Quote Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth View Post
65k people in 1 channel would be impossible to read. That just sounds terrible. As does global chat.
I was getting wordy so I left some reasoning out. I also forgot to include no hard cap on the number of channels any character can belong to. One of my friends recently left the only LS we had in common because they're capped.

I never meant 65k simultaneous participants. That would be hell to follow and I suspect any chat with more than 1000 or even 100 active participants would be untenable. I'm in a couple of large Discord servers with about 1000 actives but only 10-20 are actively chatting at any one time. Chances are the people would self-organize into more manageable channels.

That figure is an intentional overestimate to ensure that it can accommodate large communities of characters without having to play musical chairs. NA has a very diverse timezone spread and not everybody plays during their geography's prime-time. In other words, not all members will be connected at the same time. Trying to guess a good upper bound is hard. The decision to limit CWLS to 64 characters is as much a howler as "Nobody needs more than 640k".

It would be a godsend for those of us that play alts, want to keep tabs on hunts, follow organized RP events, etc. Anything that could benefit from real-time notifications. With proper access controls those sorts of channels administrators can limit who can post.

If it sounds like Discord, you're not wrong. The problem with Discord is that it's incredibly hard to get people to actually use it. I've seen much better adoption of in-game custom channels in other games than I have Discord probably because 2nd screens aren't all that common.

Among the group I came here with there's an opinion that XIV is extremely insular. IMO some of that is because the Chat UI sucks but also because how restrictive the social constructs (FC, LS, CWLS) are.