Chat, the message board and the staff line

In short: Where to talk, where to pin a note that stays up while you sleep, and how to reach a real person with /gm.

Chat channels and the paid broadcast

Conquer has more than one place to say something. Most of them are free; one of them is a megaphone the whole server hears, and that one costs Conquer Points.

The free channels

Guild chat needs a guild, team chat needs a team, and a whisper needs the exact character name.

Broadcast -- the paid megaphone

The Broadcast channel reaches every player online and the client shows it as a highlighted line rather than an ordinary chat entry. Because it interrupts everybody, it is the one channel you pay for:

• 5 Conquer Points per line.
• The points come off the moment the line goes out, and your CP counter updates immediately.
• If you cannot pay, nothing is sent and nothing is charged -- you get a note saying what it costs.
• There is a short pause between broadcasts from the same person, so a stuck key cannot empty your wallet.

Two ways to send one, and they cost the same. You can type on the Broadcast channel, or use the client's own broadcast window — both charge the same 5 CPs, both obey the same pause, and both reach the same people. Use whichever you prefer.

Good uses: selling something nobody would find in a booth search, calling your guild to a siege, announcing an event. It is worth remembering that everyone online reads it.

Calling out from your booth

While your booth is open on the Market you can type a line on the vendor channel -- what you are selling, what you want for it -- and it goes out to everyone on your screen, over the carpet where you are standing.

A shopper who arrives after the call still sees it: opening your booth shows them your line along with the goods, so one call keeps working for as long as you stand there.

Keep it short. Anything past thirty-two characters is cut, and an empty line takes the sign down.

Reaching the staff

Chat channels reach players. To reach a person on the staff, use /gm — it costs nothing, it is private, and the answer finds you even if you have logged off before it is written. See Writing to the Staff.

The message board

What: five public notice boards — Trade, Friend, Team, Guild, Other — where you pin one line for everyone to read. Where: the message board window in your client (the "leave word" board). Cost: nothing.

The board is the oldest way to trade in Conquer, and it works while you are asleep: your note stays up until you take it down or replace it, whether or not you are online. A booth sells what you have in your bag right now; a board note says what you are looking for.

How it works

• Pinning a note is just typing on the board's channel. Pick a tab, type your line, send it.
• You have one note per board. Posting again replaces the one you had up — nothing to clean out, and nobody can bury a board under twenty lines of their own.
• The list is newest first, eight lines to a page.
• Click a line to read that note in full.
• Take yours down with the board's delete button.
• A note is at most 60 characters, so write it like a classified ad: what you want, what you pay, and your name is already on it.

What to put where

Nothing enforces the tabs, but people read the one that matches what they want, so a sale posted on the Team board is a sale nobody sees.

Worth knowing

• Your note carries your name and the time you pinned it, so an old note reads as old. Repost it if it still stands.
• The board is not chat. Nothing you pin appears in anyone's chat window; it waits on the board until someone opens it.
• A note survives your logout — that is the whole point of it. It also survives a server restart.
• To sell right now, a booth is better: the goods are on display and the sale needs neither of you to talk. The board is for the half of a trade a booth cannot show — what you want to buy.

Writing to the staff (/gm)

How: type /gm followed by your message, anywhere in the game. Cost: nothing. Answer: a private whisper from a GM — and it will still reach you if you have logged off in the meantime.

Stuck in scenery? Lost an item to something that looks like a bug? Someone behaving badly? This is the way to reach a person rather than the game.

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Sending

/gm my quest NPC will not talk to me

You get a ticket number back straight away:

Sent to the staff as ticket #12. An answer may arrive later, even after you log out.

Keep that number. If you write again about the same thing, quoting it saves everyone time.

There is a short pause between messages — half a minute — so that one frustrated player cannot bury the staff's list. It is not a punishment; it is what keeps the list readable for the person who has to answer it.

What happens next

Your message is kept, not merely broadcast at whoever happens to be online. That is the whole point: most questions are asked at hours when no GM is standing in the world, and those are exactly the ones that must not be lost.

Any GM online sees it immediately. Any GM later sees it in the open list. When one answers, the reply reaches you as a whisper:

• If you are online, it arrives there and then.
• If you are not, it waits, and lands the next time you log in — you will see a note saying how many answers were waiting for you.

Writing a message worth answering

The difference between a fast answer and a slow one is almost always detail:

• Where you were. The map and roughly where on it.
• What you did. The click, the NPC, the item — the actual steps.
• What happened, and what you expected instead.

"my quest is broken" takes three exchanges before anyone can help. "the Old Hunter in Twin City still says 0/10 after I killed twenty pheasants" can be answered on the first read.

One ticket an hour

You can open one ticket per hour in game. It is a deliberate limit: too many were being opened by accident, and a ticket is a conversation now -- if you have more to say, you do not need a second one.

Try again too soon and the game tells you how long is left, and points you at the better option: log in at aurenfall.com and continue the conversation there, where you can write as much as you like and read the staff's replies in full.

Your tickets on the website

Every /gm message becomes a TICKET you can follow on the website: log in at aurenfall.com, open your Account panel and click My tickets. There you see each ticket's status -- Open, Answered, or Closed -- and clicking one opens the full conversation in a large view: your question, every staff reply, and (once closed) the resolution the staff recorded.

You can REPLY there too, and the staff sees it in their panel the same way they see your in-game messages. A closed ticket cannot be reopened from the website -- if the matter comes back, write /gm in game and a fresh ticket is born.

What this is not

• Not a report queue for bugs you want fixed on the spot. For anything that is a defect rather than a problem with your own character, the test board on the website is the better place — it is read by the people who change the game.
• Not anonymous. Your character name goes with the message, which is what lets a GM answer you.
• Not a channel other players can read. Only staff see it.

For staff

/tickets lists the open ones, oldest first. /reply <id> <text> answers one — whispered immediately if the player is online, held and delivered at their next login if not. Every reply is written into the audit log with the text that was sent.

How our version differs

Chat channels and the paid broadcast:

Classic Conquer priced its broadcast in Conquer Points too; the exact price varied by version and era. Ours is fixed at 5 CPs and can be adjusted -- if it feels too cheap (spam) or too dear (silence), say so on the test board.