Local and Global Chat

I received two more of the x11 books today, so now i have 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8. I heard there wasn't a 7, I don't know if thats true though. Hopefully it will have all the information in it I need to begin programming x11. I am tired of using the buggy default C functions scanf and gets, I heard gets is really bad and you shouldn't use it, but that is no reason to pay any attention until something breaks. There is a problem with them that whenever you run a function before using them, it seems to skip over the input getting step. Hopefully I know enough C syntax to begin programming instead of leaving it entirely up to other people like I was doing before.

But what I really want to discuss is local and global chat. I was reading how in Darkfall there is no local chat. That really changes the social dynamic of the game, making it a less social game. Apparently, most of the chat goes on in guild chat. I think just having global chat is too overwhelming, espeacially since there are more than 8 people on the server. I think that if you are in a large crowd and everything you say has to be directed at every single person, it makes you just want to shut up about some things, because you can't really get to know people as individuals, just what ever they chose to broadcast about themselves. It is like if everyone just read blogs and no one ever used email or instant messageing, you wouldn't really get to know people because when you blog, unless you limit it to friends only, you are broadcasting to the whole internet. Maybe that isn't always such a good thing.

Sometimes things are too personal, and you don't want everyone to know them. For instance, on a pvp server, you don't want every pker in a large area to know that you and a couple other people are going to try and hunt kobolds. Then the pks will come and kill your small band, taking your loot away. It would be better if only you and the couple other people in the area heard it. Then you have a chance of having a successful hunt without the gank squad showing up. Now, there is the possibility that your other party member could try and pk you anyway, but that risk is much lower than if the whole server knows what you are up to.

One possiable way to deal with no local chat is to mostly only have guild chat. Guilds are groups that play together. They could find each
other outside of the game on places such as message forums and websites. The problem is that some players new to the game may not even know about the guilds, or even have an idea of what guild would most fit their play style until playing the game a bit. Also, players may fall out with guilds, or wish to form new ones while in game. If you don't have a local chat, it can be hard to get people to met up and decide if they like playing with the other players enough to want to join the guild. Furthermore, some things make sense to happen outside of guilds. It would be like if you only talked with your family members ever, except when you were blogging or something. It would get hard pretty quickly, since you might end up with the warped way of thinking that your family (or guild) has set up. Seeing other people and talking to them one vs one or on a small group basis can do more to change a persons mind about something rather than hearing everything broadcast over the global channels. I would not want all my personal problems broadcast on live tv for everyone to see. Some people might like that, but I doubt the majority of us would want that to go on.