Star Wars Galaxies: Tuesday Tips- December 23rd

Every Tuesday, Q-3P0 posts a tip on the official boards and then leaves room for others to add tips. Here is todays tip. This weeks is a long one :D.

BradBradley wrote:
On a planet other than the innermost 3 and it feels really empty, really quiet? If more people used this command, maybe we'd all feel less alone at times:

/chat join (planetname).chat
(For example, /chat join dathomir.chat)

Each planet has a planet-wide chat channel. Typing this command will add a chat window for planet-wide chat. You can alternate between chat windows with ctrl-home (previous) and ctrl-end (next).

Or you can not have to. Go to that new window. Double-click the tab to modify it. Double-click on spatial to add spatial chat to this tab, too. Leave Chat as the default channel. Now you can type normally to type in planetary chat, prefix your text with "/gs" to type in the group channel, prefix with "/." (slashdot) to type in spatial chat - all three channels in one place.

Unfortunately, chat channel settings aren't saved between logins, which is high on the list of reasons that nobody uses it. Still, as I learned on test server (where almost everybody starts their session by typing /chat join tcpa), it makes the game a lot friendlier if you bother.

There are a lot more thinks you can do with the /chat command, including automatically setting up and/or joining custom channels, but this is enough for one day's tip.

(I wish SOE would: #1 save chat settings between logins, and #2 document the /chat command in the in-game help system.)
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Great tip, BradBradley. I'll look into getting it atleast documented as one of my first tasks of next year. I agree that the planet chat could be much better utlized. The entire chat system is very deep and powerful (especially now that the Chat Server has stabilized), but it is not very user-friendly. We'll be looking at it more with the new year. In the meantime, you can do /chat in game to see all of the commands.