I thought Planeshift was supposed to be different? Isn't that the reason many of us are here?
Personally I'm here for the community, not originality provided by the game. There may be features I don't particularly like and there may be those that I'll praise the devs for. All the same I won't deny there may be people who will cherish Planeshift for every single feature implemented and every single bug fixed.
However, community itself is what many of us perceive to be the high point of Planeshift. Other MMOs may have more features and in general be actually complete, but they usually fail when it comes to the community they attempt to build. As such, I don't think it would be a good move for Planeshift to remove features that deal with communication between the players. We could just as well dump tells, guildchats and everything else that may appear to have out of character nature and leave only the purely in character channels for people to communicate in. This however, brings two major drawbacks:
1) Risk of people taking out of character chat into in character channels arises.
2) We may experience hardships in maintaining relations between one another.
The IRC argument doesn't stand as well, due to the fact not all players (or even their small friction) actually uses it. It's also inconvenient to be forced to use two different aplications for communicating with people. Especially when some people may experience problems multitasking, if one of the apps is in fact Planeshift. Moreover, Planeshift doesn't provide constant breath-taking in character events. If there's no out of character channel for people to use from time to time, they will simply get bored. And what's the point of playing a game that bores you?
Of course, this may not be the case for you, zanzibar, and you may find all the enjoyment you wish to find even without using out of character channels, but not everyone are like you. And I believe it would be for the common good of our community if we'd simply acknowledge those little differences in how different people approach the common game we play.
Using group channel to maintain in character conversations may appear to be improper, that's true, but let's not judge the entire feature based on just some people who misuse it, shall we? Especially when it's not really damaging. If people want to keep certain things to themselves, just let them. There are probably 100-200 other people online you can communicate with. And if it
really bothers you, maybe try talking with them? That is, via tells of course. Then if they persist on doing what they do, why do you want to role-play with them in the first place?
And this is pointed at quite a few people in this thread I guess: Why do you insist on making Planeshift so role-playing prudent? Back when I just began my experience with Planeshift we weren't really all that strict about role-playing. We didn't frown upon strange names, we didn't frown upon out of character discussions taking place in the shout channel. And guess what? We didn't die. I
really like how things developed since then however and I really enjoy the rise of role-playing level we had over the last years. But let's not get over the top, turning Planeshift into some sort of a bizzare society where upon connecting to the game, you're not allowed to be anything more beyond the character you created. It's just not healthy.
