Global Chat

I'm confused as to why, but for some reason the internet the past couple years has become absolutely enamored with declaring games "dead" or "dying" and assessing all of the reasons why they are "dead" or "dying", and only their singular internet wisdom can prevent the game from dying. There were even people on the Steam forums for Rome 2 when it came out proclaiming the game "would be dead within a month" Loadout's steam forums have a thread on the game "starting to die" that started in February. I assume its partially due to steam giving player numbers so people can over-analyze and badly extrapolate from every little peak or dip in player numbers.

I'm also not a fan of a global chat. I mean it brings people together and thats realy not what we want.

I wasn't talking about facebook.

A lot of games have to solve the same kinds of issues. I'm just suggesting that those issues be solved in new ways than just say oh we need X (global chat), when X is just one possible solution to the actual problem. Sometimes it really helps to go back and re-analyze the problem instead of just assuming that X is the best way.

It's also the opposite kind of arguments / criticism that are useful to us. It's pretty easy to prove that launching without global chat doesn't render your game DOA. Also, that kind of stuff is what keeps devs away from forums. You can't tell a dude his game is going to be worthless when it launches, as he's working around the clock to make something cool for the community.

However, making it known that you want something is a good and valuable thing.

You're starting to delay or even cutting away features that make a good online RTS game (yes I realize your opinion of that differs). I need to say drastic things to make clear how drastic your recent actions are to me.

As far as I am concerned no chat equals no community. Yes we have the forums, but the forums are not a place the same thing by a large margin.

I don't know if your game will fail financially, but at least to me it'll die and I am pretty sure you won't be able to sustain longer support of a game that has no online community.
I have been not that active play-wise for a while now and the main reason is that it is hard to find opponents that are not part of a very small circle.
There is little diversification in the pool of potential opponents. This is either because PA is a dead game already and simply has not enough players, which I strongly believe is not the case. Or it is because there is no function in the game whatsoever to get more people to be involved in some sort of online community.
Basically I've been waiting to come back and play more once there is a global chat and a ladder. Without them I'll either try to add them to PA Stats and hope it'll work out in the same way FAF did or I'll simply leave.
Though with PA Stats so far I only have ~120 players a day. I'd figure you have a *few* more as to make a nice pool of people that can join a chat and ladder.

Yes I only represent a tiny faction of the player base, but that tiny fraction is what makes the difference between a game like FA that can has thousands of players 7 years after it was created and therefore also has things like active modders etc pp. and SupCom2 which is plain dead. If you want to create a simple single player game for vs AI players you can skip things like a ladder and a global chat, but you so far created the impression that you want to create a somewhat decent multiplayer game.

Look at FA. It had GPGnet. The best thing that could ever happen for it. The whole great point of it was this super awesome online client. So good that people from the community replaced it and now there are still thousands of players playing FA online. Seriously if you want to create a game that lives for longer than a few month and has an active community that stays active you need a friggn place for them to meet up.

You're placing PA in the sad situation FA was in when GPGnet died before PA is even released.

Seriously wtf

Trust me, I'm speaking from personal experience from multiple projects when I say:

Global chat is usually a bad idea.
It scales badly, it requires permanent moderation for every single global channel (since there can't be just one!), and even with moderation, topics will derail frequently. Not a single topic (legal or illegal) I haven't found in the chat logs yet. And then there is also the "global" aspect, people won't stick to a primary language. Not even in the global chat.

It only ever works "automatically" when it's some type of exclusive refuge for a small number of players, just like the GPGnet was. But you can have that in other ways too.

Heck, even asking Uber if there were nice enough to integrate an arbitrary IRC channel (users choice!) would be better than an Uber provided global chat.

PSA for those who are unbelievers in global chat:



Go play Airmech. There will be cake.

Still an unbeliever.
On average, only about 250 players are online in Airmech at any time. In PA, that's about 800, even more with each new patch. Not even counting users of the dedicated launcher.

You don't want that number of users in a global channel. Bad idea.

Honestly, if they add global chat I guarantee the next feature people will want is a way to turn it off/ignore it. Its how it works with every game with global chat. They just end in disaster that 99% of people get no use from.

Why? FAF chat has that without troubles?
TeamLiquid chat had 1500 users when starcraft 2 was released, no problem either.

You can't compare RTS players and MMO/FPS players. They are more mature by the nature of the game.

I'm pretty sure everybody has stuck to their beliefs so strongly here that everyone is wrong.

If PA releases with global chat, the world won't end. We'll have to deal with some bad days in chat when all we get is spam and 12 year olds, but it won't be the worst case scenario.

If Uber decided not to do global chat, the world won't end. It will be a little harder to find competitive games but the top players will find where to look. We'll all keep being just as rude to each other as always even without having global chat, and people will keep on playing the game.

Great just don't expect me to engage with your histrionics.

...I'm not sure why a hipster would say that

Let me tell you a story.
I've played supcom a lot. But vanilla balance was horrible. I've stopped playing the game for some months.

But because of GPGNET chat, I was still hanging out in it, even playing silly games time to time, just because people proposed me in the chat, until FA came out. And as I was still hanging with the Supcom community, I bought it immediately.

Seven years later, I'm still playing it and still talk with the same people on a friendly chat.

Without GPGNET chat, FAF wouldn't exists, and FA would be long forgotten either way.

Right now, I'm in the same state that supcom vanilla with PA : I have no interest playing it for now. I doubt I will hang in these forum a long time after release if nothing catch my interest.

If the recent scandals on this forum are any indication, that's exactly what we don't have.

People idling in chat keeps them involved in the game. If PA had a chat that was active, it would keep them regularly opening PA.exe. I think that is worthwhile.

I wonder how hard it would be to hybrid a global chat into PA through a mod? Make it appear in the PA main menu in a tab beside twitch and patch news? If that was possible to do, someone should do it. The best thing about it being a mod, is the mod owner and his 10 friends could kick bots and troublemakers regularly.

My other arguement for a global chat, is as for moderation, it is a legitimate game costing money, so anyone in that chat paid money. That would deter bots at least. People typing random for fun ("cool people press j", followed by 27 j's) doesn't entirely hurt "shrug" and was in runescape all the time and just encouraged more socialization if anything.

that is NOT true. please refer to FAF global chat.

WOW that is off by alot!

you CAN'T play faf without getting FA on steam before or after. sure you can get it elsewhere but who the hell does? you can't top steam's comfort, especially if like me you change OS often and don't want to reinstall your games, in which case you have 'em all installed in your storage drive and just have steam rebuild the registry keys and appdata files.

second you hear about faf from youtube. ratio of faf youtube vids to steam supcom youtube vids is like 100 to 1.

you can also hear about it by word of mouth, alot of people playing it on steam know about it.

AND LASTLY: faf's community isn't mature because the guys who play it are all old (or i don't even know what it is you were saying there) faf's community is mature, because it's a grown man's game. it's freakin chess, it's not COD. ok? that's enough to fend off the immatures an unrespectfulls. they get bored instantly by this type of game.

Global chat - You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

what?!?

OK, I'm not on the side saying this will "save PA", is "primordial", or a "1.0 necessity" or anything ridiculous like that.

It's a plus, OK.

A very big freaking swiss flag.

it's fantastic.

I'm talking about the experience I had with it on FAF, not the one I would have had with it if such a thing existed on COD.
As I explained in multiple other posts : FAF's community is mature because of the type of game it harbours. not because of some voodoo magic.

PA is proximately the same type of game, I'd venture.

theoretically we should expect the same results.

"a horrible idea"? I'm bamboozled.