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I appreciate that the five channel limit can be a problem for some people, but I'm afraid I don't quite see how five Global channels is not enough to replace one server-wide channel.
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Because they're fundamentally different? A server-wide channel is one that everyone on a server can be on. It's also one that, depending on how it's set up, people may be on unless they opt out of it.
Whereas a global channel is one that has to be opted into, and one that only those who have a spare channel out of their five available can actually join.
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First of All, thanks a lot Bridger for all the clarification here. You said that you posted something like this a while ago, I didn't read that and it is good to have such post again.
Now, about the problem, is not exactly that you have to opt in into a channel. The biggest issue is that we need something to talk server-wise and server-wise only. I remember a while ago that I joined a global called "DefiantBadgers", but I started to play a lot on Union. And I didn't want all that spam on my chat window, I could just then silent this channel on my union characters, but I need the same tool for them.
In fact, what is needed, as others said is a Broadcast server-wide probably diferent for Heroes and Villains, whose purpose will be to find teams, TF groups, etc.
In a game where many people have alts, and could be playing with them at a given point, this is quite need, IMHO.
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There are many chat channels in the game that are far better suited to other topics, and do not involve imposing your discussions on the entire population of the server or preventing people from using Arena for its intended purpose.
[/ QUOTE ] There is, however, no other channel DOES let us talk to the whole server, and that is the problem.
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I say it is a private channel, because it is not one that everyone is automatically a member of. (unlike help, global etc).
[/ QUOTE ]Nobody is member of global by default either.
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I appreciate that the five channel limit can be a problem for some people, but I'm afraid I don't quite see how five Global channels is not enough to replace one server-wide channel.
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The reason is (and im trying to understand the other party here) that people want to impose a message such as "kronos titan has spawned in Founders falls! Help!" to the population of the server. The more people hear you, the bigger chance is that someone will come to help. And everybody is member of arena by default, so naturally Arena has been used for this purpose so far.
However, if you shout it at <insert global channel name here> the chances are that less than 10 people notice it in any case, and even less will come to help. The key is indeed 'imposing' certain messages on other people.
Problem with global channels is that they are player generated (afaik), and hence people will have to actively search for them to put them into their tabs, so naturally people who do this are much fewer in number than those who _havent_ removed arena from their tabs.
Take for instance *cough* wow here, that has a faction-wide (or one that you hear in all cities?) channels for groupfinding and trading at least which are in peoples chat tabs by default. In addition it has a 'general' channel afaik (im no WoW-expert so please correct me if I make mistake).
Coh gives 2 serverwide channels for help and arena instead of having couple more for say, finding teams or general chat. Then it ALLOWS the creation of any kind of global channels but the key is that they have to be made by players and then players would have to choose which one use... and then there is the 5-channel limit.. did I mention that only small percentage of players read forums, so how to let people know which global channel is the one to use..
Ultimately people use the one channel that is right in front of their noses (ie. arena) when they need to talk to as many people as possible.
(I take this moment to say that it is totally awesome that devs listened to players and created the global channels in the first place. However, this post is to show why global channels can't replace certain things).
I don't think any user-generated channel is suitable in these cases personally, not least of which because it's not official - I know the suggestion of using Forumites (which I have on my globals, but usually keep quiet on) as a help channel seems laughable - I suspect you're more likely to be drowned out by a discussion about muffins/chickens/other random convo (not that's there's anything wrong with that, it's a general chat channel), and spamming that channel wouldn't go down well either. As so many have suggested, the inbuilt channel system needs an overhaul - my thoughts here are:
* Making more channels like Arena/Request/etc usable for the correct purpose, server wide and actually useful. I know in a year I've never seen request used for anything useful, nor help, and I often see unrelated speech bubbles on generic stuff above peoples heads, then realise it's Arena chat (I have it hidden). Since those auction houses seem to be going in, perhaps the WoW model someone mentioned before isn't so far-fetched (good grief, why do I keep mentioning THAT game 
) - Server wide channels: Help, Arena/PvP, Looking For Team, Trade perhaps, whack 'em on their own tab called "Server Chat" instead of Help and away you go.
* Adding more global inbuilt, auto-enrolled channels, maybe actually doing something with that Help tab we had foisted on us a while back 
. Needless to say this would need the global channel limit changing, which I suspect may cause yet more global channel fun and games.
* A simple one this, why not, in global channels (optionally somewhere in settings, probably on by default) suffix our server name to our global id, so @Bill would show as "Bill [Defiant]" or something? Would be better if it only did it for people on another server, so local server people didn't see the suffix.
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Take for instance *cough* wow here, that has a faction-wide (or one that you hear in all cities?) channels for groupfinding and trading at least which are in peoples chat tabs by default. In addition it has a 'general' channel afaik (im no WoW-expert so please correct me if I make mistake).
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The LFT, Trade, etc channels are only visible in the main 3 cities of each faction, and even then only fairly recently, previously they had separate versions of each of those channels per City. OFC it was possible to manually join these channels with /commands (very handy when you're somewhere awkward and your priest just left - though it had an inexplicable habit of stopping the auto channel joining working for the rest of your life (WoW's /B chat etc showed as visible channels, complete with "you joined xxx channel, you left xxx channel" on zoning).
Edit: Wow, my spelling's awful tonight
On slightly related note, I came to realize that there are some global channels that are 'default', non-player created? If so, what these channels are?
Last night I checked my channel search, chose 'default' filter, and then tried to join "defiant(EN) PVP" -channel. The game said: "the channel does not exist, would you like to create it?"
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Why do this now when arena chat is already a mess?
Because the PvP communities are starting to migrate to other EU and even US servers, I don't want to move just because a group of non PvP people took liberties and 'forced out' casual PvPers from the specific channel. About time someone moved people to do something about it really, and I'd personally like some more opponents, so yay for selfcentred motivation.
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as has been said, people are migrating, not because they're sick of Arena spam/chat it's because the PvP community in the EU is soo much smaller, they're going to the other servers\regions because the population both PvP and community as a whole is soooo much bigger..
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You cannot dream yourself into a character: you must hammer and forge yourself into one. �Henry D. Thoreau
DC's quick and dirty solution:
Make Request server-wide, and therefore useful for, well requesting stuff.
The obvious downside it that it would render it useless for hami-raids. However, a hami-command global channel could be created, which people could join for the duration of the raid.
Dead Calm's Defender Manifesto