Guild Wars 2

After playing GW2 since Beta 1… I always thought the chat interface was just behind the times.

They achieved their goals of making you look away from the interface.. I rarely have to look at my skill bars, I only glance at my HP if I know I screwed up and took some damage…

The problem is I rarely have time to look at my Chat interface…. I miss conversations completely sometimes…

I have tried several times to think of ways to innovate the chat portion of the interface.. but can’t come up with a solid idea…

Voice Chat…. works well in group and guilds but not for people around you.

Any ideas?

I just want the Chat UI from GW1, you can toggle which chats are visible and you can change your chat tab instantly by using the number keys + modifier key

They have chat bubbles which show up in the main view — sort of takes care of the “people around you” part of your post. But the chat windows should be more configurable, i.e. be able to pull out a channel and put it elsewhere on your screen.

I know about the chat bubbles and those do help… but they are still a legacy way of dealing with talking to people

My question is what could be the next evolution of interface to deal with real time socialization between people…

Maybe a physic engine for speech where you can talk normally to the area around and the further out from your spot the less likely you hear… This would create very busy noisy areas but they would be more realisitic….

RP’ers would hate it though…

Maybe nothing can be changed until the technologies advance to the point that “chat windows” just become archaic and have to be phased out.

don’t know about them being legacy…. they show you what the other person is saying so seem to handle what you’re asking for.

as for voice comms they could build them into the game where you’d chat and those close enough would hear with the distance drop-off as you said. that would be a neat feature, you’d just walk up to someone and be able to hear them. but I think it would go largely unused because most would be in Ventrilo or Teamspeak with their guild and would prefer that to an in-game system.

I had the same problem in gw1 and still in gw2. I never had a problem noticing chat in WoW (not promoting the game, I can’t stand it). Maybe if they let us change the colors of the chat channels. I don’t know what it is but I too miss whole conversations at times.