Chat Channels - minor rantFollow

Okay. We have four basic chat channels available to us at the beginning of the game. General, Trade, Local Defense, and Global Defense. Each of these has a purpose (although Trade is shut down except in towns).


Why is it that half of the population in the game insists on doing PvP chatter on the General channel? Use the Local Defense channel, for crying out loud! That's what it's there for!

Before you start flaming me over this, think about it. Yes, it does make a difference. There are a lot of players who, as soon as they log in a new character, immediately do /LEAVE 1 to get away from the inane, adolescent BS that goes on most of the time in General. Me, I can ignore most of it. But when you shout, "Lv. 55 NE Hunter camping my corpse SE from Xroads," on General, you're missing a good chunk of the audience that might help you.

Then there's the opposite side of the coin: people who used /LEAVE 3 to avoid all of the PvP chatter, because they just want to level. By spamming General with PvP chatter, you're pissing these people off.

That's not all. There's also the fact of the customizable UI. Personally, I change the colors of the different channels, so that I can tell at a glance what's going on - and Local Defense, in particular, is a nice bright red so that it catches my attention. If you're going off about some PvP on channel 1, I'm not paying attention to it - and I'm sure that there are dozens of others who set their channels up in a similar fashion.

So, please. Do everyone a favor, and use Local Defense for PvP chatter. That's what it's there for; if you use it, you guarantee that you'll reach the broadest range of people who could possibly help you.

Thank you.

Edited, Sun Dec 12 21:07:05 2004 by Nekojin

On the same topic what annoys me is ppl selling stuff on the general channel that what the trade channel is for i hate seeing WTB or WTS on general just use /2, if you want to sell/buy something.

Well if its not in a town you can't balme them since /2 isn't available anywhere but the cities really.

This is also something that gets on my nearves sometimes, and i've actually turned off both 1 and 3 on my char before... Being on a RP server this doesn't hurt me as much as if I was on a PvP server. Reason I turned off both is because I would /leave 1 and people would just suddenly pop up in 3 asking a question outa the blue from 1 like "what level?". How the heck am I supposed to know whats going on exactly? Of course I can guess there are some oposing faction (have chars on both sides on different servers) members somewhere, but where, when, how long ago they popped up, other things...

Global Defense is a channel that you have to manually turn on - it's off by default. Its purpose is for rally defense in a heavily-hit Contested zone, or coordinate a multi-pronged attack on a zone.