Eve Online is facing player backlash after announcing a huge change to the local in-game chat.
For most games, you’d think a change to the in-game chat would be a minor footnote at the end of an update, but everything is different in a game like Eve Online. In Eve, the in-game chat is perhaps the most important intelligence tool available.
For years, Eve’s in-game chat would display the player’s name as soon as they arrived in a star system. This allowed everyone else to know exactly who was there thanks to in-game scripts that would tell fleet-owners whenever there was a change to the in-game chat list.
This also allowed fleet commanders to get quite the early warning when an enemy appeared in-system or allowed pirates to know when pursuers were still on their tales or if they’d given up.
But that’s all set to change. Due to the Drifter attacks that took out large swaths of nullsec infrastructure, developer CCP Games have decided to institute another game-changing event: a blackout of the in-game chat.
Although this would make it seem like people couldn’t communicate at all, it’s actually just changing the way people communicate in-game. Instead of having players immediately show up on the chat list, players will only appear once they decided to type something in chat. This basically announces their presence.
However, this change basically eliminates the usefulness of those scripts that would look at the chat list to see who was in-system. Once the Blackout goes live, those scripts can be easily foiled by simply keeping your mouth shut.
And not everyone is okay with this. A Reddit thread discussing the matter seems pretty split on whether or not this is a good change for the game. Some say that this will ruin their intelligence-gathering operations, while others say this was a necessary change for an ancient and stagnating game in much the same way as the original Drifter assaults were.
There’s no word on how long the Blackout will last, but Eve Online’s news broadcast “The Scope” let players know there will be a 48-hour warning before it goes live. There’s also no word on how long the blackout will last. It could just be the new normal for Eve.
NEXT: Apex Legend’s Best Players Are Forced To Smurf
