Hey Everyone! You know we’ve been growing and working hard on Empire Avenue, so we figured we’d best give you another update and a heads up on some upcoming developments.
Empire Avenue continues to grow at a rapid pace, and we have to keep up! One of the the areas of the site that has languished as we have grown is our Empire Avenue Communities. So tomorrow (June 22, 2011) we are going to start improving Communities! Yes, I know a lot of you have been asking for it! Tomorrow, we will shut down Empire Avenue Communities for a short time and reconfigure how they work.
From end of day June 22, 2011 onwards, it will no longer cost you eaves to join Communities. Any monies you have spent on community upgrades will be refunded to you, going back to the very first day we launched them! We will allow you to join up to 100 communities, leave at will and re-join if you wish. This means you can join any Community of interest, and meet new people who like talking about the same things as you!
We will also go back to basics on the user interface, and Empire Avenue Communities will match the rest of the site. You may notice a few unused pages missing or some features lacking. We have decided to release each feature and upgrade as they’re ready. This means Communities are about to undergo daily/weekly changes as we improve their functionality.
Some of the things that are coming:
Chat up a storm -- or two!
One of the neat features of our Communities is that you can run your own Public Chats inside a community. As of June 22, 2011, we will be disabling Public Chat on the rest of the site. We're doing this for a number of reasons, the main reason being that as Empire Avenue grows, we cannot continue to support site-wide public chats (imagine doing this with millions of users!). The upside of this is that more focused Community Chats ensure that you’re getting more value out of chat – it’s not just about talking to random people, but rather to connect with like-minded individuals!
It's been really fun having the chats and we see the incredible potential in them for helping new users. Therefore, Empire Avenue will continue to run scheduled "Help" and special event chats on the site.
Remember you will be able to continue to socialize and chat with the same people you do now by setting up a group private chat, or jumping into a Community! When you create your chat, you have full control and you can moderate it to your heart's content.