On Mon, 7 Apr 2008, Jeffrey Watts wrote: > On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 9:46 AM, Niclas Fredriksson <niclas at acc.umu.se> wrote: >> On Sun, 6 Apr 2008, Jeffrey Watts wrote: >> >> > I've played games that would utilize communication in EXACTLY the same >> > way as Netrek. >> >> What games are that? > > To name a few: > > [...] > > All of these have similarities to what happens in Netrek. Similarities, sure, but none of them "utilize communication in EXACTLY the same way as netrek". In fact, no game does. Netrek built-in communication is the best and most efficient in-game communication ever made. There is no substitute for the extremely fast, efficient and reciever configurable communication that exists in netrek. The reason we can have such fast and effective communication in netrek is that the things that need to be communicated are few since the playing field always looks the same and people do pretty much the same few number of things things. This is the reason why other team games cannot have the same way of communicating as netrek has. An easily understandable example is positioning: Wherever a netrek player is in the "playing field" he can easily communicate his position ("@ ORG") and everyone will instantly know exactly where that is, +/- 1-2 second travel time. If a WoW player who's out running in some forest wants to communicate his position ("Green forest near big lake") there may only be a few players that know where that is and even if they know it, the indicated area may be very big. This is what I feel that you are not getting. Netrek is a small game with few things to do and few places to be. As such, the built-in communication system for the game is perfect and will always be much quicker and more accurate than voice communication. I will elaborate on this more in my next mail to Mielke since he too does not seem to get this. -- Niclas