Modern In-game chat feature. Anyone else desire this?
LoTekkie
Member
I would like to start a discussion regarding the chat feature in MMOs. With the rise of Discord it seems most people prefer to do their chatting there rather than in-game. I think this is largely due to lack of innovation of the chat feature from modern MMOs. The need to utilize 3rd party tools to stay informed / engaged is quite a distraction. Is it within the realm of possibility to create such a chat feature that would allow users to access it outside of game and come equipped with the ability to use modern tools for expression such as Gifs, Emojis, etc..? Is this feature worth the cost? Perhaps I have not looked hard enough but It seems there is little in the way of attempts / discussions from anyone on this subject. Id like to know why and whether or not this has been considered for Ashes of Creation. Thank you.
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Comments
Where AoC will tread on in-game chat and voice features is covered here: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/In_game_chat
The ideas I've read here are reasonable. There are options for every mood and occasion.
What I think made it work in DDO is the requirement to use voice chat, and an older community. When I was playing that game hard in my early twenty's. I always felt like the youngest person in the party. A lot of middle aged people that grew up playing D&D in the 70s and 80s was the player base. So I would imagine that older people not wanting to be bothered with out of game chat made it work.
I remember when WOW tried to add voice chat. I was like sweet, no more Ventrillo, or mumble. Whatever we were using at the time. This was like between 2005 and 2009 I want to say. Anyways the patch for WOW that added voice chat came, and no one used it. Maybe the community was already set in their ways. Maybe it just a bad implementation. It never took off.
Ultimately, I am going to have discord open on another window at all times anyways. Its been like that for years. If people want to chat in game. I am fine with that. I will always get random calls from other people playing other games. I would like to see AoC embrace voice chat the way DDO did, but If I had to bet money. I would bet it is going to end up like WOW. A "hidden" feature that no one uses.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
No thnx.
I just want a normal MMORPG chat. With zone and global and guild and whispers, the normal stuff like it has been for years.
I don't want innovation, even if its the year 2050 I don't want to change it.
Old school game, for old school players, with old school features. Gifs and images and proximity voice chat brakes inmersion.
Yes, I want to type in-game, I want to type and not talk or use images, don't change the formula brothers.
This.
Also I can't imagine why anyone would want to constantly switch back and forth to chat in Discord while gaming. Sure I'll use Discord's chat when I'm not gaming and when I am, we usually will be using voice or in game text chat. But it's just so much more convenient to be able to chat in the same space that I'm gaming. I don't want to switch back and forth like that, and I prefer the old school MMO chat anyway. Discord's extra features work for Discord but if those features were added into an MMORPG it would feel to me like the chat version of Korean MMO's with police cars and swimsuits. Completely out of place and immersion breaking.
Most people use Teamspeak or Discord as both programs are easy to use and have a clear connection, while in most ingma voice chats you sound like you talk over a radio from the 60s.
Ingame voice chat is like voice acting.
You either do it in high quallity or now at all.
Bad voice acting hurts a game more then no voice acting does.
The same goes for ingame VOIP
For me, the problem with integrating discord in to game is making sure the channels that people can use are not too global. Global channels just shrink the size of the world and make comminucation easier across distance. It is one thing to have that available through guilds but to make it easier across everyone is not to my liking.
If course people are going to use forums and discord out of the game, but at least make them have to switch away from their character.
Also, for me, the idea of having discord style chat pop up in my in game windows, complete with massive smileys and memes, is so off putting that I can not adequately express how so.
I don't want my in game experience ruined by people using real world pictures to communicate.
So a big NO from me. Sorry.
It's not the chat systems that stops people communicating in MMOs now. It's the dull as dishwater MMOs that promote solo content over social content with their mechanics.
Take GW2, who did away with the holy trinity of MMO gaming. Take Rift, that had a great idea for an on-the-fly class system that would let players fill different roles in groups, only to negate the entire idea by letting everyone self heal. Both games let players self heal. With that there is no reason to ever group.
Both games experimented with socially focused dynamic content, but neglected to make it necessary to group. The fact that you could self heal meant you just partook of the event and left.
Take every MMO since WoW that has made questing throughout the entire journey to be the normality. I'll let Blizz off because they tried to shake MMOs up a little. It is the fact that every MMO since has tried to be WoW, or tried to gather WoW's player numbers. Quests have gotten simpler and content has gotten easier. Developers have gotten stuck in a mold of just making simple MMOs that grab a few easy bucks. No one cares to be interesting anymore.
