Guild Wars 2

“Team” or “Map” chat – Is there any real difference? I see people using them interchangeably in WvW and I’ve often wondered if there is any benefit for using one over the other.

If there really is no difference, I’d love for ANet to:

Make /t a true team chat – one that allows us to communicate with the entire team across all borderlands.

• Is this something the rest of the community would like to see?
• Is this something that ANet can implement? (if so, is there any reason it’s not already a part of the game?)

(I did a search on chats and didn’t find any previous posts relating to team vs. map chat, so I apologize if this has already been addressed and I’ve simply failed miserably at forum searching. )

I think it used to be that /map chat could be seen by all teams on the same map (i.e. your opponents could see it). whether this was deliberate or a bug (or a malicious lie) I have no idea.

but now I can’t see any difference, except for the color.

-ken

I think it’s like Map chat for general chatting, and Team chat for actual useful WvW reports. :p

It’s fine how it is now. Use map for general blah, team for campaign specific things.

Snowreap.5174:

I think it used to be that /map chat could be seen by all teams on the same map (i.e. your opponents could see it). whether this was deliberate or a bug (or a malicious lie) I have no idea.

but now I can’t see any difference, except for the color.

-ken

Close-ish. In beta 1, /say was visible to everyone.

/map and /team were intended to have different functions but they were buggy as heck at the time (neither worked at all for me, for example).

There was some disconnect between the team coding the engine which handled the maps and the chat interface team though. The engine just didn’t include a way to connect chat across servers, which is how the battlegrounds are designed (each a unique “world”). The /team channel was intended to be able to talk across all maps, but since that was not possible (and likely due to time constraints) both channels were just assigned the function /map was designed to fill and it’s been left at that. Haven’t heard if there are any plans to revisit the code and possibly make the channels function how intended or just get rid of one, so I doubt it’s a priority.

A lot of people have map chat turned off. I tend to use team chat more than map chat for WvW purposes.