(The lack of) world chat was as important as population cap in vanilla.
Back then it was not used at all! You could create the channel but noone would join since they didn't know it existed. People went to major cities to look for others in /Trade which doesn't even have everyone in it.

Everytime someone left a dungeon in the middle you had to whisper your friends or go for the Trade channel.
That was painful but it paved the road for good friendships. You knew you had to make friends with most people you've completed a dungeon with (even DPS) because it was wise to keep patient and reliable people close.

Warlocks were much more welcomed in groups because they could summon you back with the new guy.

If the world channel exists, it'll be a short announcment on /4. World and you won't be urged to add good players to friends because you are likely to find any role whenever you want.

Besides, existence of world chat kills the spirit of local chats like Barrens Chat!
In vanilla you felt a warm feeling for different places like Barrens because you thought "Here's lot's of people to talk to, maybe even for a dungeon group".

Are you concerned that they will add an auto-joined global channel? Isn't it more likely that they won't?

emberfiend wrote: ↑

6 years ago

Are you concerned that they will add an auto-joined global channel? Isn't it more likely that they won't?

No I'm concerned %99 of players will join the custom world chat by themselves.

I don't think that will be an issue. If everyone is using world chat that will become saturated too fast, making it less usable. If I'm in Westfall and want to create a DM group, I'd rather use /1 than /world, because then I know the ones that are reading are my target audience.

Wasn't there some kind of innkeeper that would let a player join a party looking for more people of some sort? I think that was related to the meeting stones... but who cares.

I'm pretty sure mumble (at least in EU), forums, messenger and IRC were widely used back then, now it's TS3, Discord, Reddit, etc. It's the same gameish but with a different big player.

World chat isn't a problem, never was, it's just a way to communicate, a tool. To make it simple to understand, communities in video games needs communication tools, and blizzard created the /join /leave medium as a tool, no more, no less!

C4N wrote: ↑

6 years ago

blizzard created the /join /leave medium as a tool, no more, no less!

Yeah but I think they were not thinking of a channel consisting of all online players. You used to be isolated and small. I think typing something that everyone reads is contradictory to the vanilla feeling. I'm not making a huge deal out of it, but still.

Not gonna lie, part of me wants to pony up for a Ventrillo server just for the feels.

What would be your thoughts on a realm (faction) wide discord server? I thought about creating one, once the servers were announced and I chose mine. The main intention would be to relatively easily find people to play/group up with, talk about the game etc. even when you cant play at that moment. Think of it like "ill be home in 2 hours, who is up for SM?" instead of logging in and searching quite some time.
Would you consider that detrimental to the game too?

I personally don't join the world chat just for the same reason, I like to explore the map and in order to look for people I just search for them in the /who tab. Maybe a lot of people joins world chat but that doesn't mean that's the only chat they see so it shouldn't be an issue for the playability of the rest

Well that's your opinion, I really like /world channels and was amazed to find out they are a thing. For me the classic experience isn't tanked by having a channel that helps with grouping / regrouping.

And as others already said: general might be faster, even if you are an alliance toon idling around Scarlet Monastery.

I think world chat is a non-issue. People who don't like it, don't have to use it. For others it's a great capital city chat replacement. I remember that in vanilla it was possible to join capital's general, trade and LFG chats from anywhere in the world, but you had to type in location (which was cumbersome). Nowadays I'd just rather join world.

The only thing I don't like is using /world as trade chat. Maybe we should split it into /worldtrade, /worldlfg and just /world.

If 99% of people join, you can bet they'll be given a reason to leave pretty damn quickly.

Umm I used global LFG channel which you had to join manually in vanilla and early tbc until meeting stones/lfg killed it. It was fairly active..

World chat is not going to cause any problems. removing it would not be blizzlike tbh.

Barrens chat is not going anywhere regardless (as evidenced by private servers), the only thing that would kill barrens chat is pc culture within Blizzard.

C4N wrote: ↑

6 years ago

Wasn't there some kind of innkeeper that would let a player join a party looking for more people of some sort? I think that was related to the meeting stones... but who cares.

No, that is a private server alternation due to low player count, like world chat.

People will use the World chat like they use the LookingForGroup chat or even the Localdefense or worlddefense.