Global PA chat.

All is on title, will we have a place to communicate with players like a global chat and a way to add players we loved to play with in ''friends list'' ? Thanks and sorry for my bad english.

That kind of stuff is relatively low priority at this stage, but it's certainly on Uber's mind and we have had some good threads on in-game community tools and such before.

Mike

Alright , thanks .

Something else that I'm sure is on the to do list:

Adding a little ding or other sound when someone sends a chat message.

Friends List can be done with Steam (though people that don't link their Uber account with Steam will have trouble there, myself included).

That said, I wouldn't want a global chat in the middle of a competitive game. Either have it lobby-only, or Opt-In while in-game. Outside of that, I'm 101% in favour of a global chat. Showing people there's a community is a great way of getting them interacting with the community, and that will help the game grow.


Now, to play devil's advocate; if you have a global chat, you need moderators. People will be dicks on the Internet, and chat is no exception.

Make a UI mod that includes a webchat module for quakenet, bam done.

That was my first thought, but that's an Opt-In system. Take some fresh PA player, who's just bought the game; he'll have no idea of the chat, and he'll wonder why the game appears dead (at least socially).

Get the developers to officially support this approach as it also allows for external IRC clients to be connected to the same chat.

This allows for a more tight-knit approach to global chats as you're no longer tied to launching the client, plus webchat is available on most mobile devices.

All the necessary security precautions are taken care of by Q and S, operators can be selected from a pool of dedicated community members that showed good conduct (aka not me, Hi garat!)

p good points

FAF has something similar with their chat channels

An included IRC chat would be freaking awesome.

I fully agree with the friends list thing. PA should include something like that or better yet, have it connected to your accounts friend and enemy list.

Let me be brutally honest and say that this is an open question. I *think* we'll do global chat at some point but I have serious reservations about how nasty the community will be.

Penny Arcade summed it up pretty well: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 (Non PG language in link.)

It's not that bad in SMNC.
I hope

I hate to say it but that just means that you don't have enough people playing SMNC.

Well, the SMNC forums are kind of a mess

I've heard this argument from Blizzard when they refused to implement a chat for SC2 and as a result didn't buy SC2 till they had at least implemented group chats. Not implementing such a basic functionality made me as angry as "90$ wtf is this ****"-steam flamer.
Now you're coming up with it. Well I guess I do trust you a lot more than Blizzard to tell us your honest reasoning, maybe my own view of such chatrooms is just too positive.

I've never seen any big problems with the chat in Supreme Commander. Halcyon in GPGnet and Aeolus in FAF are like the artery of the community. There are 471 people in the FAF chat right now. It's a damn important place to gather and create the feeling of a somewhat connected community. Sure some people are stupid trolls, but most people are pretty okay. I think one of the reasons why SupCom2 felt as bad as it felt was because it didnt offer any kind of official chatroom. It was a serious drawback. Like really serious.

I think without Halcyon I probably would have never been drawn into the SupCom community as much.

EDIT:
@the penny arcade link:
It might be a good idea to take away the anonymity part as much as possible. Only allowing one account per key like in GPGnet is a good first step to do that. Only allowing limited renames another one.

My experience with Halcyon (GPGNet) was pretty awesome. I don't spend much time on FAF, but if it's populated by the same people it should be fairly similar.

This is badly/sadly true. :x

Like I said, I have mixed emotions. We can certainly do it if it's what you guys think is the right thing.

Maybe if we were just really clear with the policies and used the ban hammer enough we would be ok?