Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 is one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, but it has some serious issues as a social experience. A big reason for this is that the cumbersome chat system makes social interaction a lot more painful than it need be. This post is an attempt to collect all the biggest issues with the chat system in one place, along with arguments about why they’re important and how they can be improved. They are arranged in roughly descending order of importance.

Guild Chat — Singular

By far, the biggest issue with chat in Guild Wars 2 is that you can only chat with the guild that you’re currently representing. I think it will be obvious to most people why this is terrible, but I’m going to explain it anyway just to be sure, because this is so important.

ArenaNet has said that guilds are meant to be social groups, rather than the highly regimented/structured organizations they are in other games. It’s completely ludicrous that the choice to talk with one of your social groups excludes you from the opportunity to hear what the others are saying. Imagine for a second that to read the forums you had to ‘represent’ a single topic, and any posts made outside the topic you’re currently representing were permanently invisible to you. That would be silly, right? Same deal in game.

This also leads to a problem of guild dilution. Many guilds, despite their good intentions, wind up as ghost towns because their members are mostly representing other guilds that provide some more direct value.

The simple and obvious solution is to let us choose any and all of our guilds to chat with on any given tab of our chat window, in the same checklist that shows the other channels. They would be accessed with /g1 /g2 /g3 and /g4, with /g acting as a shortcut to the currently represented guild.

Chat Window — Singular

It is can be difficult to separate and follow several threads of discussion (/party, /map, /guild). Tabs help somewhat with this, but it can be a frustrating experience having to constantly switch tabs to keep up with different discussions. Multi-guild chat would contribute further to the clutter.

Luckily, there’s a simple and well-understood solution: let us tear off chat tabs into separate windows so that we can have multiple individually filtered views visible at the same time. To help with screen clutter on smaller displays, it might be good to have an option to fade out all but the main chat window during combat.

Readability

Lengthy conversations can be a bit hard to follow for another reason: your eyes have to do a lot more work than is necessary to see who wrote a given message. The more differentiated player names are visually, the less time you have to spend reading names and the more time you can spend reading content.

The solution is simple: color-code player names in chat. Give each player a unique color (many IRC clients do this) or color them by class (WoW does this). A simple combination of color and length is quite often sufficient to identify the speaker with a high degree of accuracy. This actually fits in neatly with one of GW2’s design goals as well: the less time you spend with your eyes scanning chat, the more time you can spend looking at the game (not the interface!).

“Game Messages”

The “Game Messages” chat channel contains useful information like notifications of your friends logging on and off, but it is far, far too cluttered, mostly by the loot log. Loot should be split off into its own channel. Nothing controversial here.

Links

How many times have you been frustrated when a guild member pasted a lengthy URL into chat, only to find that you have no way of getting it out aside from manually retyping it in your browser? Speaking for myself: many times. Sharing links is part of the basic foundation of online communication, and it shouldn’t be so painful.

The obvious solution is to make URLs in chat clickable, but that has its own set of issues (malware, shock/gore sites, rickrolling, etc.) that might have a negative effect on the game experience for unsuspecting players. One possible fix is to only make URLs clickable in ‘trusted’ channels (guild and party, but not say or map). An alternate (and much more generally useful) solution would be to have a button that toggles a mode where you can select and copy text from a chat window.

I agree with most of this. On the subject of links: I am an adult. I am perfectly capable of deciding whom I want to trust and what links I want to click. Let there be an option to make links clickable. Let this be password protected, if you must, for those with kids.

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Sign me up on these suggestions. Copy/Paste should work in chat.

I do agree with you, but on how to fix it isn’t really the issue. I mean, if look at their old guild-alliance system it worked perfectly besides the limitation of guild members only being at 100 max.

GW1’s Guild System Picture :

Guild Snapshot

Alliance Snapshot

I think honestly all they needed to is expand and approve on this instead of really changing it all around. It is also understandable to keep around an alliance system with out the Lux or Kurz this time around since it help create a community.

As I mentioned above the biggest problem would only expand that player limit in this system sense it is a bigger and better game. As far as community goes in a whole with this system. I think people will always want to create the best guild or best alliance in any system. It’s only natural to make it more accessible to other players if you want it be more community oriented than rather strict it with a money sink for initial setup.

P.S. – In the alliance picture I don’t really got an example on how the chat looks but it shows (Character Name)(Tags):(Convo.). I was in kind of a hurry to take some snap shots of the system since rarely play it anymore.

Alliances would be nice for other reasons (they’d the problem of the guild size cap still being a bit low for my tastes), but they don’t really solve the main problem. If I have different groups of friends with different interests, and I’m the only factor that links the two groups, it would be silly for me to ask them to form an alliance solely for my benefit.

I think it depends on how it implemented by people because if it was like one of my alliances back in GW1 days. It had a verse of specialty guilds since it was trying make more of a community than a GvG, PvP, or some type of specialized alliance.

It does fix one big issue though too as in the abandon guild feeling because than you can stay in a guild but chat with multiple guilds or people in the alliance.

I am not trying to doubt there isn’t away to fix the main issue you are talking about but it a lot harder because if you aren’t really restricted to a guild than you can make guilds more diluted like now. Yet, if do exact opposite than you get people complaining that they want play with friends but also be in a specialized WvW guild too.

I’ve been agreeing with Thoom on this since the very first BWE. The flaws in this game’s chat systems (and the lack of user mods to make up for it) are the biggest thing holding this game back.

Lysus.4260:

The flaws in this game’s chat systems (and the lack of user mods to make up for it) are the biggest thing holding this game back.

This is really the take-home message here. These days I find myself logging in for an hour or so every week and quickly getting bored because all my guilds are desolate wastelands. If it was easier to keep in touch with everyone, I’d be playing every day.

I just want to second the addition of the ability to split the chat taps into separate windows. I have seen this in several other MMOs and I’ll just say it was always a God send for me.