It’s easy to overlook something as simple as a global chat channel, but it plays an important role in an MMO. It connects everyone together, giving them a single channel of output, be it anything from the daily political/religious/which-class-is-better-at-soloing/Chuck Norris debate to forming and looking for a group, it is something one expects to always be present. It lays the groundwork for the server community.

Logging back into Lineage 2 for a short while today, I immediately noticed this loss. I wanted to greet everybody, to let everyone know that I’ve returned even if it was just for a moment, hoping that someone I knew was on, but I was robbed of the opportunity to do so because I didn’t have access to global chat. In Lineage 2, global chat is exclusive only a few ‘heroes’ – one of each class that wins the olympiad competition monthly.

Without a global chat, to look for one group, one would have to physically go out to the safe zone in the outskirts of a hunting area to congregate and shout for a group. This isn’t so much of a problem back during the early days of Lineage 2, as there were only 2 main exp areas. Right now, I don’t even know how one gets groups other than already knowing someone through social circles. I’ve never took a huge notice of this previously because I usually group with guild members only, and almost never do pickups, and I still don’t.

After all that’s being said, I can see one reason why having global chat would actually be a disadvantage in a PvP-centric game like Lineage 2 – the kind of chat that goes in there would probably annoy a good number of the population who aren’t board warriors.