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Global Chat Sunset

ambassadorkael#6946 ambassadorkael Posts: 95 Administrator
edited March 2020 in Super News Network
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.
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Comments

  • This sucks, a lot.
  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    one less reason to try NW/STO/MTG:lol i guess
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  • panthrax77panthrax77 Posts: 309 Arc User
    Huh. Always thought this was just a built-in feature. Sad to see it go.
  • tenebriswolftenebriswolf Posts: 54 Arc User
    "Standard of quality" for a game that is begging to get more attention and instead has more stuff taken away. And I thought I've seen stupid things happen before.
    Mordykus on Dawn Radio
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    Relax guys, they're just unplugging CO from the system so they can flush it without breaking their profitable titles o3o
  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    panthrax77 wrote: »
    Huh. Always thought this was just a built-in feature. Sad to see it go.
    Pretty sure it's just a side effect of them only using a single chat server for multiple games; I guess they decided to make it multiple servers, probably for performance reasons.
  • historiphilehistoriphile Posts: 95 Arc User
    This news is just odious.
  • This is unfortunate. With the cross-chat platform, it's great to have 3 different MMO genres with the same community and friends (more or less). It's what's kept me in Neverwinter instead of moving on to WoW or other fantasy titles.
  • xparibaxxparibax Posts: 149 Arc User
    Dear Cryptic,
    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

  • slibbers2012slibbers2012 Posts: 15 Arc User
    ok, off to Vudu to watch Deadpool for the "we're done here. Fully done." scene since this is step one to a close down.
  • cbncbn Posts: 20 Arc User
    What amount of resources are required for this feature? I've been playing Cryptic games since CO went F2P and, if memory serves, this is the first I've heard of any such problems.
  • mastercontrol7mastercontrol7 Posts: 181 Arc User
    [I'm against this decision]

    the logic of this seems pretty off, and very counterproductive, IMO

    what next of Our Great Wonders are we losing next?
  • ealford1985ealford1985 Posts: 3,582 Arc User
    Next?

    Game.
  • unknown.png
    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?
  • chaosdrgnz43chaosdrgnz43 Posts: 1,674 Arc User
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  • esonverconradeesonverconrade Posts: 9 Arc User
    What exactly is this 'standard of quality' are you striving for here?
  • jonsillsjonsills Posts: 6,318 Arc User
    What exactly is this 'standard of quality' are you striving for here?
    Perhaps the ability for something to fail in one game without shutting down chat for all the others. Have we all forgotten the debacle that accompanied the introduction of vehicles already?
    "Science teaches us to expect -- demand -- more than just eerie mysteries. What use is a puzzle that can't be solved? Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the universe to make sense!"

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  • This is something that I oppose. I really have relied on being able to chat with my friends cross game for any and all kinds of help and such and to just be able to chat with people instead of being ignored by people in the Zone and Local chats or just getting railroaded and swept under the rug and steam rolled out of existence.

    When this goes, I'll probably go.
  • avianosavianos Posts: 6,132 Arc User
    edited March 2020
    Yes I'm absolutely sure PWE is devasted with the decision to kill yet another multiplatform feature-service in order to cut corners and reduce maintance cost
    c33.jpg
    spinnytop wrote: »
    Relax guys, they're just unplugging CO from the system so they can flush it without breaking their profitable titles o3o
    Champions Online has been the Cinderella of their MMOS after all :grimace:
    Can't have it along with the spoiled rich sisters, STO and NWO​​
    Post edited by avianos on
    POWERFRAME REVAMPS, NEW POWERS and BUG FIXES > Recycled Content and Events and even costumes at this point Introvert guy who use CO to make his characters playable and get experimental with Viable FF Theme builds! Running out of Unique FF builds due to the lack of updates and synergiesPlaying since 1 February 2011 98+ Characters (7 ATs, 91 FFs) ALTitis for Life!
  • sapphiechusapphiechu Posts: 268 Arc User
    I am very much against this intended change to the chat system, and would like to know more details as to why it NEEDS to happen.
    3856039c53d222b47efa23bc56b3c976ccefd059.jpg
  • retehi#8400 retehi Posts: 32 Arc User
    the standard of quality we strive for across our games.

