Player Associations Archive
Thread: Why not an EQ style chat system?
My uninformed opinion: SWG has all chat functions on a separate server. This improves overall game performance because the world servers don't have to process chat. But, it is a new method of doing things. Thus, until they have it totally streamlined and have all of the kinks worked out chat ends up being more unstable than it was in past MMORPGs.
Well a theory I have is because the chat system here is way different from EQ, which had only a set amount of chat channels: zone, group,market, guild, officer.
However, here in SWG, you have the ability to setup custom chat channels. This is where it gets dicey. Because of the big load if everybody and their grandma was to set up a custom channel, then they would need to somehow separate it from the main game server. Thus, the separate chat server was born. Now it's been buggy to get this "external" interface in-sync and working properly.
At any rate, that's my own opinion why our chat system is borked always.