Hi everyone. Today, we are releasing a very major but exciting change to our chat system. For a super long time, new players have joined the Empire, only to be told to Play Your Way, and go into the wild and build! And then they say Hello. Hmm! This server sure is dead! This is not the impression we want to deliver to new players. So, we've been planning this for a while, but had to work out logistics of the changes... Town Chat has now been renamed to Community Chat! Community Chat will be open to all players, not just supporters, as a global chat. EMC is always been about the community. Isolating players in the wild from the community, restricting them from chatting with others, just because they did not pay us real life money, is NOT what Empire Minecraft is about. I apologize it took us this long to solve this critical problem, but it is finally done! But wait.... there's more.... Economy Chat is now Market ChatAs you should know, Empires is in development. Empires will be a "Clan" or "Guild" system as commonly called in other games. Empire Chat is pretty obvious a good channel to have (logistics aside of how that will work - I don't know yet) But E was used for economy chat! So, in preparation to free E up for Empires in the future, E has moved to M for Market chat. "But wait, doesn't the staff team use that for Mod Chat?" Yes, we did. But, the staff team will take on the hard labor of typing additional characters, and use /chat mod instead. (Momentus just had to totally screw up my screenshot didn't he) As you see, using /chat T and /chat E (for now, until Empires) will still work, but give you a warning to use the new code. "Can't wait to see mods accidently send messages to Market chat meant for staff. Give me all the secrets!" Thought of that too Our community will be much more connected now thanks to this change! Enjoy What about Supporter Chat?Nothing has changed about Supporter Chat. In the future, we hope to improve the Supporter Chat channel by making it work cross-server as an additional supporter feature. We hope supporters choose to chat in Community so everyone can be a part of the discussion though Misc Updates /chat <tab>, /chat show <tab>, etc now works for channel names too. @market @community @group @local all work now instead of only the first letter. Each channel has a few aliases. IE, staff can use @mod. @town and @t go to community (E nd T will give the warning)
And yes everyone we know the wiki will need to be updated. It's being worked on, but keep in mind that's a lot to change. Alex only has so many hands...
For anyone interested in a betting pool on how long it takes Alex to change every single "Town" to "Community" and "Economy" to "Market" on the Wiki, the over-under is 10 years. Happy holidays, Contribution Team, and huge thanks to the Devs for this!
This change looks great. As someone new to the Empire, I've been wondering why chat is so location-restrictive.
Should be good! Typing /c c will take some getting used to though... Can't wait to see the next thing you guys are working on!
Alright so, I know that nothing I'm going to say is going to change anything, and I know you all have worked very hard on this but... I think you just killed one of the key things of EMC. The wilderness is wild from is disconnection from town, largely because of the chat disconnection. Every server that someone just set up from their home computer has a global chat everyone can chat in, that's the lame default way. Emc has always stood out with many custom features, one of them being the great chat system. I feel like this update is reverting back to the 'default' way of servers and eliminating part of the feel of EMC. Supporter chat died when supporters were able to chat in town, which I was somewhat saddened by, as I always liked the S chat. Chatting from town is a nice perk of supporters and it is useful for many things, but now it's no longer a perk, everyone gets it. I even mute town chat while in the wild most of the time, because I feel like even with my supporter status, seeing town chat while not in town ruins part of what the wilderness is. I'm not sure what solution I would say is better, but I think creating a global chat for all is a mistake, and takes away part of the specialness of the Empire.
I understand your view point, but as the player Esrik pointed out, they feel the polar opposite. Everyone is going to have different ideas for their ideal experience and giving access to a global community interaction for non-supporters that you can still turn off, won't actually change your overall plan any. You may still turn off the chat and experience your secluded wild, if you so choose.
Well yes, of course I can turn off Community, but that's just me. No one else is going to do that and the new players getting the feel of EMC for the first time aren't going to do that. I appreciate your work, I really do, but for the new players that you're wanting to appeal to, I think part of what makes EMC stand out has gone away. The wild is becoming tamer. Don't get me wrong, EMC is still amazing, I haven't played on any other server for several years, because EMC is, in my opinion, the best, but I think that taking chat more towards the way every other server does it is taking away part of what EMC is. I'll live with the change, I'm certainly not going to leave or anything, but I just wanted to give my input, which is shard by many people I have already talked to in the last 10 minutes.
The people that you have spoken to need to be online with a new player joining. The majority of new players are turned off by limited community interaction when we advertise having a strong family style community. Yes, some players will prefer it your way, but what makes EMC stand out is not exclusivity of a chat channel. It's the community here and part of that community is the chat channel in-game. There's a framework to our chat that is still far beyond basic vanilla spin-up-in-your-garage systems.
But essentially what you are saying is the "better" way is to FORCE isolation on players. But EMC is not about that. We strongly want players to chat, our players want to chat to each other, and a majority of players leave after they go to the Wild because they have noone to talk to. No one to ask questions. No way to make friends. You don't go to a multiplayer server to play by yourself... But with how our chat was setup, they had no way to play in the Frontier AND meet new people. You were forced to play in town first, meet friends, join an Outpost, then venture out. That's not a friendly starting experience. Plus, our chat is still very mature, consistent, and stable in bandwidth. It's still nothing like your traditional faction server. with 4 billion colors.