Compared to Everquest, WoW's dungeons were a little tamer, but compared to WoW, the games that have followed have had increasingly dull dungeons. The dungeon I did in Rift beta had me yawning at how simplistic it was. I look back to sprawling dungeons like Guk, that you could get lost in, or Unrest, that had a death potential of about 95%.
If a game is well designed, brave with what it wants to be and innovative then you don't need new spangled chat systems to make people be social. The game will do that.
Okay, sorry, I got a bit ranty there. But to see you say we need some innovative new chat system, with the potential for memes to get people social again, amused me.
We just need the game to be innovative. Ashes looks to be trying that. It's why I chose to put over £100 of my own money in to it. The game will bring back the sociality of MMOs.
Good point, healers (and healing mainly being their unique ability) is one of those things that acts as the glue for groups. I tend to play healers and an alt stealthy dps type. When you're a healer I think it's good that you pretty much suck at soloing, it drove me to be social, the instant I logged into game I immediately was looking for a tank, and meanwhile tanks were bored with long rest periods between mob pulls so the moment they saw me walking over the hill towards them they were happy for my buffs and heals. Then we have a stable group and it all comes full circle because the first thing we think is, we need more DPS, I never run out of mana for heals we can speed this up, and so then you invite the rogue or mage that's walking by.
Self healing for most classes hopefully is kept limited, which is how it looks for Ashes so that's great. Everyone of course should have heal potions or weak heal options of a bandage or food/camp fire. But those self heal options, like the potions should be a little expensive and always causing the player to think, "Dang I need to find a cleric to group with, I could avoid drinking a 1 gold heal potion between each pull if I just had a cleric". Just my opinion, everyone self healing made me feel like an out of work long term unemployed healer in games.
I can agree that making MMOs more solo friendly is a fairly large part of the lack of communication but there is another side to it and it's that people natrually gravitate to out of game resources to communicate/organize because they are vastly superior. This leaves even less of a reason to engage in game. MMOs are far from simple and making them more accessible has been the trend because that's what people wanted. The pendulum definitely is swinging the other way because people are realizing there is little value in what is easily obtained. This is a moving target that will always have the community divided. You say you want innovation but fail to see it in any of the games you mentioned. GW2 especially innovated quite a bit on the formula. Id be interested to read then what your idea of innovation is and why it would solve this problem without the need to modernize communications.
In near 20 years of playing MMOs I've not seen this topic before. It is not my experience that people use other sources to chat in MMOs, just often that they don't need to chat so much.
Voice chat has become a very used tool in MMOs, that is true, but I was using voice chat in EQ2 before discord became popular, and back when forums were the primary place to chat.
To chat efficiently in discord whilst playing would probably require a dual monitor setup, so I'm not sure it is becoming a way gravitated to.
GW2 is just another game that shrunk features in MMOs. They weren't even the MMO to first introduce dynamic content. Warhammer Online had already done that.
I'm not saying GW2 was a terrible game, just hardly innovative.
What the hell are you talking about?? are you crazy bro?
You need a NASA setup to open 2 programs or something?
Well nobody wants to be alt tabbing back and forth on one monitor, so yes to game efficiently you'd have to have Discord open on one and the game on another. They do have a chat overlay but that takes over your screen and you can't really game and chat at the same time.
I haven't heard this yet. What are the rules?
EVERYBODY wants to be Alt-Tabbing to another thing, EVERYBODY.
If you need two monitors to use Discord, you have some problems brother.
I am clearly referring to having to alt-tab between the game and discord. Who wants to be playing and have to alt-tab to follow chat?
You must be alt-tabbing and not paying attention if you failed to follow what I was saying. So proving my statement.
Reason being is that every game I've played that incorporated a text-chat ingame just became less social over time with less communication and more filled with people spamming the chats and making the funcion useless anyways.
I wanted it until I realized what it took away from the MMO which was actual socialization.
But thats just me
Discord fulfills the more in depth convos-links- and other functions 10x better
That would be the best of all worlds. There is a normal in-game chat and you can also add a tab (or tabs) that are connected to a discord account.
Downside is that the integration effort could spell legal trouble and if Discord changes their ToS some day, the publisher might have to disable it, which is worse than not having that integration in the first place.