Blizzard:"No plans for "specific" chatrooms, crossrealm play"

[Gifted]

I was talking more about chat rooms in general, especially the "stupid public chat channels" as you call them. :P

And lookie, I've edited my post.

Thanks for mentioning that you edited it, you added quite a bit. Regarding your expirience on the matter, I can see how the channels I didn't appreciate we're very beneficial to you. I just saw them as spam magnets. In theory, the same ability to "chat and find an AT partner" can exist in matchmaking and just try to talk to them afterwards. I _CAN_ see Blizzard's point, even if I don't fully agree with it.

I will admit that the majority of times I met friends was in what will be the "group" or "clan" channels, so that's why my personal thoughts are going to be accepting if the channels are going to be implemented in a way I suspect they will be. This doesn't change the fact that they need to change the inability to add a person without playing a game with them, but I digress. That's another subject for another thread.

Yeah, I think that's a strong argument for the existence of fully public chatrooms that aren't bound by clans and groups. When this game gets going, new people are gonna need that place for first exposure. If you can't even have basic chatrooms like that, then people are gonna feel isolated. It's frustrating to try to work oneself into a large established community like a clan or major fansite. Newbies need a place where they can feel a part of the madness by default, THEN they can start moving on up into higher places. If there's no point in such basic chatrooms, then there's also no point in having the official forums at battle.net. But there is a point. There has to be that initial entry. Then invitations to join strong groups proceed . . . and the rest is history.

This is something to consider. The major question is this... how will the group channels exist. If they gave some the ability to be publically filterable and findable, you could emulate the way that public chatrooms were intended to be. There is no information to specifically say that a group HAS to be private. They also stated before that they want to find a way to make those chatrooms "work" and their old form wasn't working...

But then again, that could be words leading to another bad implementation, but I don't want to say it's bad before I see information. I was worried the facebook implementation was going to be horrible, but have found it very useful when I used it cause it was a lot more lightweight and non-intrusive as I thought it would be.

[Hav0x]

They NEVER said there would be chat rooms/channels. What they said is that they have something planned for clans and groups that they believe will be better than chat channels. We don't know what their plans are so how can everyone be so up in arms saying that it's going to be terrible?

I don't know what you guys are smoking, but I'll take bnet 2.0 over bnet 1.0 any day of the week.

[n00bonicPlague]

This is something to consider. The major question is this... how will the group channels exist. If they gave some the ability to be publically filterable and findable, you could emulate the way that public chatrooms were intended to be. There is no information to specifically say that a group HAS to be private. They also stated before that they want to find a way to make those chatrooms "work" and their old form wasn't working...

But then again, that could be words leading to another bad implementation, but I don't want to say it's bad before I see information. I was worried the facebook implementation was going to be horrible, but have found it very useful when I used it cause it was a lot more lightweight and non-intrusive as I thought it would be.

Wow . . . why didn't I think of this? This thing would be ridiculously easy and simple to implement and use. When you create a group, you can decide a few key things. First, will your group be shown on a public listing/search or will it be completely hidden? Second, will the chat be full open, open to viewing but invite-only for posting, or completely invite-only?

Take SCL for example. You could have one group that is fully open to anyone who wants to walk in and chat and could be found with the search groups tool. Then you could have a group that is for SCL members only, where you have to receive an invite in order to chat, but it could be searched for and viewable by anyone. Then you could have a third group that is for staff, which could be completely blocked off from searching, viewing, and posting unless you were explicitly invited. After that, you could make whatever other groups you would need, and mark people as moderators for such groups.

Damn, if it worked this way, then the whole generic public chat thing WOULD be a waste of time to implement.

[Gifted]

Yeah, but this is only speculation. BUT, with some of the things Dustin has said, it would make sense if it was in this direction.

[n00bonicPlague]

Well I wish they would start givin' some details so we could stop being at eachother's throats! Everytime I hear/read an interview and some controversial points get brought up, it sounds/reads like they expect us to already know their plans, because they give so little details and then are randomly like, "lol you guys really want this? fo' rizzle??"

I know that idea is speculation, but it would work like a dream.

[Crazy_Jonny]

The crossrealm play is something I think needs to be touched upon in the future, if they intend on this game taking off globally. Similar to Broodwar's gateway system, this could be added later. But specific chatrooms - with their spam bots, and whiny 9 yr olds... yeah, I'm not gonna miss them.

[ArcherofAiur]

A Blizzard should know better!

[don]

Regarding the issue of no cross regional play. I think the primary reason for it would be the network model they used.

BNET 2.0 actually hosts the games that we play, not just acts as a meeting place where players can find players and then go play P2P. For each copy, we are actually playing for a "slot" in their servers.

In the old BNET, no matter how loaded the servers get, once you get into a game the experience is only dependent on the connection of the players and their machine speed. With BNET 2.0, the current number of players playing is a big factor to the game experience.

We see this with the current Patch 13 problem where they had to turn off map publishing to fix intermittent disconnects. IMO, it might not be a programming issue but a server resource issue.

It sucks and I don't like this one bit, but I don't think Blizzard is going to change direction for WoL. They set out to do this a long time ago, the poll question should be "Do you like the direction BNET 2.0 has taken?".

[ArcherofAiur]

On TL I have 1000 people who would give SC2 a 1 star rating on Amazon.com in protest of BNET. It only took about 700 to get EA to change Spore's DRM.

[Asfastasican]

With the ability to now add players you just played with after a match by simply right clicking their names, why exactly would we ever need chat rooms? I'm not crazy am I? They did add that feature in patch 13, right?

They could also have a chat room built into the score screen if they really wanted. That's basically what HoN does, among other chat room features.

Sure, them removing identifiers doesn't necessarily make meeting new friends easier anyways, but it's just like any other messenger where you have to add a friend and allow for the other to consent.

We should be more worried about the future of map publishing and custom map creation if you ask me.