Communication Methods

There are a number of ways The Basin use to communicate with each other in Guild Wars.

In-game Chat

The most obvious way of communicating. There are six major kinds of chat in Guild Wars. Four of them are important for communicating with people in the Alliance and the guild.

Alliance Chat allows you to talk to every single guild in the Basin Alliance. Alliance Chat is a very good way to ask for other players to join you in missions, quests, or PvP, or you can use it to ask for information. Because Alliance Chat does broadcast to everyone in the Alliance, it is considered good manners to refrain from monopolizing the chat or, at least in the early days of release, giving out significant storyline information. Alliance chat is color-coded as orange.

Guild chat allows you to speak with the specific subguild you are a member of. If you are trying to find players to play GvG with, then the first call should go out over Guild chat because the game requires that at least 4 people in the group belong to the same guild. Guild chat is color-coded as green.

Team chat is used by members of a party grouped together to do a quest, mission, or to participate in a competitive game. Team chat is color-coded blue.

Whisper is a private message to a specific player. No one else can read this except for the player who receives it.

The other two types of chat, General and Trade, deal with communication in outposts. General chat can be heard by anyone in the outpost or the specific instance. Trade chat is meant to be used for commerce between players. As a courtesy, trade should be confined to trade chat because some people will often uncheck the option that allows players to "hear" trade chat.

Additional information about how to use the in-game chat

TeamSpeak

TeamSpeak is a third party tool to speak (by voice) to each other, most commonly by using a headset or a microphone and speakers. TeamSpeak channels are used to group users that wish to hear and be heard by everyone speaking in that group. The Basin therefore has channels set up for the supported games, and sub channels for particular areas in the respective games.

TeamSpeak is considered to be particularly useful in PvP games that often end up as fast paced, where the participants have little time to start typing on their keyboards, because these players are busy using the keyboard to issue combat orders and guide their own characters. Taking their time to start typing would typically result in making their characters sitting ducks. Making strategic decisions on the fly and even requesting help are common activities done via TeamSpeak.

PvE players also find TeamSpeak helpful. Guild Wars is a team-based game, and voice chat allows players to coordinate their activities more closely--a very important aspect of gaining high scores on challenge missions or in the successful completion of mission bonuses.

It is not necessary to have a headset with a functioning microphone in order to use TeamSpeak. Instead, players can opt to use TeamSpeak to listen to their teammates. However, it is highly recommended that players investigate headsets with microphones.

Products competing with TeamSpeak involve Ventrilo, but TeamSpeak is the product currently preferred by The Basin. Most Basiners have both products installed so as to be able to play as guests in non-Basin parties where the host guild uses Ventrilo instead of TeamSpeak.

Additional information about how to configure and use TeamSpeak in The Basin

IRC

(short description here)

Arcala's Step by Step Guide

brianc84's IRC bot triggers/commands list

Xfire

(short description here)

X-Fire Basin List -- chat with Basiners across games

GameComm

TeamSpeak is currently used instead of GameComm to communicate in Guild Wars, while GameComm is being evaluated and tested.

The reason some of us are a bit interested in GameComm is because it, compared to TeamSpeak, expands on its feature set with highly useful features such as a bulletin board, public and private text chats, text-to-speech, and user profiles. The program could therefore theoretically unify several communication methods by a single application, and then even provide Diablo II like user profiles.

Additional information about how to configure and use GameComm in The Basin