Earlier today, Stephen Reid reminded people (via twitter) that constructive feedback is welcomed.. at the time, the particular subject appears to have been cross-faction communication.
Throughout TOR’s development cycle, the ability to communicate with the opposing faction has come on gone, it’s currently in the ‘on’ state.
My thoughts on cross faction communication are (copy/pasted from my post on the forums about it.. why type twice?):
I get that in a traditional MMO, cross faction communication is ‘bad’, and generally goes against lore. But, even in games that do that (I’ll use WoW for an example), the implementation at times doesn’t seem well thought out. For example, every single Horde NPC can speak to my character..but the Horde PCs…can’t?
A basic cross faction implementation would make sense in TOR, after all.. look at all the cross faction communication happening in the movies. However, I think totally un-restricted cross faction communication would lead to, let’s say… less than nice things, especially on a PvP server.
I think in-city communication should be allowed across faction. So, if a Sith Player, and a Republic player were both hanging out in the Mos Eisley cantina, they should be able to talk to each other.
Away from cities, if you view the traditional chat ‘channels’, as literal channels on say the holonet, then it makes sense that each would, essentially, be ‘encrypted’ for that faction only.
Star Trek Online, allows full cross faction communication everywhere, which is good…and bad.. in that if you see player X saying in chat “LFG to do blah” there is no indication to which faction they’re on, so even in the limited cross faction I proposed above, there would need to be some indication as to which faction a player was from (little Empire/Republic symbols by their names?).
Please go chime in on this… constructively… over here. And, while you’re at it, please chime in on this thread about customizing your starship name.
edit: and this thread, about renaming your companions to avoid 1 million Makos wandering around.