Dear Uber, is there any chance of a rethink on global chat?

Well considering most people play offline/singleplayer...

Sure, what I'm saying makes some assumptions that may or may not be correct. One assumption is that single-player people who are interested in PA will have already made up their minds either way, and the hypothetical launch of a patch that makes single-player awesome is not likely to get the publicity needed to make a difference, nor is it likely to change any minds.

Another assumption is that people change other peoples' minds. Somebody having a great single-player experience might tell two friends. A community having a great multiplayer experience will make enough noise that people become intrigued and decide to check it out. Forged Alliance Forever is bigger now than GPGNet ever was, and that's largely due to having such a cohesive community feel.

I do hope that somebody from Uber comes and tells us exactly why they don't think chat would work, because I am sure we can find a way to fix all those concerns. If as I suspect the main reason is due to trolling, well then that's about as sensible as locking down individual freedoms in the wake of a terrorist attack. Trolls (and terrorists) aim to disrupt things so that people can't go about their everyday business, and if the reaction is to stop everyday people going about their business, then you've just handed a victory to a minority of idiots.

Typical multiplayer rhetoric.

Improving SP improves the game FOR SP, attracting people who love to play SP.

Improving MP improves the game FOR MP, attracting people who love to play MP.

But improving the MP experience does not improve the SP experience, and again all you people tell me is that the MP is superior to the SP, that the half-baked features of single player deserves a back-seat to the fully functional multi player.

EDIT: That may have been unfair of me to say, my condolences.

I started off playing RTS games with Dune II, and played every major one from then up til TA. Until playing SupCom online in maybe 2008, I had never played these games online and had played like everybody does: cautiously, building up an impregnable base, etc etc.

After I learnt to cast off my noobish (no perjorative intended) ways, I started to enjoy the games so much more. The more-frantic nature of it fired up my excitement and made me more able to make decisions more quickly. The feeling of playing an equal opponent who's trying to kill you just as hard as you're trying to kill him when you're properly 'in the zone' is better than nearly any drug.

I'm not saying that online is the 'right' way to play, but as somebody who spent many, many years playing TA against the AI and never really improving, but just enjoying the feel and the explosions, I feel confident in saying that there is much more potential reward in giving multiplayer a proper go. Go on, what have you got to lose?


EDIT: Oh yeah, in response to your main point. Lots of people playing multiplayer creates much more of a buzz than ten times as many people playing single-player. More buzz = more players = more money.

Making a lot of assumptions there.

These are bold claims. And personally I don't believe this, unless someone provides some statistical data for this, or at least some GDC talks with some numbers.

IMHO eSport tournaments (yes, you need multiplayer for this one) and social media like Youtube play through / lets play videos are far more important factors for community multiplication, but this is - again - an unproven claim, too.

criz.

Please, don't force me to watch a wall of text when I log in. Make it opt in.

Wow
uber. you do know how to do it.
Do it

Yeah it's funny, both SMNC as well as Toy Rush have global chats like that.

But two plus two does equal five.

Radiohead math! Can't explain that!

that's not an actual reason. more people playing SP (and by now there seems to be an inverse tendency, check stats thread) does not drive the number of people playing MP into the negatives.

it just mean people are playing MP AND people are playing singleplayer. nothing else.

the only place you can go from there is criticize the validity of the less numerous side's interests simply because of their numbers (once again, a useless comparison by now) and I'd come right back at that with "how are one's interests (or rights) less valid then that of another?"

how do you distinguish the two? what new form of hideous classification have we created now? are we now sorting the far sighted nerds from the near sighted?

MP players play single player too (and you owe your stats to them, mind you) and SP players go play MP from time to time as well.

we're all one big family. and trust me when I say these interests of mine benefit you as well. (or will, sometime much later down the line ...in the end)

I rarely push threads, but I do push some.
/push. Seriously every day I think about how sad it is that PA has no global chat to hang out in. Like we could all talk there and realize how much fun it is. Then we could manage daily tournaments. And ... oh damn I am starting to remember good old gpgnet days. So much fun.

meh

@jables
You're our god. You're awesome. Do something

As a couple of other people have said, as long as players can opt out of General Chat, I have no problems at all with a GC system.

If, however, a GC system was put into place where players cannot opt out, I would definitely never play another PA game, because WoW's, StarCraft II's, and Diablo 3's Global/General Chat channels destroyed any interest in them for me.

Funny, I had that game preordered. Then Blizzard declared "no global chats". Then I cancelled my preorder. Many month later blizzard added chats and I bought the game. Though I can't see how you would dislike them there. The chat window was small and you could just not open it, at least last time I played it. Same with Diablo3 I guess, as I played that game and I did not even realize it had a global chat.
But yeah I think the screen lokiCml posted from SMNC shows a perfect solution. Maybe additionally have a simple option that completely disables it.
So by default you see one single line of the most recent chat and you can either make it go away forever completely or you can pin it up to stay open forever. Implemented via a multi user room on the existing jabber server.

*dreams*
Maybe I could then go and make a page like https://palobby.com/ but for thet chat :>

Yes, you can opt out of General Chat in all three of those games. Which is one reason I feel ok about continuing to play SCII and D3.

If, however, I had to have the ridiculous comments and ad spamming usually done in those channels without an option to turn them off, I wouldn't play.

Did you ever play as the Horde in WoW? Do you remember Barrens General Chat? (The Alliance had a similar zone, but I don't remember which it was now) Worst. Thing. Ever. (Edit) Followed by the General Chat in the major cities.

Ah I misunderstood your post about sc2 and d3.

I played alliance in WoW for a few hundred hours. I remember some spam, but I especially remember how I got to know nice people and guilds in the general chat. Without that chat I would've spent much less time on the game.
What do I care about what little kids write there or what gold spammers spam. That's just meaningless text to me, what matters is being able to communicate with other people.´
And I am sure PA won't have that many issues anyway. We don't have gold spammers. We have a much higher average player age. We have much less players than those games. Past examples for games like PA all had quite the success. (GPGnet/FAF, basically without the chat in GPGnet FAF would not exist today)

Well, as I said, I have no problem with a GC system being implemented. I'm not arguing against its existence. I just want to make sure that I don't have to have it on if I don't want it to be on.

I think a global chat system would be positive for the game, especially if moderators could be assigned (e.g. the forum moderators). Also, why not just use the current IRC channel on esper.net and just implement a fairly rudimentary IRC client for PA? Keep it simple!

The format of the chat is pretty important. The SMNC chat is a bit clunky and hard to use, mainly because it has large text on a small part of the screen. The flexibility of the FAF chat system would be ideal.