The game team has voted to not release the area reclaim feature. There was a lot of effort to come up with a solution to make this feature viable, but in the end playtesting showed that what we hoped the feature would do, is just not achievable. It will not come with the patch next week and it is not planned to be included in future patches either. There are fundamental problems that would require serious changes of the reclaim mechanic as a whole that would need to be done first to make this feature viable.
One aspect why many people were looking forward to this feature was that they believed it would reduce the incentive to spend your time issuing reclaim orders. Unfortunately the feature is so strong that it actually increases the incentive to spend time issuing reclaim orders (just this time the area version). There is no feasible technical way to simply make area reclaim less strong.
More detailed explanation of the reasoning for this decision will follow. I thought it was important to make the announcement quickly instead of compiling all the arguments first.
