Given that the chat box can be used for both good and evil, I would caution developers against explicitly encouraging players to read it. I think it's better to just let the chat box be there, and to let players do what they will with it.

That said, I do think that one thing that can contribute to OP's situation is that it's easy for what's typed in chat to not be visible on the screen. By default the chat box doesn't hold many lines of text, so it's easy for valuable information to quickly scroll away and be replaced by something useless. And if a player has switched to a different chat tab (like if they want to view the battle damage tab) either intentionally or accidentally, then they're not even going to see the chat that's occurring.

So my suggestion to address this issue would be to improve the chat interface so that players have better access to it straight out of the box, and to add protections against accidentally losing access to chat.