Use global chat

[theTrav]

Is there any way of finding and speaking to other people who are playing? I've seen one or two dash past, but for the most part I'm on my own in the middle of the wilderness... It's ever so lonely

[kaka]

Not really, but you can right click on another player to engage in a private conversation or start a party and use the party chat for long range conversations.
I don't think they intend to make any global chat, but they have talked about some kind of mail service.
We'll just have to wait and see :)

They are working on a general chat log though, so you won't have to read every bubble as soon as it shows up, but it will be for local communication only(I think).

[sami1337]

They will probably implement pigeons and letters.

[kaka]

Or owls. :)

[StarChaser]

Would anyone object to an IRC channel as a temporary Global Chat?

[loftar]

Maybe I should mention that, as an artifact of old code scheduled to be removed, you can press Ctrl-C to bring up a global chat window. It kind of sucks, though, because only those others who also have the same chat window open will receive messages, there is no history (in the regard that you won't see messages sent before you opened the chat window), and it lives in its own window rather than among the other chat windows beside the menu.

[StarChaser]

Ah. Thank you for that knowledge. I hope some others will keep the window open. Hopefully you guys may add it to the lower dock like the party chat. :3=

[theTrav]

I think there's several pro's and con's of having a global log.

In some ways we're already circumventing the game features by using the announcements forum to organize groupings, that is at least one level back from real time.

The pro's of global log are fairly obvious, but the con is that you lose some realism and make it easier for people to organize large groups without any skills to back up that organisation.

On the whole I tend to be of the opinion that it's impossible to prevent people from circumventing that communication so you might as well give them some sort of common ability so that people who don't go out and find the non official irc channels and teamspeak servers or what not are not too far behind.

Actually an official irc channel would probably be quicker to set up than an in game feature and would probably satisfy just about everyone

[sami1337]

I like how it is. You don't know anyone and don't know what's going on in the other town.

[loftar]

I like how it is. You don't know anyone and don't know what's going on in the other town.

Thank you! Despite numerous requests for a global chat, I completely agree with that statement. Even if players have to communicate with each other outside the game, it still leads to social clustering among those who chat with each other. An "official" global chat could well destroy that aspect of the game which I quite like.

That said, however, there are certainly many aspects of chatting that could be improved vastly. Some kind of "area chat" could very well be reasonable, for example. With regards to that, I'm mainly just unsure how to define the "area". Also, it could well be argued that the party chat window should remain even after having left the party. Also, once we add real villages, I guess there should be a village chat. It is less obvious how it should scale with the size/population of the village, however.