Guild Wars 2

I know a lot of players (including myself) use voice communications with their friends, but that doesn’t really help a lot when you’re playing with randoms — especially in sPvP or WvW where coordination is (pretty much) paramount (to success).

Given the rather quick pace of the game, and the relative slowness of typing (or of trying to convince randoms to join your voip server), what I’d like to see is a “three key chat” system similar to what you get in first person shooters such as Tribes, Unreal Tournament, and so on.

If you haven’t used one of these systems before, the premise is pretty simple: you use a quick sequence of keystrokes to transmit commonly-used statements and/or animations. One sequence might transmit “Enemies spotted to the west.”, another “We need more supply.”, and so on and so forth.

The interface for this system is fairly straightforward. You have an initial key binding (typically “v”), which brings up a heads up display off to one side of your screen. This display lists a number of categories, each of which has an associated key. So you might have “s” for the “Siege Equipment” option, “e” for “Enemies”, “a” for “Animations” and so on.

Tapping the relevant key selects the appropriate category, updating the display with another set of options — with actual specific calls, each of which is also bound to a hotkey. In the “Animations” category, for example, you might have “d” for “Dance”, “t” for “Threaten”, and so on.

With a little context-sensitivity thrown into the mix, you could quite drastically increase the amount of communication options available to players with very little effort. Not to mention, it’d make the game feel just that little bit less lonely (even in a zerg, the silence is sometimes deafening).

Anyway, just an idea…

It’s a great idea………..but I think any1 who would be seriously interested enough to do this would just use voip anyway.
Most of the time a lack of communication is based on just not being bothered to do it. Sadly that’s not going to change any time soon.