Greetings Champions,
On Monday, March 9 2020, we will stop supporting Global Chat across Cryptic games. This decision was not made lightly but was necessitated by the resources required to sustain this feature and the standard of quality we strive for across our games.
The following features will no longer be available:
• Cross game chat (including cross-game private message)
• Cross game private user-owned channels
• Cross game friend/ignore list
Cross channels that currently exist will remain within each game, with the messages staying within the shard the message originated from. For example, if you are a member of a channel on both STO and NW, you will still have the channel available in both games but only see messages that originate in the game you are currently on.
0
Comments
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Please reverse this decision, I have many friends spread across the three games and the cross-chat is the only way of keeping in contact with them. It's always been a useful feature I've enjoyed using over the years. This is a detriment to the player-base in a massive way. Please do not do this.
-Pariba
the logic of this seems pretty off, and very counterproductive, IMO
what next of Our Great Wonders are we losing next?
Game.
This looks to be an unwise decision. Cross-game chat is one of the features the community seems to love most here, allowing players of Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and D&D: Neverwinter a much more convenient means of staying in communication with eachother without having to rely on some other messaging system. Really, it's quite a genius idea, and more game companies should do it when they manage multiple MMOs.
It's possible to live without it, sure, but is it honestly truly necessary to do away with? Is it that big of a burden to the system?
__________________________________________________________________
Alts:
Lord Sans (Full Healer FF)/Axel Leonard (Crowd Controller/Off-Tank)
- - - - - -
Feel free to visit my websites!^^:
DeviantART|FurAffinity|
Twitter
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
When this goes, I'll probably go.
Champions Online has been the Cinderella of their MMOS after all
Can't have it along with the spoiled rich sisters, STO and NWO
Also there's the question about numbers. how much server is needed to actually host all of that?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My characters
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My characters
The chat system here is unprecedented and serves to bring all three gaming communities closer to each other. It makes it more likely that a new player of one game might try out the others, because they know they'll be able to stay in touch with their friends in the original game while they do, and that they can get advice or help from their friends for whatever event or quest they're stuck on whether their friends/guild/fleet/whatever are currently fighting dragons or Borg cubes or Qwyjibo.
Please, let us keep talking to each other. Let us keep gaming together.
How does removing this increase your players life expectancy and service?
[insert silence]
It could be processing or network related; the cost of message transmission scales with number of messages * number of possible recipients, so it's typically quadratic in player count. On the other hand, it's not like anything has changed recently that would make it harder, and both network and processing costs are lower today than five or ten years ago. I suppose they could be expecting an enormous influx of players for Magic: Legends, or they could be converting their chat system to SSL.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Cryptic, please, PLEASE no
i have way too many pals spread across the games and while we might have our personal favorites, when a bunch of us are online, we like to coordinate and hang out on the same game
in fact, i have personally introduced many, many players to your other titles via this feature
this is one of the more unique and certainly one of the absolute best features of a Cryptic title, please, please do not remove this convenience
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
Social Media interactivity(autotweeting perks and milestone achievements. Publishing screenshots directly to Twitter)
Crypticspace Blogging Service
Rate my Champion!
Checking and sending ingame mail from website
Champedia(Armory for CO)
Website Cryptic Store
Pulling headshots from your ingame character and using them as forum avatars.
XMPP
MashON Comic Book Creation Tool
Cryptic global chat functionality(Coming Soon!)
Lots of sunsets, no dawns.
also totally deserved
> This is hilarious
>
> also totally deserved
————————————-
————————————-
What is?
The trend for removing content has been ongoing for well over 2 years now. Whenever someone in the community spoke out about it or took a stance (Bluhman, brou to cite the most recents) the rest of the community would instead troll them by going "lol this doesn't affect me" or outright harass them instead of supporting them.
Well now here you have it, you've proved Cryptic time and time again that the community would work up any mental gymnastic to try and justify their decisions to the point where they don't even have to worry about coming up with an excuse themselves, someone in the community will, so they decided "lol, let's remove chat in a frigging MMO". Some people have gone as far as creating a safe space for the Cryptic team to hang out and be praised for their "oh thank you dev for writing some elementary grade text narrative over some rehashed content and calling it programming new content" skills, while also rooting out any hint of negative feedback.
Thank god I found another company and game to spend time and money on a couple months back, cause every time I drop by to see "hey, maybe CO got gud again" it's only more stuff being gutted out of the already rotten corpse of the game.
I just wish I had taken up the offer on my account a couple years ago, now it's probably worth nothing.
Pretty much this.
