Month: June 2007

[City of Heroes] Since I got the question, I am going to explain an excellent City of Heroes/Villains system that every game should steal. Every account gets a global name, one that is unique across all servers. In-game you would refer to it starting with an “@” so I am @Zubon. This has several uses.

• Global tells: even if you are playing a villain on Justice while I am playing a hero on Pinnacle, you can reach me with: “/tell @Zubon” If I am not currently online, it will save the message for the next time I am online.
• Global friends: if you accept someone as a global friend (/gfriend @name), you will be able to see what characters each other are on, including server, zone, origin, archetype, level, and current team size. You can suppress this with /ghide.
• Global chat: you can set up chat channels that people can join (with whatever permissions you want) from any server. You can have five channels running at once.

No matter where I am or what I am doing, I can find my friends.

: Zubon

[City of Heroes] Much of City of Heroes happens in instances. There are a few zones where people hang about outside for various reasons, mostly the auction houses these days, but the missions are instances so we spend most of our time in no particular zone. You could spam broadcast all day long and irritate only a few people at a time. This makes Paragon City feel pretty empty for many new players once they leave the newbie zone.

Instead, we use the global chat system to communicate. That and supergroup/coalition chat, but we use a global channel as the de facto guild chat because at any given time someone might be in an alt supergroup, on the other side of the hero/villain divide, or playing on another server. The same idea makes global channels (multi-)server-wide general chat, reaching people in instances and all zones.

But if you don’t know the server’s favorite channels are, you are still in silence. When I visit another server, I am still listening to the chatter from back home. Let’s help each other out here: what is your server’s most popular global chat channel(s), and what is/are it/they used for? On Pinnacle, for example, we mostly use PinnacleBadges, for general chat as well as sharing badge hunting/missions; using it to look for a normal group is usually considered poor manners, but looking for task force members is perfectly fine. Off-topic chat is extensive.

With any luck, the comments here will be a useful resource for players trying to find the community across the servers.

: Zubon