Booster alliance chat

With the upcoming booster, previews state that taking down high level towers will take the coordinated effort of several guilds. I am curious what, if any, chat options will be availiable to us. If guild A's tower is under attack, how are we going to let Guilds B and C know? Will we have to just tell random memebers online in the hopes that the message will make it too their memebers? I think a good idea for the booster, if not the game in general, would be to implament an alliance chat that would allow a guilds alliances to speak on a uniform channel. This would require the need for a "Form alliance" command within the game. (I am not aware if this function currently exhists within the game) This way, we would have greater horizion of communication, as well as strenghthening the usefulness of alliances. Feedback welcome.

I agree, Tansilla!

Being able to form an 'alliance' chat group would be very welcome and extremely useful.

I don't believe it solves the problem of notifying guild B & C members that you mentioned, though. I assume that only a guild leader could 'accept' the chat alliance (else we'd have a bunch of alliance chats existing all the time without any rhyme or reason).

[Or, are you suggesting 'permanent' alliance chat groups, that never go away, even when guild leaders log off? I'm not sure FC will go for that idea, since broadcasting chat appears to be more of a resource hog than you might expect.]

There will always be the need to organize and inform players what is going on and what they can do to help. The downside of larger 'alliance' chat groups is that Clan Chat is already horribly flooded during events/battles. Multiplying that by 2 or 3 makes communication harder, not easier. Soemtimes the messages scroll so fast I can't determine which message is important, let alone read them all.

Overall, used properly, with some player discipline, 'alliance' chat groups would be an incredibly powerful tools in organizing multi-org campaigns.

Typothetae

I love the idea :)

If Alliance chat isn't introduced simulatneously, each Org might have to develop it's own Bot(i.e. Tarabot and Acambot), and add all the members from all the orgs they have Alliances with. A HUGE pain, but the closest workable solution(other than your suggestion, that is) that I can come up with.

Permanent alliance chat channels have been a part of DAoC since it went live, and last I knew were working very well. I don't know anything about the code differences between the AO and DAoC chats, but it's possible at least in some engines to do a decent alliance chat system without hogging resources. I'd love to see something like this, I think that'd be really excellent.

When I was thinking about the idea, I saw it in the following way:

-The leaders of guilds A and B decide to form an alliance.
-Either leader types a command (which would need to be implamented). Something along the lines of:

/org alliance add 'GuildB'

-This would automatically create a new permanent chat channel in the communication window:

Window:
*'Guild A'
*Allicance
*Omni-Tek Herald (or whatever its called)
*Team (if in one)
*Seeking team
*Shopping

-Then, either of the guild leaders could add a guild to the alliance with the command above. The channel could be "shut off" like any other channel, and could be used to easiliy find team members, worn of an attack, etc. It would basicly act like combined guild channels, were all members could talk over.

a bump for this idea, would make commands/chat relay alot easier within guild alliances.

Bumpity Bump!

Thanks Tan for laying this excellent idea out so clearly. If DAoC can do it, AO can and must do it better! I would like to see the possibility of more than one alliance chatbot, depending on guild preference. As a member of two separate (if overlapping) alliances, OTMA would benefit from two separate alliance bots. Where are our technical gurus when we need them most? :)