Chat Channels

In the Suggestions we are also discussing:
"Friends List Functionality" and I think that these would coincide especially with voice chatting in a "chatroom" setting.

Trading
Looking for group
Custom Channels (neato for communities)

It does get annoying with all the gold spammers, like in APB I have 30+ spammers /ignored. Perhaps an option to ignore newly-made characters that are less than a week old, unless they're on your friend's list. Hopefully within a week a spammer would be banned, etc.

When on beta stage it definitely needs some kind of tech support channel, where you can discus with moderator or sum other supervisor.

And it wud be nice to make your own channels of course.

Yeah a feedback & Support channel would be awesome (with voice chat as an option!).

I hope you give us the ability to also Disable Certain people in Chat, simply because my exp has been in Free to play games, there's lots of bots that spam the chat channels. It is very annoying and distracts from the game. We should also not have to type in /c main, or /c party, or /ignore Soandso, make it so we can right click on the person or chat channel and give us options to go into channel, mute chanel/person, so and so. for switching channels have the shortcuts like /c main and such but also implement where you type Chat press enter, and a list of all available chat chanel's come up or just press C on the keyboard and then we can click what chat channel we want in.

this will be a nice feature to have also can they implement a voice chat

I'm curious as to whether Grinding Gear is capable of implementing a form of voice chat into the game, or for that matter whether it is their intention at all.

I think it'd especially help those in a guild to coordinate activities better, and some of us simply like to have our hands free for game play as opposed to typing simultaneously.

So any thoughts on the matter? Have I missed a discussion on this?

The thought to have chat localized per instance, with the only cross server communication being private chat, party and guild chat, I think is perfectly fine, assuming standard usage applys, able to block people and disable channels as required.

As for Act chat, where lets assume there an additional tab called #Act Chat per act and its not included into main chat, but players have a option in settings to disable "Auto join Act Chat" so that, if they do not wish to use it they dont have to, but those who may want help can allways pop onto it in <OOC> seams like a good idea.

Additionally Trade chat. I had previously mentioned in a thread about Auctions in game in the suggestion section of the forum, About a game i once played that tock the idea of. All trade chat is local aka normal chat (only those near you can hear you) and global messages are avaliable but only at a heavy price from NPCs in citys and was limited to 1 Per X amount of time.

My own feelings on trade chat is one of, If you aint got time to spam messages use the forum, someone will get back to you, if you got time to spam messages go level a job skill and maybe unless it requires something special make the item yourself or aquire it yourself, and if none of the above is possible, assuming there is some main citys and each has dedicated areas for X/Y jobs goto those areas and as the Craftmen themselfs, So having a dedicated trade channel is itself I think never good and causes excess load upon servers that it could really do without.

Finally, Voice chat equals more server strain which itself could lead to laggyer servers and higher costs to maintain, mass majority of people are not comfortable with using voice chat with people they dont know, so only select few will use it, to this extent. those who enjoy voice chat generally have a teamspeak,mumble, ventrilo or alternative they are act upon already so wouldn't make use of the ingame system anyway prime example WoW ingame voice chat.

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Sorry for a wall of text, and i do oppligise for the poor grammer and "occuational" spelling mistake.

Sorry didn't mean to post, please delete.

Actually, I don't believe you can rightfully conclude that a "mass majority of people are not comfortable with voice chat" because you've provided no personal experience or data to speculate such a thing. Where's your evidence that a majority would disapprove of voice chat?

Speaking from my own personal experience as someone who's played MMOs for about 5 years(on and off), I can say with confidence that few people actually object to the idea of chatting with like-minded individuals; objection normally arose when someone wasn't accustomed to it (eventually getting used to it though) or was naturally a timid person. However, I think even the shyest people would use it if they were among others with a similar hobby or goal in mind, such as a group outing in a game they love to play. More often than not, even in pick-up groups people on Ventrillo would cooperate with one another in a very easy-going atmosphere; the only time there'd be real trouble is if a guy got out of line and verbally assaulted someone (there could be an option to mute or even kick someone from a group for that). Who would want to play with somebody like that anyhow?

The point being is that we're a social creature and we naturally want to express ourselves about things we have in common, but we're not perfect. It's normally when someone is alienated or feels threatened that they shy away. I'd bet anything that voice chat would become a welcomed addition for those that are reluctant with such a tight-knit, enthusiastic and universal interest that we all have with PoE.

And if all else fails, not everyone has to use voice chat. It'd primarily be a tool for clans to help with coordinating and camaraderie among friends.

As far as its impact on the servers goes, chat channels generally don't impact the latency of game servers; that'd be like my phone interfering with my cable internet. It's a separate entity that can coincide with any game client; it'd simply be more convenient for some of us if PoE included voice-chat functionality.

I'd appreciate it if Chris would at least create an official poll on the subject and see what the majority truly wants. I believe voice chat would add to the community as a whole, and it'd be nice not to have to go to third party programs for our voice chat needs. It's just something to think about for the future, if not at release.

P.S. Kurosaru, I happen to know as a former WoW player that barely anybody used the in-game voice chat because it was utter garbage. It was nearly impossible to make out what anybody in one's group said. And Blizzard didn't bother to maintain it so people naturally went back to their respective 3rd party programs.

Essentially, if Grinding Gear supports a voice chat then that's one less thing those of us wanting a full-blown experience would have to worry about. I mean, just the other day I read about somebody already thinking of modding PoE on a 3rd party server, and the lead designer's response was that it could hurt the company financially, and they'd rather try to accommodate as many people as possible. I'd prefer a developer sanctioned system myself.