The Future Potential of F2P In-game Comms

[Kincaide]

Firstly, not everyone wants to play on AP.

And not everyone has to play on AP. Nowhere is it said that anyone must follow any plan. But, I've already said that I would be interested to hear people's reasons for not wanting to play on AP... because if their reasons have anything to do with the personality of the people that are there, then they are looking at the current problem without realizing that this idea is the solution to the problem. If one were playing on AP instead of say Vashj, and the people one saw in chat were only the exact same people they saw when they were on Vashj, but they also had this vast community available if they needed extra people to arena with, etc, then what's the problem?

Secondly, if changing channels is so easy what is the point? The people who you ( or whoever) are trying to avoid can just follow you.

This quote makes me feel like you haven't actually read the thread at all. The idea here is to have custom channels available whose membership can be managed by the person who created the channel, exactly akin to how guild chat works for P2Ps. No one would be able to join Team Swag's channel unless they were invited to do so.

Thirdly, you'll break up the community into sub community's that will be at each others throats.

How is that different from the way things already are? The TI F2P community is already broken up into sub communities, The problem is those sub-communities are spread out on different servers, so changing groups when your current group becomes somewhere you don't want to be anymore is a huge amount of work.

You've again taken it that this is what the community wants/needs/should do, without asking said community. You need to stop and ask the people this effects before you put it in motion.

The purpose of this thread was to create a dialogue about it. A few people have supported the idea, and a few people have expressed concern. One concern, actually... that having multiple chat channels would destroy small servers. This is a -dialogue-, that means I make a point, someone makes a counterpoint, someone makes a counter to that counterpoint, and so on. I have already made a counterpoint to the argument that this idea would destroy small servers AT LEAST four times. No one has taken up against my response, despite my continuing to ask people to do so.

Furthermore, since custom chat channels already exist, I don't see how you can say that I'm running off with some new idea on my own. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head and saying that they have to split up their communities. The effect that this has on communities is already in place and observable: that is, the ability is already there, and it hasn't destroyed any communities. I've lost track of how many times I've raised this point, and all you guys keep doing is continuing to ignore it and continuing to say the same thing instead of addressing my response to the concern.

 

[Allybeboba]

This quote makes me feel like you haven't actually read the thread at all. The idea here is to have custom channels available whose membership can be managed by the person who created the channel, exactly akin to how guild chat works for P2Ps. No one would be able to join Team Swag's channel unless they were invited to do so.

No system is going to be perfect. the reason I singled this small part of the quote out is many people may get singled out of groups they want to be in. This happened to me at the very beginning of AP four years ago. Sure I was a subbed 20, not a "pure" trial. But I bent over backwards to go by the rules that the "community" set forth. To the point I even had to delete a character I had made that was a worgen since at the time trials could not use worgens. I was ridiculed because I could "easily" obtain heirlooms.
"Cliques" are going to persist everywhere. Much of the player base in this bracket is either still in High School or not that far removed from it. Immature drama is just a matter of fact here. By excluding people in your "guilds" all you are doing is setting up a recipe for disaster and even more drama. We really don't need any more of that here.
Look at the dramafest that happened a few weeks ago. We lost a somewhat productive member of the community that just needed to learn to control themselves.
/cheers

Sweetsidney

 

[Kincaide]

I agree with everything you said, but if there are multiple groups on a server then there are multiple places one can find similar people. If there are hundreds of F2Ps on one server, you've got a much higher chance of finding people you like than if you roll a toon on a server, and then the server dies or the people change and you have to roll another toon on another server, and go through the same process and then roll another toon on another server...

In other words, everything you just said would be reasons for this idea, not reasons against it.

