Other space empire games have one. Let us too!

Zorg Empire has one, and they do just fine with it. (Of course there are moderators.)

What say we have a chat channel of our own, where all of GL's players can chat in real-time (to trade, teach newbies how to play, to collaborate on inter-legion projects, etc.?)

EXAMPLES OF USAGE

For example, I'd like to ask the question: "What happens to their base if a legion is disbanded?" However, I don't like to post a one-liner question to start an entire thread, and of course I could ask on my Legion's chat, but don't prefer to wait hours for an answer if I think of it when we're pretty much asleep.

I also like to trade with legions with trade pacts, but sometimes, I prefer to complete trades in under 3 minutes and not wait hours for responses.

COST OF MODERATING

If anyone is worried about the cost of hiring chat-channel moderators, no need to pay in real cash; plenty of us would be ecstatic to take the job with a GP wage (say, 7.25 Galaxy Points per hour.)

Keeping track of how much is due of them is no problem; the entrance and exit time-stamps do the math. Any periods of inactivity aren't counted. Perhaps the pay should be kept in 5-minute increments so if there are certain 5-minute blocks without any chatting nor moderator action whatsoever, they aren't paid for it.

CHAT POPULATION LIMITS

If anyone is concerned about thousands of players turning a chatroom into an inverted ASCII waterfall, cap the rooms to 250 players, and put the overflow into "Galaxy Legion General 2." Moreover, it would be unfair to have a room capped full of sleepers (idlers) so an auto-kick can commence after, say, 1 hour of inactivity. (However, fines need not be paid to rejoin for idlekicks; idlers can rejoin immediately once they're back at the keyboard.)

CHAT CHANNEL CATEGORIES

Rooms should be divided by category: General, Trade, Recruitment, Newbie Help (Must be ranked <100 to enter unless you have the official "Helper" badge), Off-Topic, and maybe "War Planning" if consensus agrees to that.

BEHAVIORAL ENFORCEMENT AND FINING

If anyone misbehaves, a Warning could be given on minor/first few offenses. Then depending on the severity or whether priors have been committed, a user can get kicked out and need to pay a fine to rejoin.

(The fine can vary by severity and be up to the moderator's discretion: 500 Kurenite, 5 Tech Parts, 5,000 Exotic Matter, or whatever artifacts are so chosen.)

The top 1% are not excluded from the stings.

(I sympathize with OWS, and most of you probably do, too.)

This would not give veteran players an excuse to misbehave more often just because they happen to have more resources: Moderators could have the right to know their total assets (Credits, resources, artifacts, etc.) and give punishments congruent to their wealth, akin to Finland's fining system.

(In Finland, the poorest speeders pay $100 USD. I don't know of an upper limit but a top-1%'er paid a $50,000 USD speeding ticket for the same severity of offense that would've fined a poor driver the $100. The idea is for the richer citizens to feel the sting of breaking traffic laws just as much as the commoners.)

Conclusions

I look forward to finally being able to chat with each other in real-time. This would cause a lot more trades and other tasks to happen far faster than they do now, and more relationships and pacts to form. It would be exciting, for sure.

If you have any ideas to add to the global chatting feature, let us know!

there is a fb group with a handful of people in it but it seems filled with mostly high ranks and people who have been playing for a long time
it is a rather dead chat imo, only a handful seem to use it and nothing kills the chat faster than someone trying to brag about something
i personally turned the chat off a long time ago but check on it every now and then

it would be nice to have a chat group with the younger/newer crowd in it
i don't think moderators would be necessary, it isn't hard to have a few impartial admins who can kick trouble makers out

multiple chats would just clutter up our pages, keep it to 1 chat at first since too much complication will turn people away

The "Chat" option, to the right of "Research," would be a drop-down submenu so it would only clutter the screen when we look for a channel to join.

If it's an officially sanctioned chat and not one through a FB group I haven't heard of, then it'll be far more alive than what you observed above.

Several reasons why this would be a REALLY bad thing to add.

