City of Heroes preparing for double XP and reactivation weekend

Reader Comments (3)

I actually played CoX this past weekend for the first time in a while and was really surprised how crowded my server still felt.

I don't know if it was from playing recent games with limited instance caps, but I definitely felt like I was in a world with other players and not a small box with a few people who never use or look at their chat window.

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One of my biggest beefs with MMOs is the chat window. It is interesting how Ultima Online only had overhead chat bubbles. Of course, they made it "realistic" where you could only hear people nearby and you could whisper too, where people only heard a tile or two away.

This ended up forcing people to use 3rd party apps for long-distance chat.

Then Everquest brought back the chat window, and it was chat window only for a long time. CoX might have been the one that brought back overhead chat bubbles for local and team chat.

What I find annoying is that there has been no attempt to improve this method of communication. The more action the game is, the more the chat window fails to work. If some of the interface communication barriers were removed, I think MMOs might become more social. In the case of Champions, it is almost annoying to read their chat window for some reason.

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I spend a fair amount of time in City customizing my chat boxes so I only see what I want to see. I set up different tabs for different communities, and keep my PMs in a different window entirely.

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