Guild Wars 2

Tired of sitting around in Lion’s Arch while reading the waterfall of text coming from the group of people discussing politics, television shows, religion, philosophy, conspiracy theories, etc.? Wanting to block them to stop the text waterfall, but hesitating because you don’t want to block people who maybe sound intelligent, you don’t want half a conversation on your chat feed, or the person isn’t really offending you? Well, you’re not alone. I, at least, also feel that these scenarios are an issue with the chat system currently in place in the game.

Why is it an issue?

1. The waterfall of text effectively cancels out the ability of any other conversations starting up that could potentially interest the player.
2. Certain types of conversations, though not necessarily offensive, can make being in the zone (i.e. Lion’s Arch) uncomfortable for the player. For example: Talking politics stresses out some people who play the game to escape from the subject.
3. Shotgun blocking large numbers of people to avoid walls of text in the chat feed runs counter to the game’s social aspect. It does not help to build a sense of community.
4. Some people prefer chatting about certain subjects in a more subject closed environment (i.e. Politics only, no anime discussion). Party chat and guild chat could potentially be used, but are too much effort to form for a closed topic chat, other’s can’t join in without first knowing about the group through another person, and party size is limited.

How can this problem be solved?
One potential solution for this problem is to add a feature to chat that functions similarly to a chat room. The feature would allow for the creation of chat topics that are visible to everyone within a chat zone, on a list in a UI window, and added to the chat window as a new chat tab.

Ideas for such a chat room feature:

• The feature would operate in a similar method as the new LFG tool and potentially be stored on the Contacts and LFG UI.
• Other chats, such as map chat, etc., would still function as they do now, but conversations that start in map chat would be able to be taken to a chat room.
• Players would create a chat room topic in a similar way as LFG group advertisements.
• Players would join chat rooms in a similar way as the LFG groups.
• Instead of joining a party automatically as with the LFG system, the chat room system would take the player’s ID, such as my Pi Slinger.5801, and place it into a chat room group under a topic heading. When it does this, it would open a new tab on the chat window with only chat from the chat room topic present on it.
• Players could be in multiple chat rooms at once.

Pros to such a feature:

• It would free up map chat so that new conversations could form and potentially be taken to new chat rooms.
• It would allow players to have topic-specific chats.
• It would allow players to avoid certain chat topics.
• It would help build a sense of community.
• It would be potentially useful for WvW.
• It would reduce the number of people that are blocked due to others not wanting to see their conversation.
• Regular chat could continue on as it always has, minus the waterfalls of texts for small group conversations.
• Players would potentially form guilds or add friends to their contact list based on interactions in the chat rooms.

Cons to such a feature:

• It would potentially spread the map chat to the point that zones would be full of players, but seem empty based on the amount of comments in the chat window if a player is not currently in a chat room (which some may enjoy, but new players who are unaware of the system might see it as a sign of the game being “dead”)
• Managing large numbers of tabs would potentially be troublesome.
• Players would have to trust the title of the topic or join the topic to view the true contents of the conversation.
• It would potentially reduce the ability of players to “jump in” to conversations when the topic hits a point of interest, limiting the ability to “add you two cents.”
  • A potential solution to this would be to create a checklist functionality that would allow players to turn on certain topic chats in their general chat, which would allow them to see the conversation, but not respond until fully joining the chat room for the topic.
    • This would potentially lead to increase in the frequency of, “Oops, wrong chat,” moments.
• It may lead to the formation of social cliques, which could either be seen as a good or bad thing, some of which would potentially have people hazing people who join that they don’t welcome. (But, hey, blocking the people who offend you is what that system is actually for, right? Not blocking people to not see conversations)

Well, those are my thoughts on the matter. Do ya’ll have any more ideas? I think a chat room feature would be a great addition to help build the community in this game.

You already have in game a few options:
1.You can turn on and off the chat from a specific box.
2.You can make new tabs where you can turn on specific channels.

I did the 2nd point.I have 3 tabs active the whole time.
One for Guild,Map,Whisper,Say and Emotes.
Second for NPCs only
Third for Combat log only.

I have tabs set up, too, but the issue I’m addressing with this suggestion is that even if you set up a tab for just map chat, and there is a group of people having a long and passionate conversation about a certain topic in map chat, there’s no way of setting up the tabs so that the conversation isn’t present in map chat while still having other map chat comments visible in the feed. The map chat will still have the conversation in it unless you block the players so that their comments are filtered out. Basically, this suggested feature is for those who don’t want to turn off map chat, don’t want to block other players, but don’t want to see a particular conversation in the feed. It’s only really a problem in map chat.

The current chat system, tabs included, does not allow for the conversations to be taken elsewhere without using third party systems. You could block the people, but that doesn’t help to build community. You could turn off map chat, but that doesn’t allow you to see other comments that might interest you in map chat. You could take the conversation to party chat, but parties are limited to 5 people and others can’t join in on the conversation as readily. However, if there were a system that allowed for those conversing to leave map chat for somewhere else, so that others won’t have to be bothered by their conversation, while still enabling access of others to the conversation, then the problem would no longer really exist. Heck, the problem could even be addressed by simply putting in some kind of mute button that would temporarily block other players’ map chat comments, but that’s more of a bandage than a solution and doesn’t really help promote community. Silencing people for spamming text wouldn’t be a good solution either.

A lot of the conversations I have seen, particularly in Lion’s Arch, get to a point where the people involved in the conversation on map chat end up totally dominating the map chat window and other comments not related to their conversation get bumped up through the chat window so fast that they’re not really noticeable. Also, not everyone wants to see a conversation about politics flying through their map chat, they also don’t necessarily want to block people for chatting about politics, and they still want to keep map chat on. I’ve also noticed that a lot of people find it annoying when walls of text are just going through their map chat window that are unrelated to the game.

If there was a place for players to chat about specific things if they wanted to, and they could start the conversation in map chat and then move to a chat room type place where others could join in if they want to, then the number of text heavy conversations happening in map chat would be reduced. A player in Lion’s Arch the other day made a good point when asked by multiple people in Lion’s Arch to “please stop chatting about politics.” His reply was, “where else would I go to have a real-time conversation about politics with these people? Teamspeak? AOL? Too difficult.” If a chat room feature existed, instead of having to either block people, turn off map chat, or deal with it, players could request for the people to take their conversation to a chat room.