Originally posted by crisisfox@May 24 2006, 02:15 PM
I am against chat channels.
Why travel places if you can chat across the world?
How do you claim to be a roleplaying game with a game-wide chat channel dedicated to the WNBA and stuff?
Lack of chat channels promotes unity. It encourages people to take up residence in a particular area and make it their own, because that is where they live with their friends. It also provides a niche for messenger abilities. Having mages with familiars who can deliver notes over long distances, ranger runners capable of crossing great distances in minimal time, necromancers summoning spirits to deliver omens of DOOM! Limit messenger abilities to a few classes, and you encourage more interaction between characters.
And that's really the main snag of chat channels: they are in-game systems for interacting with other *players*.
So long as people like Frosty give us wonderful sites to use as meeting points, the community will flourish, but in-game interaction should be in-character, and to me chat goes completely contrary to that.
I have to disagree with you and I'll use my weekly Pen & Paper group as an example of why.
We're currently playing a D&D campaign and none of us are great actors but we try to stay in character when dealing with the DM. We will discuss stuff out of character, say trying to solve a puzzle or decide on a strategy, we'll say things that our characters wouldn't. This is, to me, part of role play.
We'll also spend time chatting while the DM looks something up or as he's drawing out the room - we use mini's for movement and combat - or while someone else is RPing something with the DM that we're not part of. We'll talk about a wide vareity of subjects from how our warrior's doing in med school to what's happening in WoW or CoH, or what's going on in the Civ4 game that 3 of the memebers are playing in. For me it's these social aspects that make the game fun.
I played EQ for 6 years and I'd say that for the last 2 of those years I was really burned out on the game. The only reason I stayed was I had a guild of friends, as well as an extended group of people in other guilds, I could log in and chat and joke with. Very little of this was RP, in fact almost none of it was, it was my version of going down to the local bar and chatting with my friends. Some nights I'd log on and no one in my guild would be on but I could usually find someone on my friends list and chat with them while I was running around finishing off quests or tradeskilling or whatever. As more and more of my friends stopped playing, or were playing less frequently, I started logging in less and less and finally quit.
If I'd had to run to where my friends were to chat with them I'd have left much earlier. This is especially true in a game like EQ where some of my friends were on Time raids, I couldn't have gotten to them if I'd wanted to.
So yeah, lack of channels would encourage people, or groups of people to sit in one area so they could chat. But then what's the point of heading off into that dungeon or going out and exploring the world. I'm going to be stuck either off by myself or with a small subset of my friends while I'm completely out of touch with the rest.
That kind of system would, for me, kill the community and basically make the game 2 games, a graphical chat room and a single player/small group exploring/adventuring game. Heck that's what Guild Wars basically does and people complain about it all the time, and I've never seen a ton of RP happening there either.
As for people like Frosty, I think this site is great and I think it serves a useful purpose. However, if he were to get a large influx of players, say the number needed to actually support a graphical MMO, he'd have to either find a way to monetize the site or close it down, bandwidth ain't cheap. Then you can look at Allakhazam's for where that can lead.
There's also the issue that if the only place I can just chat with my friends about whatever, in-character or OOC, is on a message board somewhere then, since I'm playing this game for the community, why should I even bother with the game. I could go to the site and use the message board or IRC for nothing.
I think that forcing my idea of RP or your idea of RP or anyones idea of RP on a community is a much surer way to kill it than any chat system. The way to encourage community is to give that community options.