Feldon From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:
We’re always looking at ways to improve the fun factor on PvP servers and one point that comes up occasionally is how we handle cross-faction communication. Currently each faction has their own language and there’s no way to communicate other thing minor things like pet names, etc.
We are considering opening up public channels to cross-faction chat and wanted to find out how the community would feel about that. We understand that chat in PvP can get pretty heated but also feel that taunting your opponents and being taunted is part of the PvP experience.
The current proposal would be to open “shout” and possibly “say” to cross-team chat. This would need to be done by allowing you to switch to “Common” or possibly getting rid of Lucanic and Antonican languages altogether. Let us know what you think about this change or if you have an alternate, better proposal.
Keep in mind that we are working on several other PvP changes as well, but this dicussion is strictly about communication. do you like it the way it is or would you prefer to see more open communication between teams?
and later in the thread:
In general it looks like the majority of people are in favor of it either as proposed or with some modifications. I’d prefer to not see yet another chat channel created since we have plenty of channels that overlap currently. If shout and say were made to be cross-faction, we’d leave OOC alone so players can still use this channel to talk to their team without fear of the other side seeing it.
In response to a query as to whether SOE had “already made up their minds” or really wanted feedback or not, Rothgar had this to say:
I think its reasonable to use OOC instead of shout. Its arbitrary to us, the main point is to provide that capability for people that want it.
I’m sorry if it seems like we’re biased one way or another. If we didn’t think it was a good idea we wouldn’t have proposed it in the first place. However, the fact that we did propose it means we are willing to listen to your feedback, and in that regard we haven’t made up our mind either way. But after people chime in and the majority seems to want it, then yeah, it sounds like it will probably get implemented since there have been really no good counterpoints brought up for NOT doing it. The main issue was that some people didn’t want to participate and we pointed out that you can always remove that channel with the filter.