, they have no obligation to act on them immediately, or indeed at all.
• It has been decided by the developers that no alliance-switching cooldown measure (proposed to reduce the feasibility of jumping in and out of alliances to avoid the 20% BP from teammates and pactmates) will be implemented at this time. They will continue to keep this idea in mind, especially with regards to Domination due to the way in which alliance-changing could be abused in that endgame mode.
• The three current possible Domination worlds (currently with no endgame) on specific national markets (NL and two others) should have Domination implemented. It appears that the possibility of them not having it was based on if the endgame could be tested in time on the beta market. (Which it should be with the release of Sandbox 10, which will start the endgame phase only 45 days after opening.)
• The chosen reward for winning a Domination world has been announced: +10% warehouse capacity to all cities. It was felt that this wouldn't be unbalanced, was unique, and was similar to the World Wonder reward (same percentage increase as the +50 favour capacity). This was debated in the council a few weeks ago, and the +10% warehouse capacity chosen as the most likely option for implementation, however we were not able to reveal it at that time.
• Some backlogged ideas/topics earlier on are being brought back into discussion. At this point I am unable to share the details (given that most of the information is developer responses), but will find out what I can share.
• The topic of inequalities is still progressing slowly within the Council. We received a response on Monday from the LCM. Since then, we have received no contact on the matter, despite multiple posts requesting answers to existing and new questions, and a request to be able to share the single response post with our communities. While I cannot reveal the content of the LCM's post, I can say that a number of us in the Council found it unsatisfactory due to not promising any changes (except for one that had by then already been promised by the EN Co-CM Baudin Toolan just after I had written last week's update), and avoiding or not explaining the actual issues in the other inequalities presented. We are continuing to push this matter, but it is becoming increasingly worrying that the senior management for the game's overall community seemingly has no interest in dealing with obvious equality issues, even when simple solutions are presented.
  • Thank you to Baudin Toolan for removing the DNS list from the main section of the Ideas forum and beginning work on a new ideas format to help us get our ideas to the developers, whatever those ideas may be.

Due to real life commitments, I will be unable to do next week's weekly update (2nd September). I apologise in advance for this inconvenience. I hope to be back with 9th September's update, in which I will cover all that has happened across the two weeks.

Again, thank you for reading, and for sticking with us while we fight to improve the quality of the game and your experience of it!

 

[Fluvisol]

Hey everyone! This will be a little bit of an unusual update as @Kal Gordon is too busy to do it right now and for now he is still the only Inner Council member
Instead I'll try to give a basic rundown of my own experience in the GPC with an announcement at the end - feel free to scroll through if you just want that

When I was asked if I wanted to replace one of the inactive members and agreed, I was added to the GPC chat where the council members of multiple markets discuss various topics and suggestions. It was honestly a little overwhelming as I didn't really know what to do
Luckily Kal and @molinillo from the US council helped out a bit with how things work, which made it so I felt at ease enough to chat freely
Soon it became clear that different markets have different playstyles, or at least their council members do
For instance, in the spam discussion the DE members brought the slider idea forward, and when I pointed out that this wouldn't be very effective for players on the front in fast worlds they said that front cities should be stacked. I don't think this is the usual practice on EN conquest worlds, but to be sure I included it in the post on the spam topic in the forums here

Which brings me to the next thing I noticed
Input from people outside of the GPC is so important
We are just 3 people after all, and there is way more than 3 different playstyles out there. We could find a solution for something that works for all three of us but completely ruins how a 4th person plays. This is why we really need the discussions between everyone here, to see all angles and try to come up with something that suits everyone
And to go on about that point, input is not only for feedback on ideas we give and relay from other communities, but also to get fresh ideas
For example @G-Fight 's suggestion regarding cancel times was well thought out and prompted us to look into base travel times and such to refine it even further. Past week has been a bit busy for most of us but I'll see about working some more on that and posting it here for discussion