  • megaskullmonmegaskullmon Posts: 313 Arc User
    edited March 2020
    Oddly if you read the STO forums to folks that think.. This is not happening to them it is. They're throwing an even worse fit. Neverwinters chat about it is locked and no one really seems to care there. So again if folks this is just happening to CO is wrong. They're doing it to all three games and STO feels the same way you guys do. Nothign to do with this rich and so on. But they're talking about it in Neverwinter forums. But you have to dig into their forums to find it. Their forum set up for never winter is crap.
  • avianosavianos Posts: 6,132 Arc User
    edited March 2020
    Time to visit the neighbors' MMORPGs game forums and do some research-reading
    e3e.png​​
    POWERFRAME REVAMPS, NEW POWERS and BUG FIXES > Recycled Content and Events and even costumes at this point Introvert guy who use CO to make his characters playable and get experimental with Viable FF Theme builds! Running out of Unique FF builds due to the lack of updates and synergiesPlaying since 1 February 2011 98+ Characters (7 ATs, 91 FFs) ALTitis for Life!
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User
    panthrax77 wrote: »
    Huh. Always thought this was just a built-in feature. Sad to see it go.
    Pretty sure it's just a side effect of them only using a single chat server for multiple games; I guess they decided to make it multiple servers, probably for performance reasons.
    Well, I wonder if it's due to what happens when items get linked? Like jonsills said about vehicles, adding vehicles to CO crashed chat game wide in STO. Adding a third game didn't ruin things, adding a fourth?

    Also there's the question about numbers. how much server is needed to actually host all of that?
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  • kirenshee3kirenshee3 Posts: 1 Arc User
    I think this is a bad idea. It seems pretty clear to your player base that those making the decision don't actually look at how the players rely on this. DawnRadio for example. Cross game events and such. For me, I play Sto when champs is slow. I rely on the cross over chats to keep me in the know so that I can support the events and cosmics. Please reconsider.
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User
    kirenshee3 wrote: »
    I think this is a bad idea. It seems pretty clear to your player base that those making the decision don't actually look at how the players rely on this. DawnRadio for example. Cross game events and such. For me, I play Sto when champs is slow. I rely on the cross over chats to keep me in the know so that I can support the events and cosmics. Please reconsider.
    Yeah I often change games because of people talking cross-game. It's useful for coordination purposes.
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  • randomchance4242randomchance4242 Posts: 195 Arc User
    Please reconsider. I have several friends scattered across CO, STO, and NW, many of whom play two or all three of the games. I've seen friends questing in Neverwinter while they were discussing additions to their Starbase in STO as I chimed in to remind them that the costume contest in CO was going to be in 45 minutes.

    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.
  • ealford1985ealford1985 Posts: 3,582 Arc User
    A game this old that gets very little shouldn’t be removing things but trying to add...

    How does removing this increase your players life expectancy and service?

















    [insert silence]
  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    Well, I wonder if it's due to what happens when items get linked?
    Doubtful, the game client just has to recognize "that item id does not apply to my game". It does mean item IDs need to be unique across games, but that's a trivial problem (just embed a game ID in the item ID).

    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.
  • alriialrii Posts: 63 Arc User
    WHAT

    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
  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    I wonder if chat between pts and live will remain.
  • itsbrou#5396 itsbrou Posts: 1,778 Arc User
    R.I.P:

    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.
    Brou in Cryptic games.
  • lezard21lezard21 Posts: 1,510 Arc User
    edited March 2020
    This is hilarious

    also totally deserved​​
  • ealford1985ealford1985 Posts: 3,582 Arc User
    > @lezard21 said:
    > This is hilarious
    >
    > also totally deserved​​
    ————————————-
    ————————————-

    What is?
  • lezard21lezard21 Posts: 1,510 Arc User
    edited March 2020
    > @lezard21 said:
    > 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.​​
  • ealford1985ealford1985 Posts: 3,582 Arc User
    Yeah, I think your memory is a little skewed.
  • nbkxsnbkxs Posts: 773 Arc User
    I had a pretty good offer on mine just before XMPP was yeeted. I should have taken it. D:
    [NbK]XStorm
  • nique554nique554 Posts: 66 Arc User
    the standard of quality we strive for across our games.


