A Social Travian Idea [Part 1]

Hey Guys,

I'm on a mission, and that mission is to use the data that I received in my last full scale Travian survey to try and design/suggest new ways for Travian to implement social features and if possibly to try and create some support for them. If you don't like them then fine but I hope you like at least some of them and show your support in our comments section below and by sharing the post on facebook/twitter. This set of ideas will be published over multiple posts over the next two weeks. I hope I'll be able to make each idea interesting and convince you that they'd improve Travian. 

Travian 4 has already become slightly more social by allowing troops released by players themselves from trappers to go unharmed which encourages more communication between players to stop their troops dying. With confederation pacts being limited to three the importance of communication is also highlighted. While these are good steps I think Travian can be a lot more direct with their approach to socialization.

So I thought I'd start by showing some screenshots of the information I received about social networking on the last survey I ran, just so you understand what kind of thing the public (or the people who voted in the survey) would like to see or have asked for. To make pictures fit on the blog I have had to shrink them, click on any picture to see the full sized version of it.

Which Social Networks Do You Have Accounts On?

Which of these would you be willing to publish to your facebook wall or twitter stream?

So armed with that knowledge and my belief that Travian isn't social enough I've set out a number of ideas which I believe would come together to make Travian a more social, active and larger game. 

No. 1: Moving The Alliance Chat:

The alliance chat is potentially one of Travian's best features however because of the awkwardness of it's location it means that not many people use the feature and alliance chat's are mostly inactive and unloved. I love the fact that Travian has one built in but I think it could be significantly improved on if it was much easier to find and use. So my suggestion is to move it so it becomes a box on every page like how your hero's picture is. I've done a quick mock up to show you how it might be done:

Click to view in Full Size

As you can see the box would replace the taskmaster after you have completed all of the tasks and also when you have joined an alliance. It would be fairly prominent but if you did not want to use it then it would be easy to hide/disable with a simple click of a button. I would also suggest that the feature could be removed entirely when users are playing the game in the low-res version. I think it will really make the Alliance Chat a useful feature and will mean those people who do not have/want Skype or MSN are still able to stay up to date with their alliances and get involved. 

The next post in my 'A Social Travian' series will be up in the next couple of days. In the meantime please share the post and if you want follow our twitter page.