Honest Discussions & Member Feedback

what do you mean? could you elaborate more?

 

While I'm well aware I can't answer all your concerns at the present because some are things that need to be fixed, I will try to address the ones I can. We currently have Skype chats and unused IRC chats and are aware of the issues with AIM (which I believe started when they were taken over by Verizon in March 2015, it wasn't a problem when most of us joined). I agree we need a new messenger but the problem is finding the right one. While time zones are certainly annoying, it's a workable issue as most of the time you don't need to look for a specific person and can just battle/contest/whatever with the people on at a given time. For tournaments or attempting to challenge a gym/Elite Four/etc., time zones complicate things but have been workable even at extreme (≈12 hour) differences during tournaments, though it often takes a bit longer to arrange. It also helps that some people have very weird sleep "schedules" and/or very little else to do and are therefore online at times you wouldn't expect from their time zone. While most people are in the US, there are a good amount of other Europeans, not to mention the overlap area where both have a "reasonable time" at the same time. Like you and several others, I often take quite a while to think about what to do in battles (and may well hold the record for longest battle, a nine hour monstrosity of an Elite Four battle), but typically battles on messengers take around half an hour to an hour for 4v4s (the most common size), varying up or down with size of course. Very rarely can they not be completed while everyone is online in a day. I think it's worth trying a few, even if on IRC where no account is needed, which can most easily be accessed with this link. I'm not going to lie, IRC is not particularly used, but I will do my best to watch it for activity and try to bring in whoever else is needed from AIM/Skype.

For National Park, I am honestly very sorry your post got missed and am not sure why. Other people checked the park threads for it and I searched all your posts for it after seeing this, but somehow no one noticed it until today. I honestly have no idea how that happened, but it's been approved now that it's been found. [Also worth mentioning messengers can help with fast approvals because you ask a group of people that almost always contains at least one approver if anyone can do it and give them a link, that's why a lot of approvals you'll see in threads take a few minutes at most and sometimes get up to four approvals from different people approving in quick succession.]

For merging the forums, there are a few problems. One is the ability to draw in new members. Being hosted on a forum allows us to more easily try and attract members from that forum. For instance, if we were only one place and that wasn't here, would you have found us? It is worth noting that from February 2003 to April 2010, URPG was exclusively hosted on PE2K. Expanding here was a necessity due to diminishing activity on PE2K (which we're all glad of now, it doesn't exist at all anymore). Having a "URPG forum" on its own would be hard for people to find (and may be difficult to set up).

If there's anything else I can help you with, feel free to reply here, post in general chat, or message me directly. I hope this was helpful!

dylan and I ran through a bunch of different messengers a while ago and checked if any made sense, but I don't remember the exact problems each had. IIRC Google Chat was (one of) the worst. Maybe he remembers the details better.

 

Yeah, it has Hangouts. Its trash. Like the rest of Google+

Discord - Free voice and text chat for gamers

Discord is awesome, cross-platform including mobile, will have a API (so we can at the very least build a dicebot, probably more) and easy to sign up for.

 

Discord would actually be a very viable option, from previous uses I have had

 

It's been a while since I used it, if the API is active that's awesome.

I'll create a URPG channel sometime soon

 

Nah thats cool. I'll make a "URPG" server with separate channels for Chat, Battle etc

 

Staff are trialing Discord right now. Looks good. I've coded a dicebot.

We're all pretty in favour of it right now and will probably make a public invite sometime this week as long as we don't find any huge problems.