Broken Chat System impact worse than previous occasions

[Rizzle]

This has been happening now for days.
I am subbed to all channels and there is no General, Looking For Group, Group, Raid, Tells or subbed custom channels. There is only Say and mostly this isn’t even working either.
This is NOT a local issue.
There is nothing wrong with MY internet.
It is happening to a lot of people. If not all.

And while I get that it may have already been reported or chatted about on Discord official servers, not all of us are in that channel.

It’s making it extremely difficult to form groups/raids and sometimes all chat becomes global chat regardless of channel or in game location, resulting in no private chat at all and borderline breaches privacy if one were to discuss anything of a sensitive nature unknowingly into what they thought to be a private channel.

If Group/Raid chat does somehow become enabled, once you leave that raid/group - it is still showing as if you are, even if you log off for hours. I’m literally seeing peoples private conversations and that is grossly unfair on them and others.

eg. Leaving a group/raid retains the previous members, even after logging off, if one were to join another group of trusted friends and start chatting about something that they didn’t want others to know, because they assume the group is indeed the new people present, all other previous members can see the chat - this is not good for those who prefer their anonymity or privacy

Sometimes it shows people as being offline in the friends list when clearly they are standing in front of me. We’ve had to resort to making custom channels to even get things going and this doesn’t even work for some people or is unreliable and intermittent.

How/why this is happening and what/when we can expect it to be resolved (if ever)

Despite still paying to play a free to play game (And have been monthly since launch) and as per the last customer service message
In which it was stated:

Continuing the discussion from Update to Customer Service Policies:

@Tamtor

Our goal continues to be to offer the best service we can, but what this looks like continues to change. Moving forward, we will provide faster more comprehensive service to players that actively support our games monetarily.

What can be done by Funcom to fix the issue?
You are still have a playerbase here and a little TLC could go a long way.

IMO - I think that having no chat system (which is happening more frequently than before and for longer periods) blocks experience progress, If one can not continue to even play as they should with their fellow players in group content that furthers your IP level to higher tiers.
If chat has suddenly dropped off you can not even communicate strategy to players or converse with them normally - as one should.

@Tamtor

In Game Issues that Block Mission or Experience Progress - We will continue to offer full service for all players for these issues.

Update to Customer Service Policies

Funcom Customer Service is changing. Our goal continues to be to offer the best service we can, but what this looks like continues to change. Moving forward, we will provide faster more comprehensive service to players that actively support our games monetarily. Furthermore, we will be reducing the breadth of services we offer our free to play community. To be clear, most customer service interactions will remain unchanged. We are having to reign in a few services we've offered in the past. Her…

(Originally posted by Christa - who’s name appears to have changed to @Tamtor

If the chat system is so archaic and can not be fixed under ANY circumstances, then can a mod be created to ease the issue?

Not even sure what I can expect from this either, just putting it out there cos why not.

[MaelOriginal]

Some official feedback that slightly more than zero interest is taken would be nice & greatly appreciated.
Never been a massive fan of radio silence myself…

[Nelik]

Did someone say radio silence? It’s like you’re asking for another one of my songs

GM Umborls' Groove

Edited to reflect the fact that this was written in love. You have to embrace the game for what it is and the state it’s in.

[Kemish]

Sadly it is very rare to hear anything official from Funcom regarding issues however I can confirm that as of the time of this post it appears to be working fine again. Will we ever know why it happened or how it was fixed? I doubt it.

[Polin]

Is is broken again. I am convinced that they’re not actually doing anything and it’s just breaking and fixing itself based on some other event happening in the background like them running a Dune server on the same hardware

[Polin]

And it’s broken again.

[MaelOriginal]

It’s worse than broken even. I was just running an OD stretch…
Prior to entering, I had Gen, LFG (the defaults) running, as well as my customs.
After the 16th sequential wave, all of my chat channels mysteriously just dropped, including LFG. So, not only customs but also one of the “default constants” just vanished.
I had to rejoin the customs.

Biggest concern is that I didn’t change zone at all, or anything that I would have thought would “bork” the chat. I was all the time inside Stonehenge.

I personally don’t care about glitches in games, but what I do care about/get annoyed about is when something like this drags on for over a week, with zero signs of improvement and we get completely ignored by the Game Team.
Am I investing in their new product Dune, which does look cool? I’ll let you guess…
If I buy a car from a manufacturer which keeps breaking & the manufacturer ignores me, will I buy my next car from the same company? Maybe not.

[Polin]

Oh that actually has been happening to me for years.

In either SP or OD my chat would disconnect all channels after one or two waves. It’s mostly benign as all you have to do to regain the channels is type something. You can dm yourself or type something in say.

That has something to do with the chat server timing out clients based on inactivity.

Although I have to say, that bug has been spreading. I used to have no issues with chat at all, then around 2022 I started having issues in OD, then it became OD and SP, and now it’s OD, SP and some adventure zones. Like it would sometimes disconnect during regional runs.

What I’ve noticed is that it has something to do with latency you have and whether you are getting any traffic from the chat, like being sent messages and stuff. It doesn’t seem to disconnect if you are actually using chat, only after you haven’t sent or recieved any messages for some time.

Also is mostly affects people who are further from the server. It started off with one of my friends that we used to play with, and when I got it and told people about it, they were like “yeah that never happens to me” and now it happens to more and more people, so clearly it’s something on the server side that’s being borked.

TL; DR: But anyways, this is a separate bug from the global chat borkiness since that one is not actually fixable on the clientside at all.

[MaelOriginal]

Good info Polin.
Well my latency (apart from recent serverside spikes) is typically about 55-70ms.
However, that’s to the game server, and as no one seems to know definitively whether the IRC server is hosted on the same rack or even at the same site it’s difficult to know ping to the IRC server visually.
One thing’s for certain it seems, some proper maintenance to things is certainly needed. Too much dust gathering

[Polin]

Chat is hosted at chat.live.secretworldlegends.com as you can see from ClientLog. You can ping it to see latency, it should be a bit lower than the game server

[IAmCypher]

Chat was broken yesterday. Chat is broken today. That’s a shame. It makes it harder and harder to keep returning to the game.

[Olesco]

Chat still broken … a mmo without Chat…no words

[MaelOriginal]

and Chat broken again this morning (UK time).
Absolute Joke.