There are a lot of things in the game that I feel have become under utilized for the amount of work silver has put into it. recent topics give a feeling that higher retention rate of new players and reduction of inactive inactive bots are whats on the mind of the community. So here is my contribution of ideas.
tunnels: changing default vote to yes for tunnel challenges. this would allow players isolated from the rest of the players to go on the offense more often, instead of restricting them to just building up towers on their own. this would allow factions to mount attacks on towers of inactive players while players still have the option to decline the challenge if enough players change their vote.
notifications: notifications in this game are a bit poor. no notifications for chat rooms at all makes it easy to forget they exist. it would be nice if there was the ability to get notified of activity in chat rooms and in the wire such as push notifications. this would have to be limited to player messages as zone captures would then make the once per day zone updates for the api a bit useless.
Wire: part of the tutorial for the game should be the wire. the game should force people send a wire message to a nearby active teammate so they can be brought into the chat rooms. this could even be incentivized with a small cube reward upon receiving a reply to help new players get involved and to help existing players find new teammates in their area.
these are all changes that I think would be relatively simple to introduce but would have large impact on retaining new players and giving isolated players something to do other than mindlessly stack towers to impossible to break levels.