I understand. But if they have to redevelop the engine from scratch, youāre still talking about dedicating 12 to 18 months of dev time, during which little to nothing else will be done in terms of developing core gameplay. And again, to implement a purely aesthetic add-on to the existing chat system. In terms of gameplay loops, your idea suffers the same problem that detractors had with the original WiS/CQ.
Thatās what led to the downfall of CQ in the first place. It was a purely aesthetic feature with no gameplay element, and many players at the time saw it as a waste of development resources that could have been used to improve core game features.
Further, it seems like such a feature as you propose would be less optimal to use than the current chat system. For one, it only makes sense to have avatar chat rooms available when the character is docked, and only within the docked station. Otherwise, how would they be in a physical room if they are in a capsule, inside a ship, flying through space? How would they be in a room 24 jumps away in a different region? In that case, chat would go from being globally accessible to locality based. My guess is most players would try it once or twice, the novelty would wear off, and they would forget all about it (which is exactly what happened with CQ).
Secondly, it seems like multiuser avatar chat rooms would require significantly more server resources than the present XMPP-based chat system (because you have to manage avatar state, movement, etc.). What kind of additional server resources would be required to support avatar chat rooms in e.g., Jita 4-4? IDK, but more than we have today so thereās capital investment required to support the new system. (Now itās not just software, itās hardware, too.)
Compared with the original CQ, I would guess multiuser avatar chat spaces would be a 5-10x lift to implement. I would also guess that less than 10% of the playerbase would regularly use the feature.
And at present, CCP has decided to spend those limited resources primarily on Vanguard and Frontier, only allocating whatever is left to EVE. In fact, this is probably the least ideal time since 2011 to ask for a big lift project like what youāre proposing.
That said, if you have any hope, I think it might be with Vanguard. In a couple years, if Vanguard is successful (tbh, unlikely), then CCP may be able to leverage the tech they develop for the FPS to implement some sort of avatar-based gameplay in EVE. Again though, there will need to be more to that than pure aesthetics, otherwise a significant percentage of players will reject it as a waste.
