The case against having a chat room on Althanas follows:

1. A chat room on Althanas is, by principle, unnecessary.

a. Many chat programs already exist for use outside of Althanas. With such a plethora of high quality, extremely popular chatting programs available outside of Althanas, (e.g. AIM, MSN messenger, Trillian, ICQ, etc) providing a chat room on Althanas is an unnecessary frivolity. There’s no reason that role-players on Althanas can’t use the already existing chat programs, especially since they provide far more versatility and malleability than a browser-based chat room does.

b. Althanas already has a platform for OOC communication. The Flying Stone Tavern is a tried-and-true format for idle chatter that has already surpassed the major role-playing forums in size and activity. Some of you may remember that the Flying Stone Tavern was originally a interim forum created for one of the role-playing breaks we had back in the fall. Due to its immense success, it was kept on, despite previous reservations about having such a forum on Althanas. There’s no reason to have a chat room if the Flying Stone Tavern already fills the niche that chat rooms are supposed to.  

c. Very little in the chat room would actually add to Althanas. If you glance over the submitted chat room conversations in the Flying Stone Tavern, or visit the chat room for yourself for a few minutes, you’ll find that the conversations there are mostly nonsense and sloppy banter that is normally confined to instant message services, where it belongs. Our other OOC forums and services at least add to Althanas in some way, even if they detract from role-playing itself to a  degree. More problems have been hammered out on Your Word and the Flying Stone Tavern than most of us realize or really care to know. Intelligent debates and conversations are carried out there. None of these things occur on chat rooms. There are simply too many people conversing at once, many not keeping up with the conversation, for anything fluid or productive to emerge. The chat room doesn’t give Althanas anything worthwhile. If Althanas were a corporation, the chat room on it would be an unproven and a venture that only sapped money from the quarterly earnings and distracted employees from production. A corporation would cut such a venture, and certainly wouldn’t start out on one with full knowledge it would be unable to give the company anything back in return. There’s no reason Althanas should reject this common sense approach. Some may say that the chat room provides entertainment, and is therefore worthwhile; to them, I say “Refer back to 1a and 1b.”

2. A chat room on Althanas actually detracts from the atmosphere and intent of Althanas.

a. Althanas is, primarily, a role-playing site, and should focus mainly on providing a quality role-playing experience. The reason that it took nearly a year of Althanas’s existence for the Flying Stone Tavern to materialize is because of the original commitment to role-playing that the creators and moderators of Althanas maintained. The only reason there were originally OOC  forums of any description was to help people improve their role-playing abilities. We regularly voice our opinions around here that Althanas is one of the best role-playing sites around, and the reason for that is because we’ve  taken Thoreau’s advice to “Simplify, simplify” to heart. In the future, Althanas should not waver from the steadfast commitment to role-playing it has shown in the past, and the addition of a chat room to Althanas creates a precedent of wavering from that commitment that should not be set.  

b. OOC distractions on Althanas detract attention from the act of role-playing. Despite the huge amount of activity we have on Althanas these days, far less posts made on the site are role-playing posts than we like to think. There are 500 more posts in the Flying Stone Tavern than the Battles forums, and the latter has been around twice as long as the former. The entirety of the Radasanthia forum has 600 posts less than the Flying Stone Tavern. It’s great  that activity in the Flying Stone Tavern is high; most of the threads there are fairly educated discussions or animated debates on Althanian topics of some importance. However, role-playing activity, on the whole, has suffered due to this aforementioned activity. There’s really nothing else we can tell ourselves other than the OOC additions we’ve made to Althanas have siphoned off activity from the IC components we have. Adding yet another OOC distraction to Althanas can only have deleterious effects on the future of role-playing on Althanas. Since Althanas has always placed such high importance on maintaining quality role-playing, it would be contradictory to the principles of Althanas to introduce devices that detract from role-playing.  

c. Chat rooms provide new and needless problems that bog down Althanas’s effectiveness. Security problems regarding the chat room have already been discussed on the mod forum, and it seems that the problems that were discussed will create disciplinary problems in the future that will absorb our moderatorship’s time and energy with peripheral problems that don’t really affect most of Althanas in the least. This creates a situation where more important problems are marginalized because of immediate, less noteworthy concerns. Hammering down these security concerns (and possibly even designating a moderator to the chat room) take our energies away from refining Althanas.com and rectifying other problems that are infinitely more important.

That’s my say on the matter.
-LeopoldStevens

Have a taste for battle? For adventure? Althanas may be your answer. If you haven't yet registered for Althanas, AllRPG’s very own role-playing forum, you can do so by visiting www.allrpg.com/iw/.