Whether you want to talk to your friends, trade goods, or plan the next Guild Battlegrounds, communication is important!
The Message Center is unlocked upon researching the Bronze Age Technology Spears, one of the very first technologies to be researched.
The message center may be accessed from the HUD in the bottom left corner of the screen via the 'letter in an envelope' button. Also, when new messages are received, this button will flash.
The newest version of the Message Center was released on August 12, 2020 on the German servers and September 2 on the rest of the servers.
Categories[]
To keep all communication in one place and organized, the Message Center is divided into three categories: the Guild category, the Social category, and the Official category.
Guild[]
In the guild category, you can find all your guild conversations and threads. These automatically include all Guild Members, so they do not need an update whenever a member leaves or joins. At the top you have the Main Guild Conversation which is the only conversation automatically created when you create a Guild and that can not be deleted.
To start a new thread/conversation any member can click the 'paper airplane' button at the top right hand corner of the window, fill in a title and message and then click send. However, only guild members with the 'notifier' role may delete a message.
Message threads that shall not include all guild members like a Guild Leadership or Guild Alliances will have to be stored in the Social Tab.
Useful message threads for the Guild category would be
- Trade Thread
- FP Swap Threads
- Direct GB level support threads like 1.9 Guild Thread
- Guild Expeditions info
- Guild Battlegrounds discussion/strategy
Administration[]
Members with the notifier, leader and founder role may delete, lock and mark threads as Important by clicking the cogs icon next to the 3 bars in the thread.
Social[]
Here you can message anybody (provided they are not ignoring you) in private messages or group messages.
Members in the conversation with admin rights may add or kick members out, change the title of the conversation or change other message settings. The player starting the conversation automatically has the admin rights and any admin may give or remove the admin right to other participants of the message thread.
All Guild Members could be added to a conversation in this category, however the message group will not auto-update.
Official[]
Last but not least, you can find all official announcements in the official category.
These consist of :
- General Announcements - Game Updates, Recruitment and known bugs
- League Results - Results and Rewards of a League Table in an event.
- PvP Arena - Results , Rewards and Notifications
- Support Responses - Notification that the Support Team have responded to your message
You may not respond to these messages and there is no definite deletion time for any message , apart from the League Results which is 14 days and the Support Responses which is 30 days.
Tags[]
In the Guild and Social Categories there is the option to sort messages even further by giving them tags for ease of use.
Favorites[]
When you have a conversation that you would like to follow more closely, you can add it to that categories' #Favorites. This applies only to your message center and does not influence the #Favorite setting of other conversation participants.
To set the #Favorite tag, either click on the yellow star on the righthand side of the message in the message overview or check the respective box in the message settings menu.
Setting this tag will not influence the behavior in the message center - it will still show up as regular message in the overview (marked with a yellow star) and you will get notified when receiving a message in this thread.
To get to see only your #Favorite messages, select the respective tag in top of the message overview.
Hidden[]
You also have the option to hide a conversation, this will hide them from your Social/Guild Category without leaving them. You also won't get any notifications when a player sends a message in that conversation. But you can still view the conversation by clicking on #Hidden in the corresponding category.
This is most useful in the Guild Category where it is impossible to leave a message.
Important[]
The Guild category additionally has an "#Important" tag that shows all messages that one of the guild leadership marked as important. It will still show in and among the Guild Threads however it will just have a yellow banner in the corner and be easily accessible by clicking #Important at the top of the Message Center Widow (Once in the Guild Category).
Setting this tag in a conversation will mark this conversation as important for all Guild Members. Messages marked as important will not be deleted when they are older than 60 days.
Attachments[]
To attach a Great Building or Trade to a message simply click the paper clip in the bottom right of the message drafting window and you will be presented with a selection window of Great Buildings and Trade Offers (side note: the game remembers which tab you had open last and opens it by default), select one and it will automatically post for you in that conversation. You may also start a conversation with a Great Building or Trade.
Great Buildings[]
Once posted the recipient can then click directly on the "Open" button which will result in opening the contribution window for that particular Great Building.
Trade Offers[]
Duplicate offers are put into stacks to indicate how many times each offer is available. Pick the one you want to link to and hit "Send". It will be instantly included in your conversation.The recipient can then click on the button to accept the offer. If all offers from the entry are accepted, the attachment will be replaced with a message explaining this.
Previous Message Center[]
On the right hand side is an image of the previous Message Center. It did not provide categories or tags, however it did have attachments.
In the previous Message Center the top message was always the Main Guild Conversation, followed by any Official Messages (None shown in this picture). Everything else was ordered by time since the last reply.