Lounge/Tavern Chat Sunset Announcement

Hey all,

Over the last few weeks, in addition to tackling abnormal and irregular gameplay, we’ve also been making an effort to clean up the Lounge/Tavern chat channels (just the Lounge from here on out for brevity) and get them back to their intended function.

While we think we did make good strides here, and we appreciate the participation of our players who use the channel in good faith, we’ve come to the hard decision that the Lounge has not lived up to its intention of enhancing the player experience, and we will look to grow and support connections in-game of like-minded individuals and revise or update Chat channels that do not contribute to an overall positive experience.

We understand the need for trash-talking related to the game and some good natured, perhaps a bit blue, ribbing but time and again the lines of the Lounge have been pushed past the breaking point. Despite the attempts on our part to curb the language or change the tools available to help players avoid messages they may not want to see, bad actors have persisted in making the Lounge a place that only a select few can actually enjoy using.

Because of this, our Support department currently has to spend much more time moderating the channel instead of putting that time towards helping players with other issues and questions or working on projects to help the future of the games.

48 hours from now, we will be removing access to the Lounge for all players on all servers. Although the Lounge may be more problematic in certain games or servers due to the differences in population, we’ve had trouble with all Lounge channels at some point or another. For public channels, the World Chat will still be available, but players will need to abide by the much stricter guidelines there if they want to use it. Jobs Chat, player-made Groups and your Syndicate channel will still be available as well.

If you want to have conversations like the Lounge has been accustomed to, you’re more than welcome to use one of the many free chat clients that exist out there like Facebook Messenger, Discord, Skype, etc to make your own off-game groups to talk about whatever you like.

We debated about this outcome for a while and didn’t come to this decision easily. Despite being a relatively new feature, the Lounge is quite popular but it is frequently cited as a glaring negative through Support, here in the forums, and our in-game surveys. We understand that this may not be a popular decision with everyone, but it’s one we feel is best for the long term health of the games.