Guild Wars 2

Is there any work to make team chat in WvW meaningful? Shouldn’t it allow players on all WvW maps to communicate, just like how I can talk to guild members no mater where I am?

I think it would a) give team chat a reason for existing and b) allow for better in-game coordination for total victory.

Edit: See my post below for reasons why I think a global commander chat is both terrible and unnecessary.

This would be horific. On low pop servers it might work, but on high pop servers this chat will literaly explode. Enabeling such a feature for commanders would be really good though.

“OMG zerg on north bay, door at 80%!”
“What? There’s no one here.”
“Yes there is, look at the swords!”
“There are no swords -.-”
“Come on people, we need to defend bay, they are on lord.”
“But we are assaulting bay from the south :/”

I’m sure it’ll work fine…

I think a commander chat function would work better so that commanders can communicate with each other across maps.

Avatar Yirachi.7162:

This would be horific. On low pop servers it might work, but on high pop servers this chat will literaly explode. Enabeling such a feature for commanders would be really good though.

Do you mean for an only commander chat, or do you mean a chat for everyone in a squad with a particular commander. Honestly, since commander icons are really only gotten with money, I don’t see anything prestigious about it. If it was earned with honor badges, I would like the idea of them more. That said, commander chat wouldn’t be a spy free chat.

(A point on the side, I think you mean figuratively, not literally. And you spelled three words incorrectly in an age where spell checking is readily available. Good luck.)

Dawdler.8521:

“OMG zerg on north bay, door at 80%!”
“What? There’s no one here.”
“Yes there is, look at the swords!”
“There are no swords -.-”
“Come on people, we need to defend bay, they are on lord.”
“But we are assaulting bay from the south :/”

I’m sure it’ll work fine…

I grant you, it would happen at first, but eventually most people would understand the difference.

An additional feature that would help would be to add a tag to the person’s name that told you from what map they were chatting in. Yet, depending on how the programming for the chat is written, that might be an easy to near impossible feature to implement.

Terrible idea. It would add so much confusion to chat.

If it was commanders only sure… Just make sure it’s a noticeable color since most comma use VOIP

+1 commander only global chat

Its not a bad idea at all. /t should be across all wvw maps and /m should be for the specific map you are on.

For those people who want to up-vote a global commander chat, let me outline two basic reasons why you shouldn’t do that. The reasons are listed as a) why its the most terrible solution put forth, and b) why players can actually make this chat better then the devs can.

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a) Why its the most terrible solution put forth.

I’m sure you would think a chat for commanders only sounds like a great way to coordinate strategy in WvW. The problem is that people have a lot of reasons to get commander status other then for WvW. Some of these reasons are shear vanity. There are a lot of commanders on every server. There is no reason for a commander doing temple runs to want to talk with a commander in red borderlands about taking care of business. I’m sure the commander in a living story event cares even less. Commander chat wouldn’t be some back-and-forth chatter about strategy and enemy positions, it will be the same old trash you can find in Lion’s Arch. The only thing it would accomplish is the stroking of a bunch of egos.

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b) Why players can actually make this chat better then the devs can.

Its called guild chat. You make a guild, you call it “insert server name here” WvW Commanders, tag it as WvWC, and invite any commander tag you see roaming WvW. At least then you know the commanders care about what you care about. At least then you don’t have commanders missing out on conversations when they are on their alts. Remember, commander tags are character bound, not account bound.

As of this writing, I support three options for making team chat better. 1) make it chat for all WvW maps for that server 2) make it into squad chat for commanders to talk with parties under their command 3) remove team chat entirely.

None of these are entirely exclusive. The best solution I think is to make squad chat, remove team chat for a couple of months, and then bring it back new and improved.

IIRC this was actually the intended functionality. The plan seems to have been abandoned after BWE1 though, due to technical limitations of the game engine.

It would take some getting used to, but so what? It would improve communications in the long run. I think it’s an idea that could use another look at this point.

Commander chat…I would get that for the sole purpose of trolling 4 maps at once…

I totally agree with making team chat function over all maps as currently it is useless. To avoid confusion there can be a tag at the beginning of what someone says denoting what map they’re on (Ex. [SoSBl], [JQBl] or [EB]). It would be nice to have some kind of in-game means to communicate to allies on other maps to ask for reinforcements, etc.

The problem here is different maps are separated and the players capable of going into a map is limited; so even if you have a global team chat, it may not necessarily mean aid will come.

To make your suggestion work, all 4 maps must become one big map. Else, team chat is good as it is.

However, having map and team makes either redundant, since the enemy team can’t read your chat anyway. Haha.