I Was Not Kidding About Level 1-29 Chat

I saw this in Rift Prime tonight and had to laugh.

world broadcast…

See, turning off Level 1-29 chat is something I fully recommend.  Even the devs are sick of it.

 

5 thoughts on “I Was Not Kidding About Level 1-29 Chat”

  1. carson63000

    Haha..

    I’ve been playing some Path of Exile lately. I dip in every year or so when a patch looks interesting. Sure enough, almost immediately, general chat starts scrolling quickly as the “lol D3 sucks” train gets rolling.

    Seriously, I first checked this game out in open beta five years ago, and THE SAME CONVERSATION is still happening in general chat.

    I said, “Blizzard must have done something right, you guys have been talking about their game 24/7 for the last five years”. Nobody replied to me. :-)

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  2. UltrViolet

    Ha yeah. Seen many of those world messages. I’m reminded of a commenter on my blog who was sure that RIFT Prime would keep the free-to-play riff raff out of the chat so it could be used by the much more sophisticated pay-only subscribers.

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  3. bhagpuss

    I think there’s more to what’s happening in Rift Prime than just “general chat is bad”. I always have general/world chat open in every MMO I play. I like it. I participate in it. In almost all MMOs I find it varied, interesting and amusing. Yes, there are always troll, bad jokes, moments of stunning stupidity, offensive comments and so on, but by and large my overall experience with general chat in most MMOs over nearly twenty years has been that the good-spirited, light-hearted, helpful comments outweigh the rest. In new games, where everyone is excited to be there, that’s even more often the case.

    Rift Prime 1-29 is nothing like that. What it is like is the very worst caricature of WoW chat – in my experience, though, even WoW chat isn’t that bad, except in Auction. It’s all very well to just switch it off (I have) but those people are still the people you are sharing a server with and the sheer volume of chat in the channel suggests that it’s no small minority – certainly not a minority of the voluble and active people who usually provide the context in which everyone else plays.

    It’s indicative of a much deeper problem for Rift in general and Prime in particular, I think, that relates to the way the game has been marketed and the market position it originally tried to take, as a direct replacement for WoW. There’s also an odd sub-demographic of MMO players coalescing around the idea that playing on servers that somehow replicate the experience of MMOs from their past, part icularly if they have to pay an entry fee, confers some kind of “elite” status over normal MMO players. It’s really coming out in force on Prime.

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  4. Gevlon

    What did they do? Anal spam? “Edgy” racism? Or just generic display of them being complete morons?

    I have trouble realizing why there is such thing as general chat. What good do the devs expect to come out of it? I mean anonymously socializing with people you have no common goal with cannot possibly end up other than horrible.

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  5. Wilhelm Arcturus Post author

    There wasn’t anything particularly astounding in Level 1-29 chat, just the usual nonsense and arguments and trolling and complaining. Lots of complaining. Some of the complaints were legit. For example, the server doesn’t seem quite up to the task of running invasion events smoothly. But mostly it was just the complete morons route.

    It seemed to be magnified by Trion’s failure to set expectations well. As I noted in the previous post, Trion was sending mixed messages and people grabbed on to the part they wanted only to find out about the other aspects after they were already playing.

    I think the strangest thing was that it was that chat channel that became the toxic pool. I guess it was the server wide channel they dumped everybody into. Being server wide magnified things as well.

    Still, the server seems to be a success so far. There is market there to be served.

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