Global Chat and the Avatars of Justice

Submitted by circeus on Wed, 03/16/2005 - 11:54am.

General Business

Global Chat went live on March 16th, 2005.

For ease of use, our Global Chat channel is aoj.

For alliance chat with the Archons of Justice, we share the Global Chat channel justice.

You can find a list of Global Chat Handles for both groups here.

This is a private channel (much like a private IRC channel for those familiar with them). This means that you can only join if invited. This is just to make sure that this channel is for us, and us alone.

The entire supergroup should receive invites to this channel (if they are not already a member of the channel) the next time they log in. If you do not please say so in regular SG chat or send a message to me via global chat. My Global Chat handle is Circeus. To contact me in game you can use: /t @Circeus, (msgtext).

I will be honest here... Global Chat is an overcomplicated mucky muck of a chat system. Too hard for the average user and not feature rich enough for the advanced user. Its still prone to a number of annoyances (which I'll cover below), that you need to be aware of.

That said, I'll give you this quick primer and some links that I think will help you out further...

* Cross Server. Global Chat is so named because it can occur between different servers. This means that you could talk to Miss Tigress as she gets her role playing fix over on Virtue, just as easily as you could talk with Fuzun on Justice.

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* Chat Handle. This is how you are referenced in Global Chat. For example (as mentioned above), my Chat Handle is Circeus. Your initial Chat Handle will be determined one of two ways:

a) If you are registered at the Official Forums, then your display name there will become your default Chat Handle.

b) If not, then the first character you log in as the first time you activate Global Chat (this either happened when you used /chatbeta 1 before or will happen the next time you log in).

Note: the following changes may occur to your Chat Handle. Any underscores (_) will be replaced with spaces. If your Chat Handle conflicts with another Chat Handle then one or more spaces will be replaced with a dash (-).

Note: when referencing a Chat Handle always preface it with an @ symbol. This way the game will know its a Chat Handle and not a character name.

Important: you are allowed to change your Chat Handle, but you can do so ONLY ONCE. Once you change your Chat Handle you may never be able to do so again. It is unclear if support can change them another time, though they likely can to remove offensive Chat Handles, but likely will not change them for other reasons. Blame this on the old griefer tactic of changing the name to hide the face.

To change your Chat Handle you issue the command: /changehandle name

For example, if you'd like to change your Chat Handle to "Bobo the Magnificent" you would issue the command: /changehandle Bobo the Magnificent

And if the name is not taken then you will get that name. If not you can try changing it to something else. Once something sticks, you're done.

You can view your Chat Handle at any time via the /myhandle command.

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* Global Friends. With Global Chat comes Global Friends. What this means is that you can add another player to your Global Friends list, and if they accept (by adding you to their own Global Friens list). You will see them listed by their Chat Handle on the Global Friends tab of your Friends window. You will be able to see what character they are playing what server they are playing on and even what mission map they're on as well as their team size and other variables.

There are a few ways to add a global friend:

a) If you know their Chat Handle, you can just type: /gfriend handle

b) You could add them globally by their character name: /gfriend character -- this will ultimately add them by their Chat Handle.

c) In the Friends window under the Global Friends tab you can use the Add button which will allow you to enter a chat handle or a character name.

To ditch a global friend either right-click on them and choose to remove them OR use the /gunfriend handle command.

List your global friends either by /gfriends or just look in the Global Friends tab.

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* Sending Messages to Global Friends. This is done the same way you do it for characters. For example, to send a message to the character Starmaster you used:

/tell Starmaster, message

To send a Chat Handle is the same. Just remember the @ symbol as mentioned above:

/tell @Circeus, message

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* Chat Tabs. By default, just being subscribed to a channel is not enough to see the messages from a channel. You must first make sure the channel is added to a chat tab. To do this you right click on one of your green tabs and choose Edit Tab.

This will bring up a window. The left side of the window shows the channels that tab has active, and the right shows the remaining available channels. Please note that these are not just Global Chat channels but also include standard chat window channels.

Find the channel on the right that you want to make active on the tab, and either double click it or click it once and then choose Add.

When you are done click Okay. And now you will be able to see messages from that chat channel on that tab.

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* Sending Global Chat. So now that you're on a channel, and its on a tab so you can see messages from the channel, how do you send messages to the channel. That can be done via the send command: /send channel, message

So sending to the aoj channel would be as simple as: /send aoj, message

One thing I've done is this. Figuring that to activate chat normally we use the Enter key that assinging the aoj channel to Shift+Enter would be nice. To do this I've used the following bind:

SHIFT+ENTER "show chat$$beginchat /send aoj, "

Which you can add to your bind file and reload it, or just add it right into the game client as:

/bind SHIFT+ENTER "show chat$$beginchat /send aoj, "

This bind will make sure the chat window is visible and then start your chat typing with "/send aoj, ". You then just need to follow this up with the message you want to send and you're good to go.

An interesting point is that if a person is not online and you send them a Global Chat message they will receive it the next time they log in. This feature alone far outweighs the silly email feature the game has yet no one uses.

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* See Your Chat Channels. To get an IRC-like who's on the channel listing you just need to bring up the Channel Members window. This on the main game menu as Channel Members. A fast key combo for bring this window up is blackslash-W. Note that the window has a bug and lacks a close button, so you need to use the menu command or the key combo to close it again.

Note: Clicking the Leave button does not close this window, it removes you from the channel you are viewing. You have been warned.

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Bugs...

Okay Global Chat is not just over-complicated, its fraught with some annoying little bugs and nuances:

1) The Channel Member window lacks a close button

2) Bringinh up the Channel Member window does not always cause the main menu to close

3) Chat Channels may inadvertently get removed from Chat Tabs. So it may pay to check your tabs out before getting involved in game or you may be missing text.

4) All Chat Channels are the same color (not so much a bug as an annoyance).

5) You can join, at most, 5 chat channels.

6) Each Chat window can have at most 10 Chat Tabs.

7) The Global Friends window constantly looses its sizing each time you log in. If you expand it, it does not remain expanded the next time you log in.

Cool To fully expand the Global Friends window you need to expand it, then collapse it, then expand it again.