Browsing through that site, I stumbled upon this....

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/overview/gameID/173

I\'m afraid... I\'m very, very afraid.

.... a snow bank...

I love the pigeon idea :p I think it would get really annoying to have any kind of communication lag, but I just find the mental image of pigeons flying all over the place hilarious.

Seytra, I agree that assuming some sort of telepathy for everyone in the game world is the only way to justify it...  I\'d just like to see an RPG that actually addresses the issue for once, instead of ignoring it entirely.

The item really could be anything... if we\'re thinking telepathic links, it could be, for example, a circlet that activates the telepathic powers latent in every character.

I\'m hoping someone more familiar with the game world can come up with some interesting ideas

Shadowfalcon, I think that\'s an awesome idea as well.  It shouldn\'t unbalance the game, especially if it can\'t see mobs.  It would be fun to use, especially when you\'re lost.  It also shouldn\'t be too hard to implement.  The only problem might be performance - when you\'re up that high you\'re going to see a LOT more polygons, and that might bring some machines to their knees.  If the devs can make it work I think it\'d be a great feature.

Well, I\'ve scanned through the two threads stickied at the top, the first four pages of this forum, and the SourceForge feature request list... if this was discussed already, I apologize, but I couldn\'t find it

Something that\'s always bugged me is that all online RPGs (as far as I know) simply assume that you can instantly communicate with any one person (or any group of people) anywhere in the game world.  This is obviously a mandatory feature - it\'d be no fun playing these games if you can\'t communicate with your friends - but it makes very little sense within the game world.

I would like to see an actual device - an in-game item - whose only purpose is to communicate with people who are not in the player\'s immediate vicinity.  The device itself could be anything - a magic crystal, a magical artifact, an actual technological device... The details of how it works would also depend on how the actual in-game chat system works.  But overall you could think of it as the equivalent of a cell-phone - you can\'t usually talk to your friends at the other end of town without a phone... as for guild chats or private chat rooms, the in-game equivalent could be giving  another player access to the frequency/password/etc. necessary to access that group chat.  I think most features of the chat system could thus actually fit in with the game world.

I would like to see new players have to earn this device before they can communicate with people elsewhere in the game world - be it a fairly simple first quest, or the ability to purcahse it for a very accessible sum of money.  It should probably be attainable within the first game session of any player - otherwise the danger is to make the game harder to just pick up and start playing, which is never good.

And finally, the interface of the device should be entirely transparent.  After you obtain it, you basically just activate the in-game chat, and as long as you have the item in your backpack you can just \"use\" it and forget about its existance - I don\'t think there should be a special chat interface just to belabour the point.

Mainly, I think this would be a relatively easy way to make the game world more immersive and consistent - and, hopefully, provide players with a \"gee, that\'s cool, I haven\'t seen that before!\" moment shortly after they start playing.

Sorry about the long post... but I would love to know what people think

(boy, do I hope this wasn\'t covered before... I\'d feel like an idiot).

- Amdahl