How would you feel about a second PA kickstarter?

hey when we were the most insufferable little spoiled brats about ladder, they finally caved in.

then they hired @jables who seems to be totally with us there.

why don't we try again, now that we actually have a chance at being heard?

they did not. They simply followed the plan that was layed out already: Do ladder after release, as was even discussed with neutrino. Yes we disagreed with him on it, but he did give us the chance to try and persuade them.

you're ignoring brad's statements pertaining to ladder.

I don't have a library of brad's statements in my head What statement?

I searched very hard. sorry I cannot find. nevermind.

I know the forums search ... is a forums search.

OK I find that absolutely 'LMAO' have they ever seen the 12 year olds in trade chat in WoW or the leetist P***ks in starcraft1 and 2? LoL...

I wish we could stop arguing about edge features like a chat box and realize that Uber is already stretched really thin over all the various core art, UI, and balance things this game sorely needs. Ranked maps, OK I get it, this gives the game something to organize around and people wanted it unanimously. But chat...? Sure if they decided to do it great, but not at the expense of the dozens of other key features this game sorely needs.

I don't want to scoff but err...

dozens of features can't be focused on when making a ......irc global chat?

what?

that's like 3 lines of html code.

it's a choice yeah sure, ......workload? something along the line of three hours for a single dev should do.

One person and 3 hours would barely scratch the surface of the work needed to implement a global chat in-game:

• First a host for the IRC server needs to be found, and it needs to have uptime guarantees - this means either an in-house server needs to be setup that Uber can control, or a service hired that has contractual guarantees. Either way, this needs to be researched.
• Next, either the contract for the service, or a server to host it needs to be set up.
• A design team needs to work out what functionality is required to be incorporated into the engine for functions like kick etc. (The in-built IRC commands are not professional enough for deployment with a game).
• An engineering team is needed to then code those functions in.
• A UI design team needs to create mock-ups of the new or redesigned screens to handle the chat.
• Artists then need to create the UI assets
• Engineers need to implement the UI and hook it up to the coded functions created earlier.
• Testers need to test the UI and IRC server functionality.

As you can see, this would take multiple people and quite a bit of work to implement. There is also overheads involved, as a schedule for these people need to be created and managed due to the various dependencies involved. Not to mention meetings etc. to review and confirm the design aspects.

well it certainly takes more than 3 hours consider this:
- they have a social bar feature thing already with personal chats. A global chat could add a little extra UI to this instead of being completely developed from ground up
- the existing social feature thing uses jabber. That supports multiuser rooms. So the chatsystem with a running server exists already. All that is missing is a default chat tab that opens and has all users in a multiuser room with a list of all users in the right. That's one of the few UI changes actually required.

so don't make it bigger than it is

I was under the impression people were asking for side-by-side lobby thing or similar, but this could work too. It removes the first & second points I made, and reduces the fifth & sixth. Still a non-trivial effort on the remainder though; very few features are.

@raevn @cola_colin guys I know this and I agree with you
but clearly implementing chat, wouldn't require more than one dev, and it would not halt the work on a dozen other features (I don't know what the "expense" could be here maybe they take a day of tardiness, maybe a week?) let alone a single one.

I want a chat just as much as you want, but I have to tell you it will at least halt development on whatever that dev was working before.

for a DAY and taht dev would certainly not be someone with greatest expertise

It is gonna take more than a day to do this, even in the "let's use our jabber server and social bar ui" concept.
I can guarantee you that much.

I'd throw $30 in for a single player campaign. Might not cover the FMV cutscenes