General Chat

[Rostin]

Let's be honest. The chat rooms in orbit around each location are useless... As is the hailing system. They are clunky, difficult to manage, and largely ignored by the population.

A new tab that opens up a general IM room for players to talk in would GREATLY improve retention in the game. This is an MMO, so players should be having much more interaction with other people out there. This would give newbies a place to voice any basic questions like "how do I get a new ship?" or "should I mine here?" and it allows Corp leaders to recruit more aggressively and sell fuel and other supplies by advertisement or whatever.

[raphael]

Definitely, yes.

[Raptor]

Aaaaahhhh... so you have to click on the chat for it to work. I've been shouting "Open hailing frequencies!" to my computer until I eventually gave up ;)


But seriously: love this suggestion. +1

[Matamaure001]

Raptor: you remember me Scotty in Star Trek The Voyage Home, he has the same problem lol.

[JamJulLison]

Raptor: you remember me Scotty in Star Trek The Voyage Home, he has the same problem lol.

*Computer on"

Holds up mouse.

"Computer on"


lol.  I loved when that all happened.    As for this idea this is a very good idea. It would make it easier to meet new players and to try to recruit them.

[Fenix]

I was just going to recommend this exact thing, good thing I decided to check some of the old suggestions that I might have missed before making my own thread. I definitely agree and with all the other improvements that have been made to the game since I left early in the year I'm almost surprised that something like this hasn't been put in yet.

Talking by PM's is alright but it can get cluttered and talking to multiple people at the same time can get hectic. The corp boards themselves are nice for chatting but it depends on how many people are in the corp and how active they are, there are plenty of people that just like to lurk, read what we say and then never post anything themselves. Not that it's really a bad thing to be a lurker, I like to lurk myself, but it does make the game a bit more boring.

I would propose that we get a universal chat room in the comms section and maybe we could call it the "Standard Subspace Channel" or SSC for short, even something very basic that just shows our captain names next to our messages would be nice though it would be ideal to also allow it to show if someone belongs to a corp and have the tag next to their name as well.

I have to imagine that it would help with retaining players as well if they could just go to a chat room and ask a question that then gets answered in a few minutes by somebody rather than having to come to the forums and register and ask a question and hope it gets answered in the time they have. The player base for this game isn't all that big but it seems even smaller when communication is pretty much limited to PM's, corp boards and this forum.

[Rostin]

At this point I would even just be happy with a new messaging interface...
CCing people, sort messages option, a "sent messages" box separate from the inbox, and a "search" option for subject, sender, or content would be a DREAM COME TRUE.

[Dragonfly]

And maybe an option to send PM to all corp members. This way we would have less massages to read in corp board

[Madden]

Just to remind everybody about this suggestion, it's actually quite a good suggestion and it would be nice for it to be implemented in the game, although it does make the game less realistic. If you don't want it to be less realistic, maybe a general chat within a star system only would be good. So if your active ship is in Tau Ceti, for example, you can only talk in the Tau Ceti general chat. At least this way newbies can still ask questions in a Sol general chat, where I'm pretty sure most members still have ships at.