I've been playing around with the idea of actively beginning the development of something I'm calling the EpicMafia Desktop Companion (EM/DC). I want to integrate the most pressing concerns of the community and attempt to enhance the general quality of life for those of you who (like me) are so invested in the site that it is part of your daily lives.

Currently I've created functionality for manually importing player information from a formatted text file, but this is hardly enough to even begin to be useful to the general user. So this leads to my next problem:

I Need Your Help To Make This Happen!

I'm serious, in order to get this off the ground I actively need feedback from the EM community as a whole. I want to include an incredibly broad scope of functionality, including but not limited to:

-Photo Scaling utility for managing profile pictures, emotes, and backgrounds.

-Forum subscription services to DRASTICALLY increase the engagement on EM forums by better managing the flow of discussions. This will allow you to actively track forums of interest

-Auto-refresh script to persistently analyze active lobbies to reduce the need for constant refreshing

-The above script will also include tracking functionality to ping when a preferred game-mode is created and joinable. This goes for filtering games with established friends in it as well.

-A comprehensive learning depository, expanded to include a more detailed analysis of each role, popular game-mode guides, mentor/mentee availability tracker, site rules, informative additional tips (such as text-formatting, profile editing ideas, etc.)

[The 'learning' side of EM represents one of the largest failures of the site. The absence of easily-accessible learning resources on the site in one navigable depository is not helping player-retention in the slightest. Seriously, why make a 'learn' tab if you're not going to incorporate anything to learn? Memorizing roles doesn't help much if new-players can't visualize how those roles interact with one another in a competitive environment]

-In game functionality to better support hosting, with script to detect 'black-listed' players and automatically kick them from casual games

-Ping host when 'problematic' players join (those with a history of intentionally throwing games, or those marked by the user of EM/DC as a 'problematic' player)

-Many, many, many others that I don't have the time to write here now.

I need community support. If you are genuinely interested in this, please help me make this possible!

I preferably would like to have support from Lucid/Moderator teams to better manage data from the site. I don't want to violate any predefined rules, and anything which increases functionality of a strategy-based game has the opportunity to HORRIBLY unbalance the game. I want to avoid this at all costs. This is meant to make life easier for the daily EM player, not to give them major advantages in game.

This topic is NOT my formal proposal, I'm trying to gauge community-interest. If this is something people want, I'll make. If it isn't, then it won't happen: it's as simple as that.

I will need your support, as I am desperately going to have to integrate dev-testers to probe a good deal of the application's functionality.

Leave comments documenting your interest/disinterest, along with any additional ideas you may want to see integrated.

-Evil