Removal of irc style chat

It'll never happen but I wanted to throw it out there. You never know :)

Something I really loved about early UO was that the speech appeared over the characters head and there was not an irc style chat. There was a yell but it wasn't even close to zone wide. So if you wanted to talk to someone you had to go over and talk to them.

This was very good for world immersion, built community, and increased character identification (you weren't talking to a bunch of random strangers spread out across the entire zone or game but the character that was standing in front of you.

imo it's time to remove global chat and decrease local to zone +1.

In order to develop trade we need some type of communication imo.

Yes, it's time for global to go. I kind of think local should be restricted to one zone, but at the same time that would cause it to be very difficult developing a trade network. =\

It would make trade more difficult. If you wanted to set up a trade route with a tribe, you would have to run over there and negotiate in person. It is a trade off of world immersion and "realism" vs. ease of use. The real bonus is that local chat won't be full of nothing but "WTT fish for nails". It would become a more formal trade.

As many/most of us will agree the chat system is terrible as it is.

- Global chat either needs to go or it must be possible to disable it.
- the /y (yell) command should be zonewide, perhaps with adjacent zones covered as well. Personally, I don't care that much.
- the /s (say) command needs to cover a distance of about 10 or 15 meters around the talker. Some people like the OP want chat bubbles for that, others don't like chat bubbles, thus chat bubbles must be optional.
- the /w (whisper) command can stay as it is.
- the /t (tribe) command can stay as it is.

I'd like that the chat system gets an overhaul once the current server troubles are dealt with. There are plenty of MMORPGs out there, just pick one of them, copy their chat system and the chat system in Xsyon has improved by about 800%. :)

I think the chat bubble thing would be great. however as larsa said it should be optional. +1 this suggestion and I think it should be added to the back burner list

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Originally Posted by Lonerock

It'll never happen but I wanted to throw it out there. You never know :)

Something I really loved about early UO was that the speech appeared over the characters head and there was not an irc style chat. There was a yell but it wasn't even close to zone wide. So if you wanted to talk to someone you had to go over and talk to them.

This was very good for world immersion, built community, and increased character identification (you weren't talking to a bunch of random strangers spread out across the entire zone or game but the character that was standing in front of you.

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Signed and Amen.

Local really needs to get more 'local'. It's very offputting seeing someone's conversation who are in a whole different zone.

Rather then taking the standard MMORPG style model of IRC chat I think it would be interesting to see something done slightly different here as well. What OP suggests is a pretty good idea in that it would increase immersion in the game. People complain that it will make trading more difficult, but wouldn't trading be difficult? Think about if this was a realistic scenario, would you really be able to ask people on the other side of a big ass lake if they want to trade with you without the use of any telephones or other such devices? No, you'd have to take your trade goods over there and see if anyone was interested.

Not having the ability to negotiate trades from a distance would actually increase what this game is trying to do at it's heart which is to create a player driven community. Trading outposts would become even more vital and people would end up setting up stalls in order to trade goods. If you take it one step further and not set up a "store front" sort of thing like you find in Lineage II or Aion then you would even avoid the problem of people going afk with macros that spam "WTT X for y" every 10 seconds because they would actually be required to be a part of the situation. You'd also get a large amount of wandering traders that would go from tribe to tribe trading goods that people need without knowing that they need 400 nails or whatever. Also without the IRC style chat the constant pandering and barking that people do when they want to trade items won't be nearly as intrusive as it is in IRC chat as you can simply ignore the persons chat bubbles rather then having to physically ignore everything they say through the IRC or wade through the constant acronymical (is that a word) gibberish they spew.

I'm with OP, I think something like this would be an excellent idea and make a lot of sense and create a truly immersive player driven community and world with something that would resemble what would really happen given the circumstances. Not that it would ever happen though as I think too many people would be in an uproar over not being able to do things over insanely large distances.