New Chat Channels

With the advent of the new chat channels, several sources are attempting to start up universal channels that would be uniform to all the servers. Seemed like a good idea to me, so I figured I would post up the ones that have been suggested. Feel free to add other suggestions in the comments. I have a feeling that eventually there will be a series of 24 hour unofficial channels going. The ones I have seen suggested so far are:
  • /join Tradeskills -- When you want to buy tradeskill made items, swap supplies, or check a current price or recipe.
  • /join Auction -- When you are looking to buy or sell items, this channel theoretically can give you access to players in every zone. Also a place to go for a price check. You will still have to go to the buyer or seller though, so it would be prudent to be near a portal where you can move through Nexus, or have a friendly wizard or druid handy.
  • /join Guild -- Guild leaders looking to recruit members and players looking for a guild to join can duke it out for members on a single channel.
  • /join OOC -- A suggested universal OOC chat channel you can join when you are soloing, in some downtime and looking for some way to keep entertained without playing gems.
  • /join Roleplay -- A suggested universal roleplay channel.
  • /join Help -- The thought on this is that experienced players can monitor this channel and answer questions by newbies and those with less experience.
  • /join port -- join here to look for a wizard or druid willing to port you.
  • Comments

    Post Comment
    Chat channels
    # Mar 22 2002 at 12:32 AM Rating: Good
    The channel system is actually handled by a seperate server process from the rest of EQ, so if anything it is reducing the load on the servers. The number of channels a player is on is somewhat irrelevant to bandwidth usage, the limit of 10 is somewhat arbitrary.

    A far more serious issue is the number of people on a given channel. If there are 100 people on a channel, every message typed gets sent to 100 people...that adds up fast. The channel-server can easily support thousands per channel, but we currently have it configured to only allow 150 players/channel. If you get more than that on a channel, then the text tends to be scrolling by so fast from people spamming that there isn't much point to it anyways.

    I've noticed a highly requested feature is the ability to list all the channels. The reason we do not allow this is it would create a situation where there were lots of very full channels, which would have bandwidth implications. There is a ;listall command already that does this, but it is currently a GM only feature. We are considering allowing a GM to mark certain channels as 'public' such that they would appear to ordinary players on a ;listall command. These would generally be gm-moderated channels for newbie help and things like that.

    The channel-server supports other functionality that we currently don't have turned on (like cross-world channels), but we want to wait a few weeks and see what the bandwidth implications are once everybody gets accustomed to using them before we determine how much we can/should open up the system.

    We do pay attention to the message boards and your ideas do not fall on deaf ears.

    Jeff Petersen
    Programmer/SOE
    RE: Chat channels
    # Mar 22 2002 at 1:38 PM Rating: Decent
    Ok, I really appreciate the feedback.(And I want to take the opportunity to thank Allakhazam and Illia for this awesome site too, I am with some problems to sign for it, have some paying trouble, as I live in Brazil. If you could accept AMEX ... :-))
    Especially the info about the channels handle by a separate server. I was thinking it was code direct into each server, adding to the processing of it.
    Thankx again.
    Big mess !!!
    # Mar 21 2002 at 1:37 PM Rating: Decent
    I think the developers didnt foresee this ... ;)
    This will cause a overhead on the servers, especially the comunications.
    Lets see what will come from this kind of thing.
    Auction
    # Mar 21 2002 at 10:45 AM Rating: Decent
    Xegony is using BUYSELL instead of Auction, already very populated on a regular basis.
    New Chat Channels
    # Mar 20 2002 at 7:40 PM Rating: Decent
    *
    102 posts
    /join (zone) where zone is the name of the zone you are in. eg: /join qeynoshills this would permit other people to see how many people are in the zone.

    /join (class) where class is the class you wish to find out information on.

    i have a lot of others to think of - but these are two good ones i kinda like.
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