My personal opinion is that social interaction and the friends you make in the game are what make any particular game addictive. That is what keeps players logged in 20 hrs a day playing.
As such, we need to have many different tools to promote, enhance and enable social connections being made. These would certainly include chatting, private messages, some kind of mail capability, other forms of private msging like Guildchat, etc. Of course, to avoid abuse, we need things like ignore lists and security settings like someone in this thread suggested.
I think we should be looking for MORE ways to help people communicate--not ruling out certain ones for not being realistic. To me, not having PM\'s is like saying \"let\'s just not display anyone\'s name above their head and not have any formal guilds because that\'s not realistic\".
The fun should take priority, imho. :-)
- Venge