In any MMO I play, I usually end up turning off some of the chat channels. Out of Character is usually the first to go, quickly followed by Looking for Group and anything General, Noob, Level, or Advice related.
Of course, there is a cost. It means I end up missing exchanges like this one from LOTRO about twenty times a night:
[Advice] B***: ‘are there guns in this game?’
[Advice] R*****: ‘…’
[Advice] L*****: ‘Yes… you get shotguns and plasma rifles’
[Advice] V*******: ‘The best you’ll get are the fiery bombs wielded by sapper goblins.’
[Advice] S****: ‘Do you know anything about lotr?’
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I usually turn off many channels but occasionally you get some gems. One of my favorites was an exchange in an EQ2 channel where someone was trying to form a guild, and their name was HealingPackage. Basically it was about a 15 minute exchange of ridicule of the name and suggestions. I suggested that the other members of the guild would be TankPackage, StabPackage, and so forth. Others said the guild name should be UPS. It was hilarious all around.
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WoW was the first MMOG where I started to turn off a number of the chat channels – Barrens chat was what pushed me over the edge there.
After that, that has also been the case when I returned to EQ2, to AO and of course also LotRO. Perhaps a sign of the times, it certainly was not an issue when I first played AO.
In CoV/CoH I do not have that problem, but with people being in instances most of the time, the outdoor zone broadcast channels do not have much traffic. There are no noisy defaults you have to turn off, but rather that you find the noise/chat channels you want.
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I find that I tend to turn of all of the public chanels. This basically leaves me with Guild / Group / Raid chat and /tells.
Even that sometimes is more than I can handle hehe. Getting tells from friends and watching what I am doing in game as well as guild chat it plenty enough :)
I just see this as a parallel to real life. When you are down at the mall you focus on talking to those you are with – you dont listen to everyones conversations – you just can’t be attentive in that many directions.
Besides, I dont really want to log on to a game and have my R&R time spoilt by “hearing” people hurling insults at each other or whatever. OMG listen to me – I sound like a mean old lady lol.
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I turn off a majority of the channels, but luckily in EQ2 the game has a great chat system seperated by levels and the population is for the most part more mature than other games.
Still one thing I noticed, even popping into Eve for the 1st time tonight that in EVERY damn game people are so busy talking about what game they are going to leave and go to and they arent actually playing the one the they are currently logged into. EVERY game I logged into this weekend ( and I tried like 4 just see my recent post) i saw at least once an hour an argument between people about what game they are going to bandwagon to next.
Vanguard, Warhammer, Conan blah blah blah blah. Everyone thinks that the next game will be the savior and the best one ever, but the fact is the grass is never greener on the other side. Just something funny and annoying that I noticed in the chat channels. Sorry for the rant
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I don’t know how many times in LOTRO I’ve seen “do hunters get guns?” over and over and over. It makes me think WoW is really destroying civilization sometimes. Maybe if those kids were actually reading LOTR or other books, and played WoW 10% of the time, they’d have a clue.
Healing Package? Did he have a theme song?
Well, when I get that feeling, I need ….
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PvtHudson – totally agree man, I hear that a lot and thats usually when I turn it off. I don’t like to hear why people are leaving the game i’m currently playing, it ticks me off and makes me feel like I was a chump for dropping 50$ on it.
You have to admit though, some of the crap that gets thrown out there in all of the /ooc channels is hilarious. Maybe thats why i keep turning it back on.
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