• It would distract people from actually PLAYING the game.
• A chat within a game within Facebook which already has essentially limitless chats. Wha?
• NOBODY except me (and Dan of course) has ANY right to know my resources, let alone tell me I have to pay a fine for something.
• And the number one fail with this.... LAG

The whole idea makes me think of America Online circa 1992...

-1
I can think of a couple more reasons why this wouldnt work/be added,(for example, paying people, in GP or cash, to do it, would take money away from Dan regardless of the price)
You summed it up really well, those are the main reasons it shouldn't be added.
Doubt it will be added.

"It would distract people from actually PLAYING the game."

That's why we can have the game window open on the other half of the screen. I planned on that all along.

If you WANT to distract yourself from playing, go to an Off-Topic sub-channel. Other than that, facilitate trades, plan base attacks, planet invasions, recruit and help newbies.

"NOBODY except me ([i]and Dan of course) has ANY right to know my resources, let alone tell me I have to pay a fine for something.[/i]"


Then if you plan to misbehave, don't enter rooms where there are moderators. The moderators may only check your resources if you misbehave first. Behave in a chat-channel, and you'll have nothing to worry about.

"LAG"

Are you still on dial-up? We're on cable, satellite and other types of broadband. What IS this "lag" you speak of? Oh, I kinda remember from my earlier days, I guess. Everyone's connections were slower, and bandwidth wasn't cheap.
Moore's law is so good to us; what would've been epic, mountainous issues to surmount around the turn of the millennium would be like molehills now.

Moreover, there are over 50,000 users on Freenode's IRC network. There's no lag to be had even in chatrooms with many hundreds of users.

"The whole idea makes me think of America Online circa 1992..."

I don't know where you were in school that year, but was in early elementary. I doubt there would've been an AOL chatroom intended for kids like me, so I can't remember what it was like.

Did they have moderators? Regardless, what was it like? Moreover, why can't it make you think of Freenode of 2012? (Freenode's chat system is one of the most awesome, helpful and polite networks around!)

Overall, how do I know that no one is shooting down this proposition because they wish to chat in a room WITHOUT moderators? If they want, they may create their own channels.

I'm sorry Sere, but when moderators are paid GPs, wouldn't the GPs come out of nowhere? I don't think it takes real money to "print" (generate) GPs; it only takes money to buy them. (Hence, we buy points essentially made out of thin air.) So if moderators are only paid in GPs, and the GPs come directly from GL's system, then it may not cost any real-world cash, now would it?

Think about the overall benefits to an in-game chat: Wouldn't you want trades to take minutes instead of hours? Would you want to help more newbies faster? Think about it.

(Remember that Zorg Empire has a game-wide chat channel already. Why do you suppose they don't have problems with it?)

No! NO! Not AOL!

When a player is paid GP, if that player is a GP player in the first place, it would become a replacement of part of the purchased GP, and therefore reduce the amount of GP purchased. So while it have no direct cost, it does cause a reduction in income which can be considered a cost.



the concept of "misbehaving" is subjective, otherwise the chat can be auto "monitored" and would not require moderators
And therefore, it is not impossible to have undesirable incidents caused by the privilege of resource check.
If there should be a penalty of any kind, chat related(temporary mute or ban from the chat or permanent ones, for example) would be the most appropriate. And at most energy related ones otherwise(and at that, w/o allowing to check for actual remaining energy). Any and all other penalty would be problematic in execution, unless the moderators are NOT players but instead people dan hired with real money.



The problem would be server side lag. Which is server hardware related. FB doesn't have this problem even with lots of user using various things because it have a lot of very expensive server equipments. If dan adds a gloabl chat, there will be defintely an increase in lag and/or an increase in the cost to the amount of hardware used. However, with that said, the amount of lag and/or increase cost may be very small and unnoticable. But this is a valid issue, all that matters is if it's significant or not and thus cannot be dismissed as easily as you've made it.

I do, however, agree about the other two objections raised, they are completely irrlevant.