    Pretty much this.
  • sandukutupusandukutupu Posts: 65 Arc User
    Hey people, I haven't been on Champions for some time, been busy with Neverwinter. I wanted to comment the same as I see most people are stating above. It is a crying shame they keep removing nice things. It appears Cryptic is having a lot of issues, and the community manager even locked us out of commenting on it over in the NW forums. You can see here no comments allowed.

    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 <3
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  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    lezard21 wrote: »
    > @lezard21 said:
    > 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.​​

    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.
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  • alriialrii Posts: 63 Arc User
    so, after the killing off of the unified chat server, it was the very first time in all these years that i was worried about champions future (they cannot afford financially or otherwise a ... chat server, any more)

    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
  • heartstringsk3heartstringsk3 Posts: 159 Arc User
    alrii wrote: »
    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.

  • alriialrii Posts: 63 Arc User
    alrii wrote: »
    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 >.>
  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    alrii wrote: »
    so, after the killing off of the unified chat server, it was the very first time in all these years that i was worried about champions future (they cannot afford financially or otherwise a ... chat server, any more)
    If they'd disabled it only for CO that would be different, but they disabled it for all games. Based on prior things they've changed, I suspect the chat system needs maintenance and upgrades that they no longer have the in-house expertise to fix, and rather than paying someone to dive into the spaghetti and fix it they're going to throw it out. Which is not a great sign for Cryptic as a company, but not an indicator about particular games.
  • megaskullmonmegaskullmon Posts: 313 Arc User
    alrii wrote: »
    so, after the killing off of the unified chat server, it was the very first time in all these years that i was worried about champions future (they cannot afford financially or otherwise a ... chat server, any more)
    If they'd disabled it only for CO that would be different, but they disabled it for all games. Based on prior things they've changed, I suspect the chat system needs maintenance and upgrades that they no longer have the in-house expertise to fix, and rather than paying someone to dive into the spaghetti and fix it they're going to throw it out. Which is not a great sign for Cryptic as a company, but not an indicator about particular games.

    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.
  • lezard21lezard21 Posts: 1,510 Arc User
    Yes, yes we are all amazed CO has lasted this long in the same way as the people who poisoned and shot Rasputin were probably amazed when they walked back in and found the fucker alive and had to club him down and throw him into a river.

    Just pull the plug off already if you gonna keep gutting and lowering the quality of the game.​​
  • alriialrii Posts: 63 Arc User
    alrii wrote: »
    so, after the killing off of the unified chat server, it was the very first time in all these years that i was worried about champions future (they cannot afford financially or otherwise a ... chat server, any more)
    If they'd disabled it only for CO that would be different, but they disabled it for all games. Based on prior things they've changed, I suspect the chat system needs maintenance and upgrades that they no longer have the in-house expertise to fix, and rather than paying someone to dive into the spaghetti and fix it they're going to throw it out. Which is not a great sign for Cryptic as a company, but not an indicator about particular games.

    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~
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    jonsills wrote: »
    What exactly is this 'standard of quality' are you striving for here?
    Perhaps the ability for something to fail in one game without shutting down chat for all the others. Have we all forgotten the debacle that accompanied the introduction of vehicles already?

    Jon makes a good point.
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User
    alrii wrote: »
    so, after the killing off of the unified chat server, it was the very first time in all these years that i was worried about champions future (they cannot afford financially or otherwise a ... chat server, any more)
    If they'd disabled it only for CO that would be different, but they disabled it for all games. Based on prior things they've changed, I suspect the chat system needs maintenance and upgrades that they no longer have the in-house expertise to fix, and rather than paying someone to dive into the spaghetti and fix it they're going to throw it out. Which is not a great sign for Cryptic as a company, but not an indicator about particular games.
    My personal suspicion is that it's a combination of things.
    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.
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  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    It's a lot easier to make the server work when you don't have to code it to display things from OTHER games.
    I assume item display is handled client-side, though I've never run wireshark on the chat system so who knows.
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