How about some main menu chat systems a la Airmech? Ignore the friend list error (Servers for Airmech are down ATM so I took this from a bug report topic) and focus on the chat. Global: General Purpose Chat Faction: Clan/Guild specific Chat Party: Party Chat. Coordinate with people who you're about to play a game with (not against), among other things. Market: For the game's player market, we obviously wouldn't use this. Info: Chat that shows a few helpful things such as accessing replays, recent purchases, etc. We could have similar chats. Global: What you'd think it would be. Clan: Also what you'd think it would be. Party: Yet again... Info: Allows you to do stuff like /chronocam (game#), /stats (unit), etc. Chat moderators should have optional stealth, meaning that they could use the chat and appear like anybody else, or use a moderator specific chat color or something along those lines. Airmech also has player username colors based on level (basically time spent on the game), do we want something along those lines? Thoughts?
I dont think we even need a big discussion what a good client looks like. Look at the general outline of FAF (didnt make zepilot also a topic like this?) or GPGnet. Basically they enable you to: - Quickly get into a game - Meet new people to play with - Manage your contacts in a friendlist - Hang out in the chat while doing other random unrelated stuff So that screenshot seems to show an implementation of these requirements from the looks of it.
Also want to add that access to Mods and such is important as well, maybe not so much right at release but long term it's going to be very important. Mike
Maybe give Mods a special mod tab where they can see alerts and a /modalert command to alert mods of something?
The more I think about this whole idea of global chat the more I like it. Maybe Uber should just toss together a simple proof-of-concept and activate it for a week or two to test it out and see what they and the community think of it.
