Game status brain dump

i doubt any kind of official ranked stuff would happen before Release.

Mike

I really hope so as well. With their previous games, on PC, the in-game voice chat has been very lackluster. In SMNC the in-game voice chat is completely broken and doesn't even work. At all.

With their current funding I would hope they can actually devote resources to have a meaningful, working, in-game voice chat.

TO be honest, after seeing BF4 VOIP, I would prefer it if they didn't... teamspeak/skype are enough really. The third party things do a better job..

BUT I don't see any reason why they can't "integrate" it into the game itself.

So what you're actually saying is that you're against a global chat UNLESS it's something you have to access on your own and that leaves you indifferent to it.

Mike

I'm indifferent to global chat personally, I just think it should be there for other people who want to use it.

Think StarCraft 2, the chat is by default minimized. I just don't want it by default hurling crap at me. If I want to talk to someone, I click the chat button and it pops up revealing the channel.

Maybe I'm over-sensitive and have had few good experiences with chat services, but the vulgar nature they almost always devolve to pisses me off. If others have no problem with that, then that is there choice, click the button.

I vote for global chat to be an opt in thing. Make people think. Then we would have only the people smart enough to opt in - and no the dumb trolls. Heck, the IRC we use now seems to work pretty well. Mind it doesn't include everyone at once, but maybe i like the same group of people eh?
Oh, and this might help: http://xkcd.com/810/

we need UberChat! Its a place for short questions, for game hosting and other more or less important stuff. You should also be able to chat from lobbies to global chat.

if you fear it gets out of control, find some good moderators, like you have in the forums.

Its a bummer we wont be seeing any units soon, but knowing what is happening behind the scenes is great! Some awesome stuff you guys are working on!

Done that a while ago already :
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/my-not-so-humble-view-about-the-game-lobby.52896/

Try FAF then. Bullying is highly prohibited. It doesn't happen a lot, and it's almost immediatly punished.
We have a 700 users chat, it's not cluttered, and we only have two moderators only at the same time at best. It's already enough. FA community is very mature, I guess it could requires a little more than that for PA.

Most of game chat are not moderated because EA/Blizzard/whatever doesn't care.
That's why you have a terrible experience.
Doesn't have to be that way.

Believe me, once you had a good chat experience for a game, you don't want a multiplayer game without it anymore.

I tried FAF briefly (only a few days) and the chat centric nature of it turned me off. i much prefer impersonal gaming- i dont want to get to know people, i really just want AI games with Human intelligence running the AI. however i will admit that for what it was/is trying to do it does a very very good job. just it isnt for me.

Global chat would be nice in the main menu. The game can use what basically is already a mod (lingering chat box)

Or, they could get a ts3 server for the game, and get ts3 to allow them to include their installer as an opt in for installing the game. It would technically come with the game so nobody could complain.

Hm, did you felt pushed to talk to these people?
Did the chat went in the way of enjoying the game with some friends?

And another thing thepilot. i dont have the facts and figures to back this up so is pure speculation

Its hard for me to articulate what im thinking but perhaps part of the reason you get such good feedback for the FAF project might have more to do with the crossection of people you are collecting the feedback from.
Most of the people giving the positive feedback will be the players at the social end of the spectrum. that is those that value the interaction/community.
Whereas people like me that are turned off by it will either like me not persist with the game, or if they value the rest of the mod enough they may just be non participatory in the community sense.
When you then go across to the forum landscape, should you conduct a poll on the merits of community intensive v no-community intensive i think its a no-brainer that the community intensive perspective is likely to be more popular. this is because those that dislike the community are unlikely to join a forum, reasonable assumption? so even if only half of a theoretical gaming community liked that approach, in a forum such as this the social-centric version would be viewed far, far more favourably than its polar opposite game focussed social-interaction minimising conterpart. even if in terms of total players both alternatives were valued by the total player base equally.

Edit:

No but the fact that it was so front and centre did make me feel uncomfortable, more like it was facebook rather than a games service. obviously you know as well as i do that someone can play the game without getting involved in the social part of the game. What i mean is that the emphasis put on the social aspect in FAF, to me, in my personal view translated to less emphasis being put on the game. if i want to play a game i want to play it not talk about playing it. If i want to be social i go to Forum/Facebook/Wechat/etc. i know my views are different than lots of others maybe even the majority of others (definitely the majority of other users on this forum) but i hope you can understand my perspective. I'm definitely not having a go at FAF, its a good product, just not for me.
Stormie

Thanks for the communication Uber!

it has to happen before release to iron out any bugs in the ladder.

I'm just trying to understand what turned you down as indeed, the chat is not intrusive.

There might be a design flaw that I can fix, or it can be an ideology more than facts, that I can't do anything against.
It seems to be the latter.

I think it's also important to Uber to evaluate those things. Some people might be turned down by the lack of chat, some by the presence of it.
From my experience, the latter category is small enough to be ignored, while the first is what is what is making a game viable in the long run.

ie. I have a lot of feedback of players not liking having infos through twitter/facebook, or not liking having to go to the forum for tech support, but these were very happy about the chat.

Without a chat on GPGNet, I wouldn't be involved so much into the game, I wouldn't know any other FA players, FAF wouldn't exist, and FA would be long gone.

I have feedback from such people, but I choose to ignore them as they are part of a small minority who don't like something more for principle than facts.

Ie. the argument of being bullied is fallacious : if you are going to get bullied, it's in the game itself, not the main chat. Also the in-game can't be moderated easily, while the main chat is.

I have to take in account the pro VS the cons, and all in all, I don't see any viable cons. They are more speculations than facts. But feel free to post more of them, I've changed my mind of bigger issues than that because of good arguments

Great status update !

This is going to be fun can't wait to see how that looks.

Global Chat , just turn it on.