Love this game, but the social controls are poor imo

[jerodatgm]

First, I want to say I love this game...I am completely addicited. However, there are some simple social aspects that I think are counter intuitive and/or too complex to have to do manually. Probably a dead horse beating here, but I'd like to re-state in hopes the devs are counting comments......

- If I join a group, the clan, area, etc. chat should automatically mute. If I want to hear my clan and my group, I should be the one to do this. Not the other way around, where I have to mute the other channels manually.

- Why do I need to add friends via PSN to effectively group up, warp to, and phase to clan members? If I am in a clan, every group member in game should be able to warp to one another even if we are not PSN friends.

- Maybe it's me, but why is it a 50/50 proposition that when I log in, I can hear my clan chatting, but they cannot hear me? It's not because I have it muted, I know what to do for that. Maybe it's the phase thing. If so, see above comment. The only reliable voice chat for me is group (but not in coop)

- Why when I group with 2-3 people and queue for a coop map, that it is a 50/50 whether we can hear each other when we get in the instance?? Again, maybe I am doing something wrong, but this all should be easy to figure out.

- WHy does a text chat sentence only show in the chat box on the main game screen for a few seconds before disappearing? This should be a running conversation thing, based on channels. There's already color-coding for text chat, so just keep it there. We can see what's what.

- Are there / commands? For example, if I want to send a text to a particular player,can I do something like /t player name blah blah? If so, I have not seen anything that says I can do this.

I am by no means an MMO pro. My only other experience is DCUO. That game had it's challenges when it first launched (including chat), but once the devs worked it out on their end, it was pretty intuitive on how it worked. I think the only thing they never worked out as long as I played (10 months from launch) was that you had to start up your mic before launching the game.

I absolutely enjoy Defiance and am sticking with it. But, these social bugs, convoluted steps, call it what you will really detract from the experience.

/rant over

[Fatalmephisto]

I do agree on a few of those aspects. Come to Iron demon ranch and ill get the social aspect rolling for us.

[bix]

I like what you had to say.

I play WoW, and it's so easy to type in different chats to each other that you barely need a mic. I've played DCUO, too. That's where I learned that playing on a console with a totally optional keyboard means less people are going to chat, or chat often, so I didn't expect things to be super smooth. I'd be thrilled to see the social aspects of the game get hammered out.

[WhiteF8ng]

For all Commands: Type "/?", "/h", or "/help" in the chat box. No quotations of course.

And I agree with everything. Some of those ideas were mentioned in one of the blogs. Hopefully they make it.