I wish GW2 had World Chat

[Faline.8795]

World Chat is the one thing that is missing from GW2 that I wish it had.

 

Guilds don't count because those are limited to guild members.

 

To me (and I accept that this is only my personal opinion), World Chat makes the game seem more alive to me. World Chat is what kept me with World of Warcraft for so long. (It sure wasn't the crayon graphics!)

 

Yes, map chat is there. But what if something is happening on a different map, like a boss I wanted. Wouldn't know without World Chat.

 

I know a lot of people don't like the concept of World Chat.

 

If there was a toggle to opt out of World Chat, would that make it more palatable?

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

I think there might be an issue, with events in other maps. You would not necessarily move to the instance of the map with said event, and if it included some feature to do so, I think that's already covered in the LFG.

World Chat might just scroll so fast that it would be difficult to read; I don't know.

There was once an item that allowed one to 'broadcast' world-wide; it was quickly removed due to popular demand.

 

Good luck.

[Randulf.7614]

In principle, bring able communicate events worldwide is a fine, the issue is that world chat would not be used for that and calls would be drowned out by a selection of players who would do nothing but sit in the channel spouting nonsense, trolling, spoilering, arguing etc etc. No matter what global chat ive used, from Anarchy Online, to Lotro and others, this has been the consistent and ever present issue with world chat. If the people who would benefit then turn it off because of this, it exists for no reason.

 

So in principle im ok with it, but practically speaking, it would turn into an impossible to moderate free for all and i think support have enough on their plate without constant chat reports coming through as well.

 

Luckily on EU we have a dedicated guild who jump around maps to call out things like triple trouble and tequatl. It works just as well.

[Healix.5819]

They originally had plans for a world chat, but you had to pay 75 gems to post a message.

[SlippyCheeze.5483]

So, I have a bunch of experience with games that do offer this, and my experience says that this will not work the way you hope it will work.

 

Basically, I have encountered three different classes of "world chat" over time:

 

1. So busy you literally can't keep up. PoE global 1 has this; it is the default global chat, and dang, that is busy. Like, 200K+ players at once in it busy. There is no real discussion, or community there, not least because enough of those 200K people decide its fun to disrupt things, and it isn't that hard for them to do so.

 

2. So small you have a community akin to a guild. PoE global 773, Diablo 3, and some other games with limited per-channel capacity global chat work like this. If membership is persistent, it is essentially equivalent to guild chat for an open recruitment guild. If not, is in equivalent to map chat. Either way, it doesn't form a globally cohesive community the way you describe any differently than a guild does.

 

3. It is so limited that nobody really uses it. Typically, because of the volume that hundreds of thousands of players in the same chat channel generate, the game implements pretty low limits on, eg, how many messages you can send. This has the consequence of making "conversation" rather than advertising super-hard, so it degenerates to some combination of guild invite spam, and "LF1M T4 Daily Fractals".

 

In none of these cases does it ever offer community building, even when only a small group of people use it, and everyone else is more or less listening in to the public chatter. (A situation I have been in, hello old Proudmoore folks.) ...or, at least, no more than guild membership does.

 

Finally, all of these offered the option to opt out, and presumably some proportion of people did. I certainly did when type one and type two were in place, because it was either useless, or full of annoyances making meaningful communication impossible. This opt out did not solve the problem.

 

Honestly, I'd suggest instead of asking ANet to build a larger scale chat system into the game, you invest in something else:

 

1. Get an overlay chat channel widget for Discord. For example, https://streamkit.discordapp.com/overlay apparently supports this.

2. Create a Discord server called "GW2 Global Chat" or something similar.

3. Create a channel called "GW2 Global Chat" or whatever.

4. Set up an auto-invite system, or just open invite, or whatever.

5. Advertise it here, on reddit, and through word of mouth.

 

...and viola, you have global text chat on an *opt in* basis for anyone who is interested. You can repost your advert every week or two, I'd expect, or bump it. People will find it, especially if you respond in /y when people ask for something similar.

 

That also saves trying to convince a game company that they should *also* become a massive scale chat service. :)

[Faline.8795]

> @"Randulf.7614" said:

> In principle, bring able communicate events worldwide is a fine, the issue is that world chat would not be used for that and calls would be drowned out by a selection of players who would do nothing but sit in the channel spouting nonsense, trolling, spoilering, arguing etc etc

 

To me, that was part of the charm of World Chat. Really no different than a Discord chat or Guild Chat or anything else like that.

 

It's like being in the game world at a pub chatting with your blokes. Yes, you get some trolls, but overall I always felt it made everything more alive.

[Randulf.7614]

In which case, would it not be simpler to use the discord overlay in the GW2 discord channel? Would accomplish the identical thing if random chat is all that is desired. And the overlay pops up at a touch of a button so it's not really a burden to use.

[Just a flesh wound.3589]

[deleted].

[MithranArkanere.8957]

> @"Healix.5819" said:

> They originally had plans for a world chat, but you had to pay 75 gems to post a message.

 

Yeah. [Megaphones](https://www.teamoverpowered.com/527/gaming-news/guild-wars-2-leak-real-money-items/ "Megaphones").

 

They decided not to go ahead, because there's just too many people at the same time in contact.

 

A wise decision. It would have been utter chaos and madness. The reel would go so fast that we would not be able to read our own chats. People would just wide the megaphone broadcast, making them pointless.

[Endless Soul.5178]

If it _did_ have a world chat, I'd be sure to have it turned off.

[Danikat.8537]

> @"Faline.8795" said:

> Yes, map chat is there. But what if something is happening on a different map, like a boss I wanted. Wouldn't know without World Chat.

 

I want to just address this point, since most people have covered the other pros and cons of a game-wide chat channel.

