Chat system is discourging for new players

[Tam.Toucan]

There have been posts about how to improve the chat system since the game launched, but I’m not sure if you understand how discourging it is for certain players. Many causual players don’t have a company, or don’t have people they can play with e.g. I’m the last of my 19 player company (all of whom knew at least a few of the others personally) still playing.

Another mmo I played a lot is Neverwinter, it’s almost 10 years old, but even back then players could create custom channels so they could form their own spaces. For example there is a “Tank” channel were tanks can ask for advice on gear, builds etc. Or “Neverwinter Legit” channel where people can get help with anything and no requirements are put on GS etc.

The point is the combination of Company, Faction and PvP means a “typical” casual mmo player has a hard time. You can’t have a conversation with people unless you literally invite them to a group.

Anyway, NW has a terrible chat UI, but this post is to highlight how integral a chat system can be to an mmo. I do think that many causal players are put off by what we have just now.

[Zelme]

Hi there Tam.Toucan, you make some good points here. I wll go ahead and get this sent up to the Dev team so they can have a look. Take care!

[Tam.Toucan]

Thanks. It’s all part of the bigger picture of thinking about what kind of “community” you are trying to create with New World and how the systems you put in place might affect that. I would have assumed this was obvious, but some of the past decisions make me doubt that.

The best example is Expedition Orbs. They did huge damage to the game, they created a culture of “pay to enter” and “you must have X gear and Y GS”. They killed any chance of people just wanting to have fun “Hey anyone want to run a naked Depths?”. These things matter since even once Orbs are removed that culture can take a long time to change.

[dpec2008]

TBH the game’s chat system is 15 years out of date. Can’t even change fonts/sizes/bold/colors for crying out loud.
Along with the comically bad trading post/inventory management system, horrid chat is one of the 800 pound gorillas in the room that we have given up talking about.

[Jubbin]

Even DAoC- 20+ year old game, had a more in depth chat/combat channel…
/advice
/trade
/LFG
/Battlegroup
/help
/area
/region
/guild
/group
/tell
/alliance
etc etc…

and it’s battle log was another window you could customize in detail… you saw spells being cast in text, you saw what those spells did, you saw damage numbers and resist rates, you saw ranges if you were too far away, the system messages would tell you everything you needed to know. even death logs, if someone died, it would tell the /region who died and from what.

You could even right click those windows to have specific things be turned on/off to make it less cluttered, and colors of text that you could change to your liking. Damage would be in red or blue or purple or black, it didn’t matter it was what you changed it to.

You could even create your own window customized for your liking where maybe it ONLY showed death spam so you could see who was fighting and where by region… it was clean af…

all the while you can literally move ANY of these UI windows anywhere you wanted on your screen, and it’s size, transparency and text sizes… 20+ years old… it’s crazy it’s not normal to have these mechanics to UI…

DAoC had a player limit of 8 per group- BUT, you could then make a battlegroup with it’s own chat, where there was NO LIMIT to how many people could join said battlegroup, everyone in this group would get exp or realm points as if they were all in the same group.

Would you look at this!!! just look at it… lol that’s JUST for the combat channel… you could literally do the same editing for your chat channel too. Also- there was a default profanity filter that made curse words turn into symbols like &%#* or you could simply type in /filter and disable it.

There were cloaks that you could do /hood and you’d pull your hood over your head… /helm off would make your helm visual be gone if you didn’t like that specific look… there were WAYYYYY more options to play with than NW by far.

If NW wants to take the 3 way system that DAoC pioneered then at least they should have done some research on this game’s success…

I mean… it’s over 20 years old and there are people still playing on the daily, even the “new” or “live” server that isn’t even DAoC anymore, it’s more like WoW in that era/patch of DAoC and it still has around 3k daily players… then the free shards have around 2-5k players and there are several free shards that share the same population, just different patch versions… That’s rearing up on NW population when added all up and it’s not really a bad thing, just goes to show you how beast of a game DAoC was and currently is. There are 5800 signed up for Atlas (free shard) and it’s just in beta atm until the 24th.

If you’re going to take those ideals from DAoC, at least they gotta do their damn homework and see the reasons WHY it did so well (2022 and still being played by both new and old players)

and if that makes you laugh at their current pop… just take this into consideration, Live DAoC is for real 15 bucks a month… They currently make around $4.3 mil- in a single month subscription XD they are flexing on NW right now. and they haven’t done a single thing except exist for 20 years… Speaking of flexing… The emote system DAoC had was also more in depth XD
You could either /emote and type in anything… like fart… or puke or w/e you wanted, the emote would still work.
Then you had:
/slap
/flex
/dance
/mememe (you waved both hands in the air almost as if asking for someone to pick you)
/stagger (you looked like you were staggering/drunk)
/victory
/cheer
/charge
/rofl
/laugh
/monty (it was the monty python holy grail fake horse riding that NW took XD )
/induct
/dismiss
/wave
the list goes on and on… and they were all free.