Proximity chat

[Mother_Nearest]

So yeah. How about an option to turn on Proximity Chat?

To control the trolls and to keep it fun:

• VERY close proximity to start (10-35km?), or keep it a function only available at Stations
• Individual player voice block, in case of jerks (rather, the Jerk Inevitability Factor)
• Player report function for voice abuse (compensation for Jerk Inevitability Factor)
  To optimize a Report Player function I think it would require an adequate level of detail for credibility.

I like the current CoD MW model; for people to participate in voice chat they have to agree to terms and conditions which include being respectful, not engaging in abuse or hate speech, etc. etc… However I am also sensitive to the ethical questions of language barriers, ability to communicate as requested to fill a report, etc. How they handled their toxic player problem was very interesting, they controlled the amount of time exposed to strangers (lol) and made respect more salient.

Thoughts? I would enjoy being able to turn on a function like this now and then for fun around stations or in solar systems.

A great test of this function would be to only have it available SOME of the time, e.g. certain hours of the day. This also would help show hidden characteristics of the demographics who play. E.g. in this case, player logon in this limited period would be a plausible indicator that those players are interested in making new connections and bonds with other people.

[Gerard_Amatin]

Finally a way to check if you’re being stalked by a cloaky ship!

You just need to listen to them breathing too loud.

[Syzygium]

@Mother_Nearest

Thoughts?

CCP hasn’t even managed to implement a simple, working, high-quality voice-service into the game (I think they tried some years ago, called EVE-voice, was discontinued…). How should they be able to create a working Proximity-Chat? Besides this, while the feature is somewhat funny in CoD, the voice quality of the CoD-ingame-voicechat is nowhere near the quality delivered by Teamspeak or Discord. And tbh, I don’t want another half-baked non-professional option in the game that eats up development time and never gets really useful.

If they would finally add a spam protection algorithm (personalizable filters and timeouts for spammers) the Local Chat would be enough proximity chat for me (yes, by typing). But they can’t even get this simple thing done, making local just an unsuable advertisement chat in the populated systems at least.

[Rail_J_kar]

EVE voice worked fine, it was discontinued because it wasn’t being used and systems like that cost money to maintain.

If ccp wanted to do some sort of in game voice now, they could probably run temporary client side discord servers

[Uriel_the_Flame]

• throw a jetcan
• rename it
• warp scram or disrupt it
• …
• grid wide proximity communication

[Gerard_Amatin]

"Warp scramble attempt at Look at my bio to make billions of ISK"

[Gerard_Amatin]

Jokes aside, I do not think proximity voice chat will help EVE.

There used to be voice chat in EVE, but it was removed. Friends, corporations, alliances, coalitions, NPSI fleets all already have their own third party voice chat applications like discord, mumble, teanspeak, which are all better and cheaper (for CCP) than building another functionality that most people will turn off anyway.

Local chat is used for little else than spam, scams, advertisements and to taunt opponents. Many players do not even look at local chat for that reason, and have it hidden.

I don’t see proximity chat being used for much else than what local chat is used for, because any coordinated group will be using different third party voice chat already, a chat channel that does not allow random other players to listen in to your plans and does allow players to communicate to their scout a few systems over.

I see no good reason to have proximity voice chat in EVE, and I think development and maintenance of it would be a waste of money.