I heard (probably Tali told me) something about why Tom doesn't want a chat inside the game. Does any of you know why?
Personally I think this would be great, specially for new players.
First, this should be in a different thread. If you have a question to ask that's not directly related to an existing thread, just start a new one.
Now, to answer the question, there are a number of reasons, most of which I completely agree with.
To hit some of the highlights:
- When engaging in real-time chat, people are far, far less likely to remain IC.
- Having a real-time chat
within the game would make it much more tempting for realms to require people to actually be on the chat.
- We would have to either roll our own chat (takes a lot of time), use an external service like IRC (over which we would have no control, and which we couldn't keep logs of), or use a pre-written PHP chat library (which still takes time to integrate, and also has memory, disk, and processor overhead, and would have no guarantee of quality).
Having the Chat link for the IRC web client on the account page should provide enough for new players. It gives everyone in BattleMaster a place where we can talk freely, in real-time, about IC and OOC matters, without fear of being required to log on, either at specific times or at all.