Now for the announcement

Discord and Skype links are now allowed to be posted on the forums and in mass mails in game
But most of you probably already read this in the official post
What this means is that the GPC for EN and US now have a discord server for discussion about anything Grepolis related
We currently have different channels set up dedicated to spam, events, app and Domination, and a general channel for suggestions which are not about those four
It's also an easy place to get in touch with us, or even to just stop by for a chat
This is the invite link, feel free to spread it, the more people we get the more discussion there will be: https://discord.gg/KPEj77n

I have to clarify though, the server is run by us and is in no way affiliated with Inno or the support team, any issues concerning the server can be voiced to us in pm on here, on Discord or in the dedicated feedback channels on the server. Please don't bother the fine folks at the support team with those complaints, they have nothing to do with it

That's it for this week, hope to see you all on Discord!

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Hey everyone. Apologies for not posting this yesterday, but I hadn't had the chance to finish reviewing everything that had happened in my absence.

• Mimicking the change on EN, the US market has also lifted the ban on posting Skype/Discord links on the external forums and in-game. This completed that section of the Inequalities issue. There are still other inequalities topics being pushed by the council, however not all of them are quite as straight-forward as the DNS list and chat link issues (which took a while considering the simplicity, but complexity wasn't the delaying factor).
• The GPC-Community Discord server for EN and US players is going well. We're getting plenty of feedback and discussions that we wouldn't normally have had (especially the discussion aspect) by just using the externals. The EN/US council members will be working to summarise these issues for posting on the Inner Council and also here to let you see what is going on.
• A small issue was cleared up concerning the academy level for CS researches. (When the old proposed research changes were brought back for discussion, it still showed CS-research as Academy level 22. We have had confirmation that this was due to it being the case at the time, and there is no intention of changing the CS-research back to level 22.)
• We are gradually working our way through the community ideas backlog that InnoGames provided us with.
• As most of you will already know, En110 was announced as EN's first Domination world.

Thanks for reading, and hope you all have a great week!

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Again, sorry for updating on a Monday rather than a Sunday, but I was away until last night.

• The email change security topic finally received a staff response today. We will be seeking permission as to whether we can publish it. (They often neglect to mention in the response itself whether we can publish it.)
  
• The inequalities topic finally received an answer, after a long silence. In my opinion, the majority of the answers didn't properly address the issues, and as such I am pushing for more answers. Again, I am requesting permission on the ability to publish it. We will also be pushing new issues in this topic very soon.
• There has been further council discussion on the idea of being able to turn the notifications in the bottom right-hand corner off and on. These can often be a source of lag, or just irritation due to the way that some of them reappear when the page is refreshed, even after they have been deleted.

Apologies for the short update, but it's been relatively quiet in council due to effectively receiving no response from InnoGames staff until this afternoon, and also due to the fact that today's responses weren't stated as being open for publication to the community. Thanks for reading, and I hope to have more information for you all soon!

 

[DeletedUser36697]

all good swings... better luck at bat next time..
hard to do much when the pitcher(inno) throws curveballs to their own folks

 

[DeletedUser55972]

Will there be anymore updates ?

 

[DeletedUser54192]

Will there be anymore updates ?

I am aiming to get an update out sometime tomorrow. Apologies for the lack of contact, but family and studies have got in the way.

I would note that council activity in general has decreased in recent weeks, due to the way in which we feel we have been treated by the staff interacting with us. It's not a proper excuse, I know that, but I hope you would agree that it can be hard to remain motivated when the majority of the responses you receive are unsatisfactory in some way or another.

Again, apologies for the wait, and I will get an update out tomorrow covering the important details of the last 3 weeks.

 

[DeletedUser55972]

I am aiming to get an update out sometime tomorrow. Apologies for the lack of contact, but family and studies have got in the way.

I would note that council activity in general has decreased in recent weeks, due to the way in which we feel we have been treated by the staff interacting with us. It's not a proper excuse, I know that, but I hope you would agree that it can be hard to remain motivated when the majority of the responses you receive are unsatisfactory in some way or another.

Again, apologies for the wait, and I will get an update out tomorrow covering the important details of the last 3 weeks.

Thank you for the response, please be in no rush .. it's not your fault .. we will be waiting patiently.