 

World chat wouldn't help with that in GW2 because of the way maps work. All PvE maps are shared between servers and copies of the map are created and deleted automatically as needed. This is why you'll never end up in a queue to enter a map but can end up in a different version to your friend, even if you're on the same server. This means world chat would have to be _region_ chat, shared between all the worlds in a region since they all share maps (and therefore more likely to move too fast to keep up with). It also means even if someone announces an event there's no guarantee it will be running when you get to the map, because you could be in a different copy.

 

Instead GW2 addresses this in two ways:

 

1) Major events [run on a timer](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Event_timers "run on a timer") so you can tell in advance when they're going to start and get to the map ready for it instead of hoping you run into it or someone tells you it's happening.

 

2) The Looking For Group tool can be used for anything in the game and is commonly used to organise groups for events and map metas. Right now I'm standing in Lornar's pass and I can see that a Silverwastes Map is about to start the vinewrath phase, a different one is still in the fort defense phase, Taida Covington is up soon (or at least someone's getting a group together), the Auric Basin meta event is underway, the Legendary Distraught Choya is up in Crystal Oasis and so on. I can join any of those groups to make sure I get into the same copy of the map as them (assuming there's space) so I can do the event with them.

 

(And unlike world chat I can filter it for just the events/maps I'm interested in, or at least close to it, by selecting a category, instead of having to see everything jumbled together.)

[DarcShriek.5829]

I'm sure gold sellers would love global chat.

[Dawdler.8521]

Team chat in WvW is across just 5 instances (well 4 if you ignore obsidian) with a max of ~350 players and it can turn into a toxic cesspool in an instant. Imagine that across the entire game.

 

Uhm no thanks.

 

All global chat channels I've seen in games has been horrid. I remember Archeage in particular once the bots started up. Chat went by so fast no one could even talk normally. In GW2 there is nothing we need to know outside of the current zone thats not available as boss timers or guild chat.

[azizul.8469]

this is a business opportunity to Anet. Call it Mega Chat. Introduce it as account upgrade under convenience category. only those with such previllege can post, otherwise they can only see. do it !

[joneirikb.7506]

> @"azizul.8469" said:

> this is a business opportunity to Anet. Call it Mega Chat. Introduce it as account upgrade under convenience category. only those with such previllege can post, otherwise they can only see. do it !

 

In that case, I'd rather change it to, "only those with such upgrade can post or see it."

 

But then again, we could probably just disable it anyways in chat option. So probably not an issue.

 

But I've never once missed a world chat in this game, In fact I already tend to disable /Team in wvw as it is, because there is rarely anything of interest or much use there.

[Vavume.8065]

Last time I played WoW was prob 2011 (maybe things changed since then) at that time world chat was only server wide, there is a huge difference between server wide and mega server wide, If we had mega server wide chat here then I suspect it would look like twitch chat, and that is not something I ever want to see in this game.

[Brother.1504]

Gw1 had alliance chat. Larger then guild chat but still familiar players. Many guilds. If someone went off the rails in alliance chat, they had a guild tag and everyone knew who to take concerns up with.

[Ashen.2907]

> @"Vavume.8065" said:

> Last time I played WoW was prob 2011 (maybe things changed since then) at that time world chat was only server wide, there is a huge difference between server wide and mega server wide, If we had mega server wide chat here then I suspect it would look like twitch chat, and that is not something I ever want to see in this game.

 

This.

 

That said, I have played a game where players can create their own chat channels that others can then subscribe to. Some of them became very widespread while others remained very small scale.

[SlippyCheeze.5483]

> @"Ashen.2907" said:

> > @"Vavume.8065" said:

> > Last time I played WoW was prob 2011 (maybe things changed since then) at that time world chat was only server wide, there is a huge difference between server wide and mega server wide, If we had mega server wide chat here then I suspect it would look like twitch chat, and that is not something I ever want to see in this game.

>

> This.

>

> That said, I have played a game where players can create their own chat channels that others can then subscribe to. Some of them became very widespread while others remained very small scale.

 

PoE does that, and it is player-base-wide. It doesn't suck, but the default channels are a nightmarish living hell of horrific proportions. They are also at ~ half the scale of GW2 given what I know of player estimates of both.

[Ashen.2907]

> @"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:

> > @"Ashen.2907" said:

> > > @"Vavume.8065" said:

> > > Last time I played WoW was prob 2011 (maybe things changed since then) at that time world chat was only server wide, there is a huge difference between server wide and mega server wide, If we had mega server wide chat here then I suspect it would look like twitch chat, and that is not something I ever want to see in this game.

> >

> > This.

> >

> > That said, I have played a game where players can create their own chat channels that others can then subscribe to. Some of them became very widespread while others remained very small scale.

>

> PoE does that, and it is player-base-wide. It doesn't suck, but the default channels are a nightmarish living hell of horrific proportions. They are also at ~ half the scale of GW2 given what I know of player estimates of both.

 

Cool thing about the game I mentioned is that such channels could be open across multiple games from the same dev studio. So you could use them to chat with friends or guildies playing in the studio's sci fi game, their fantasy game, or their superhero game.

[ugrakarma.9416]

The pvp lobby chat gives you an idea of what this would become.

[Arden.7480]

Too messy, if there would be World Chat, I wouldn't use it.

[Dainank.1308]

Maybe world chat could be implemented, but it would only count in territories like Kryta / Or e.t.c.

[Alga.6498]

I would rather have an Alliance chat like we did back in GW1, aka many Guilds together as an Alliance.

[Offair.2563]

> @"ugrakarma.9416" said:

> The pvp lobby chat gives you an idea of what this would become.

 

Add the Trash err Teamchat in wvw to this at some points.