I will try to keep up with you and all my friends, by playing in Champions, after my eye surgery this week. It is very sad, I used this feature very often to communicate and talk to STO friends. Since I no longer actively play on STO, I will not be able to shout out to them from NW and CO. They pulled the Foundry from both STO and NW and now cross chat from all the games. I wonder what they plan to remove next?
Have Fun
Raging Princess Blaze + Model 286 + Red Inferno + Burgundy Beetle
tbf what I was on about was a feature change rather than a feature removal (a foolish feature change that presented a major usability/UI downgrade, but it wasn't removing anything.) At the same time that change also wasn't making maintaining the game easier so who even knows why they thought it was a good idea in the first place to spend time developing it.
Everything else is right on the money. Cryptic isn't making it exactly subtle they're on a massive decline. The breakdown of core, groundwork systems that essentially stand behind all of their game offerings is shoddy programming biting the entire company in the butt after a decade of working with insane deadlines from publishers like Atari, who too were also folding fast. What's especially weird in this case is that they're removing what (in a well-designed system) would basically be an interchangeable endpoint/API that would be able to generalize chat data or text from any source, part of why and how the in-game chat sources could plug into XMPP in the past, why would that be a major consideration for a feature removal? How much even does it cost to keep a server endpoint open?
Having applied for positions at Cryptic in the past (yes I've wanted to work on this game), I reflect on that notion: Considering the current state of things and how much they make excuses that it's too hard to implement feature X or Y, I've reconsidered that idea heavily. They've basically defeated the purpose of having a game engine - You make a game engine and toolkit to make designing maps, campaigns, content, whatever, easier. Not harder. So why is doing anything so hard for them? But at the same time I have to take that mindset with a grain of salt - I remember back when Cryptic was in charge of CoX that they said, steadfastly, that things such as animation replacements for attacks (i.e. let me do something else with MA other than just kicks all day) would never happen. Cut about 5 years later and Paragon Studios was in charge of the game and - what do you know, the mad lads did it. It's honestly hard to tell how much of it is just poor code maintenance and how much is just laziness, but in the end the two really do feed into one another: lazy coding shortcuts early on are going to make for tech debt later on. I'm not going to be the one to pick up the pieces. I don't envy anyone who works at Cryptic as an actual developer or community manager. You're very brave individuals.
Double that is the fact that the development team, kael, kais, et. al, don't make it exactly subtle that they don't listen to people who complain - it's likely because they already know what's wrong with what's going on, they're just powerless to do anything about it because whatever Cryptic orders are sent from above they have to follow or they're fired. It's clear just from how the company manages CO in comparison to NW and STO that the company as a whole works as a single unit: the entire machine favors only one or two offerings at a time. And with MTG: It's not Diablo we swear (tm) coming up now they're redirecting hosting costs and resources to getting that game online. A properly-managed company likely would've ensured their in-deployment products were probably staffed up properly to keep operation going on as usual before making the move to buy into the business venture of trying to develop, produce, advertise, and release an entirely new title. But this is being done on a budget so tight that even the tiniest bits and pieces of bandwidth from other projects - foundries, chat channels, social media hosting - need to get stripped down to even have a hope of making this product succeed.
The standard of quality.
maybe it is still early and they are in the process of separating the chat servers (hopefully) and i am just being panicky, but guys, please keep a check on this if you have contacts on the other titles:
as of posting this: we can see friends between neverwinter and star trek when they are online but not on nor for champions (unless you check via custom channel userlist)
again:
if you are on trek, you can see nw contacts online, but not champs
if you are on nw, you can see trek contacts online, but not champs
if you are on champs, you can not see any contacts online from the other games
you can always see contacts who are online in custom channels regardless of game
also, again: maybe they are still in the process and it will take a day or two, but be aware and also help update if possible
I think it's just random, I wouldn't get too paranoid. I was in STO and could see a CO friend log on. I could even see someone in CO chatting in a channel we're both in. And a friend in CO could see me in STO. While in STO, however, I could not see a friend on in Neverwinter, but my friend in CO could.
thank you~
glad to hear... well, not glad (because favorite QoL feature is getting smothered) but you know what i mean >.>
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
This chat system has been around since 2009. I don't think they even upgraded it. But it's been around for 11 years the fact it lasted this long is amazing to me.
Just pull the plug off already if you gonna keep gutting and lowering the quality of the game.
mhm, was thinking that pretty much (been around long enough) until my friend and i started seeing the same results regarding our contacts and immediately my heart just saaaank ugh >.<
back to being just extremely annoyed i guess~
Jon makes a good point.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
A: traffic volume, IE running four games through one sever is too much traffic.
B: exception handling for items from other games.
It's a lot easier to make the server work when you don't have to code it to display things from OTHER games.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My characters
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained