Diablo 3 Chat Channel Screenshots
Posted 19 February 2012 by Flux
The Diablo III Beta is now online (sporadically) after the lengthy patch 13 install, and once I got on the first thing I checked out was the new chat channel feature. It’s functional, if rather underwhelming. I certainly hope it’s also in the beta form, since it looks like something you’d have used on AOL in about 1992.
The window only appears in a tiny space in the lower right of the screen, there’s no list of people in the chat, and there don’t seem to be any formatting options, ways to see more details about the people there, views of their characters or accounts, etc. As I said, hopefully this is just some Beta version they whipped up in the past few days; you know after Bashiok said they didn’t have them, and then the huge public outcry forced Blizzard to quickly implement them while ordering Bashiok to cover for them by saying that he’d somehow been unaware of the existence of a major game feature he’d argued persuasively against two days before. [ /tinfoil hat disengaged]
Update: In my first quick look at the chat I missed the options button, which does open up a display of everyone in the chat. You can invite them to party, or add them to your friends list, as you can see in the screenshots below.
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Heh what did you expect, it took them whole year to develop such a chat for SC2…it’s a pinnacle of Blizzard design team.
It’s like going into a cave and yelling ‘helloooo, is anyone there?’, and you get the echo ‘….there…there…there’. I think that describes nicely the existing chat system in sc2.
God I hate what they did with the chat in SC2, and I can see this will be the same thing.
“…it’s a pinnacle of Blizzard design team.”
Your post perfectly comments on something that has piqued my curiosity for quite a while: Why does Blizzard try to reinvent the wheel?
Blizzard continually re-codes features from scratch, that they already have implemented in other titles. The AH is a perfect example. They already have a bug free, Blizzard polished AH working every day in WOW…. So they start from scratch for D3. That doesn’t make sense to me. These chat channels look like Starcraft 2, except you have to click a gear to see people.
Now Im not saying they shouldn’t improve or further polish their features, but why do they insist on starting from scratch. Improving on already existing ideas is something Blizzard excel at, so why is D3 different? Take your auction house, IMPROVE IT! Take your chat channels from D2, IMPROVE THEM! Take your achievement system, from WOW or SC2, IMPROVE IT! Instead we are looking at the better part of a decade development time for a feature(s) that looks to be several iterations backward.
Its a fundamental concept of computer science, if you try to re-code everything from scratch, you will spend all your time doing that, and not innovate or advance in the field…or don’t reinvent the wheel.
“They already have a bug free, Blizzard polished AH working every day in WOW…. So they start from scratch for D3. ”
What, do you think they can just copy and paste the code from WoW and it’ll work? Probably there are things they would change about the WoW system if they could, and now that they’re making a new title they get to re-write it from scratch, fixing all those issues up from the get-go.
Undoubtedly the design and implementation of AH In D3 will strongly draw on their experience from WoW and yet you act as if “start[ing] from scratch for D3″ is somehow some massive bad/stupid thing?
@Lanthanide and der
Umm. LOL. Ok, are all your posts just made up on the spot like you are an expert. When you don’t have the first idea what you’re talking about.
The concept is called modularity.
Now, clearly you can’t just copy and paste code from one game to another, then games would be identical. But that doesn’t mean that all functions are re-written from scratch. You design functions that do one thing really well. Then use those functions (for their function), and adapt those functions to fit your purposes in your current project. Then assemble those functions into the program you wish create. This is common on programming. Even if functions are torn down almost to the beginning you already have an idea of how they need to be coded and assembled due to the fact you have done it before. This is something Blizzard has done well for a long time, and now many features appear to be taking some steps back. (or certainly not making noticeable improvements)
The point I was getting at, is that they have spent the better part of a decade developing this game, and a number (as I mentioned above many) of the systems in the game are either barely at an equal level as some of their other games, or in some cases (chat rooms) steps backward. This doesn’t make sense. They have already done this before, they should know how its done, if not be able to re-use functions that have worked for them in the past. It certainly shouldn’t be taking longer to work this game, than It did all their other games, especially considering this game contains approximately the same amount of content.
I agree with you in principle. In practice, lots of software teams don’t properly modularize their code. It also takes a significant amount of extra effort (equaling $$) to write modular code that can be directly implemented in another project. In many cases, coders will decide it’s actually faster to write new code than to take previous code and muck around with it to get it to the point where it will work in the new application.
If you really think they can juts copy/paste code from WoW to D3, then you shouldn’t be talking about this, because you have no clue.
So there’s a channel for trade….
Looks exactly like SC2 chat channels.
Seems almost identical to the SC2 chat channels except the SC2 ones actually show who’s all in it and lets you click on their names in the list to look at their profile, ignore them, add them to friends, etc… I don’t know why they would not have that in the D3 version.
I take it back, turns out you can pop out a list of the people in your current channel with all of the usual options by clicking on the gear. It sucks to have to wait for other people to put out screenshots and videos of stuff instead of being able to look at it yourself…
beta still down for me. captcha “geez louise”
The question is can you chat in that “hardcore chatchannel” from the start?
I think [Blizzard] that you should only be able to join in that channel after a softcore run so the conversations in that channel won’t ruin your mind [/blizzard].
BOOOOO What a let down.
Same crappy UI with a facebook style chat bar on the side.
Something tells me we aren’t getting a real lobby.
Why is Blizzard so against chat channels?
Maybe they can use the same ui for the console version.
To express ones feelings towards this chat feature one would need a toilet, a camera, serious case of the trots and Jay Wilson’s address
So dissapointed
And sure his Chili recipe can help me with the Trots 
Got the toilet and camera. Sure Jay’s address can be obtained somehow
wow, this is serious crap. I don’t understand what’s the problem in implementing a feature which has been in blizzard games for years…
Imo, why don’t they just copy D2 chat lobby and improve on that…?
This is seriously a big letdown crap, crafted in 1hour of someones spare time?
Dissapointed!
You can see the people in the chat. You can see their profile. You can see their hero. Next to the dropdown to select the chat channel is a small gear icon labelled ‘chat options’ or somesuch thing. Click on that, and there is an option to show members. Click on an individual, and there are a plethora of options associated with them.
Intuitive interface? No. But the options are there.
Thats our new chat lobby? that tiny horrible window in the bottom right hand corner? what happened to the big window where we can all line up? check each others characters out? im seriously not impressed
Showing the list of name of people is not enabled by default. You need to go click on that coghweel thingy on enable it . I just did it in the beta. Please correct the post info.
I’ve said all I’ve had to say in regards to chat channels. Blizzard continue to make them suck and not have a serious go at implementing them properly. Ghosttown.net inc.
But hey, Starcraft 2 has these types of chat channels, and look at them! They continue to have a thriving community with a massive 3 people currently playing it worldwide!
You’ve clearly never played SC2 that much. Whenever I go on there, even at 2/3am CET, there are 400,000+ people online, and that’s just in Europe. The matchmaking hardly ever takes more than 1 minute to get into a game, even at these times. Also – chat channels, while mostly not that useful in SC2 (a separate discussion) – are sometimes well used. Try joining the ‘teamliquid’ channel at peak times and you’ll find it completely full! I think you’ll find the ‘incgamers’ channel will be equally busy once the game is released. We might even need incgamers2 and 3.
I’m not at all surprised that Blizzard hasn’t made it a more comprehensive chat system, because with good public matchmaking ala SC2, we just don’t need them as much. Also, I’d be pretty upset if they delayed the game further to iterate on chat. If it really is such a massive problem, for some people, let them patch it later.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but those figures include WoW US players, which makes up for the vast majority of that figure.
Blizzard like to mask how many people are playing SC2 because it is embarrassing. The best indicator we have is how many games are being played, which stands at around 10k during peak. World-wide.
Source for that statement?
Yep – source please.
Also, I just went on http://www.sc2ranks.com to take a look for myself. I looked at the numbers of pages that I got when searching for 1v1 Bronze/Gold/Platinum etc globally, limiting it to people who have been active in the last 30 days. As each page has 100 players on, I just multiplied that by 100 to get a rough estimate. Sure, the last page might have only 1 person on for all of these, but even if true, it’d only reduce the total by ~700. Here is what I find:
Bronze: 916 pages
Silver: 732 pages
Gold: 584 pages
Platinum: 495 pages
Diamond: 310 pages
Master: 183 pages
Grandmaster (the page it starts at): 182 pages (this might be from last season as a new one started just now, and they don’t immediately assign grandmaster league like the others)
So that is 3402 pages, which works out at roughly 340k players.
Note that these numbers only include people who have played in the last FIVE DAYS actually, as a new season started, which wiped everyone’s stats (http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/3715635/Season_6_Has_Begun_-15_02_2012#blog). They are also from 1v1 only – so this is a large underestimate as many people play just 2v2s, 3v3s etc This is hard to take into account as people would be double counted if they played both 1v1 and 2v2 for example.
I don’t know about the peak stats, but that’s also influenced by the type of game you play, which affects the length of the average gameplay session.