 

[yasueh]

If the addon is going to be supporting multiple channels as a result of the change at Blizzard's end, then it's going to be very basic, and advanced stuff like passworded or invite only channels could be a long way off. Here's a list of tasks I'm looking at to produce an F2PAddon 2.0:

• Functioning chat using the new addon channels, instead of addon whispers (would make sense to add multi-channel here, as it'll be easier than adding it after all the other code that will be making use of it).
• Rewrite all code that's currently based off the old friends list and whisper system (which is a lot, seeing as database, achievements, f2pq, etc. all have to make use of the friends list right now).
• Keep the code that's populating the friends list from the channel list, so people can still use it to send whispers, but add a backup, where names appearing in chat are also added if you don't already have them (one of the big problems with filling the friends list from the list of people in channel, is the channel list that the game is providing to the addon isn't always accurate).
• Create a whole new invite module. I want people to have more control over the groups they form, and keep the impact on P2P players to the minimum. This will probably have its own interface, where you create a group, set whether you want it to be open to all, or you pick from the people who apply to join it. When you hit the 'form group' button the list of names will be passed off to an available p2p, who will form the group and then drop instantly. No more keeping the p2p waiting while you try and find more members.
• Add a few features from my to-do list, like a blingtron announcer, and in-addon armory / help for gearing.

Private, invite only channels are the last thing I want to work on. Not because I don't agree with them. as a useful feature, but because implementing it is going to be complex, when there is no way to store a single list of who should be invited or not, with one person maintaining it. Every time the channel becomes empty, the banlist gets wiped, along with the password, and anyone can then make a channel with the same name, and any list of people to invite or keep out of a channel would have to be spread across several members of the group, so that people could be invited no matter who was online, and that list would somehow have to be synched between everyone, when not everyone with a list would be online at the time of bans/invites to update their own copy.

Finally, I don't want to be doing anything that pisses off Blizzard, by giving trials too much. If it gets too close to how guilds work, then it could well be crossing the line.

 

[Kincaide]

Thank you for the update Yasueh! The new planned group-making feature sounds great!

As far as secure channels and member lists, I was under the impression that addons would be using channels just to send secure messages from one client to another, not that players would need to join/leave the channels themselves. You know what I mean? Like the clients understand from cross communication that on this server, virtual channels 1-6 exist, and this player is "subscribed" to virtual channel 1 and 5, so when a message is sent from client to client across the data channel that says [show(channel1)"Hi"] that all the clients that are themselves flagged as being subscribed to channel1 would see the message. I suppose one could even have each client version assigned its own unique identifier on the first time it's activated on a server so a distributed database would know which person was subscribed to each channel and could flag sent messages to be displayed only on those clients.

But I'm not a great programmer. I just throw stuff out there to see if it sparks any ideas in the head of the real programmer. Have a great day!

 

[Yak]

Unfortunately, I think that what is needed is a fresh "guild-like" mentality - one that can change the dynamics of how we relate to one another (chat being but one aspect)...

I started playing in Cata by my lonesome for a LONG time, and now I play AP and put up with trolls because I want to relate. Unfortunately, a lot of quality people and leadership left AP. I would re-roll to a smaller f2p server if I thought someone might actually engage and help improve my gameplay. There is a lot of new talent out there, but distrust reigns supreme and it is extremely difficult for "new" players to connect (half are trolls, but the other half are quietly figuring things out for themselves). A guild framework might inspire the "old guard" to be proactive in identifying and building up new players - NOT simply answering questions or carrying them, but developing skill and teamwork over time. We all know the names of individuals who pwn... but the new elite challenge - build a team that can dominate!

Leaders with that kind of vision will find and refine the communication technology they need. The proposed system could make that easier.

 

[yasueh]

If you really want guild functionality, you should be using a voice server (and preferably one that supports private rooms for eg. arena teams).

 

[Fael]

If you really want guild functionality, you should be using a voice server (and preferably one that supports private rooms for eg. arena teams).

That's where mumble comes to play!!

 

[Kincaide]

Unfortunately, I think that what is needed is a fresh "guild-like" mentality - one that can change the dynamics of how we relate to one another (chat being but one aspect)...

If you really want guild functionality, you should be using a voice server (and preferably one that supports private rooms for eg. arena teams).

You've both made really good points. The community goals and desires will determine the needed tools... the tools are not going to determine the goals and desires. I've been putting too much emphasis on how the proper tools will encourage a stronger community involvement, but that's really putting the cart before the horse. Thank you both for pointing this out.