Social Groups can replace PMs?

[vfb]

From playing with Social Groups, it looks like it could be a useful replacement for unlimited PMs.

Say you are in an MP game called Blessing. And you are Mictlan, wanting to track diplomacy with Ctis.

Create a private BlessingMictlanCtis group, and invite the Ctis player.

You can do all the messaging you want, and it will keep track of all your trade and diplomacy agreements.

From the Groups page (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/group.php), it sorts by most recent message, so you can pretty much see if you've got new messages.

And it even makes it easier to find messages for diplomacy related to a particular game and nation than PMs were. It's like PM folders.

If everyone does this, there will be around (N^2 - (3N/2)) max Social Groups per game, where N is the number of nations in the game.

Is there any limit on the number of Social Groups a user can create?

Does this sound like a workable idea?

[Combat Wombat]

sounds like complete abuse of the system and its just gonna make a huge mess in the social groups section

[vfb]

Hmmm... it seems Social Group messages are permanently editable and deletable, at least by the creator of the Social Group. So this only would work in the case where both parties have trust, that no-ones going to go and edit that 6-turn NAP into a 3-turn NAP.

Still, when you're playing with friends and people you trust, it could be useful.