Battle Chat Modifications

Cynd3r: Let me shed some light on this decision.   The purpose of of battle chat is supposed to be about coordinating your actions with allies and communicating for better teamwork, as good teamwork is essential in gaining the upper hand in a battle.   At the same time, after years of observation and feedback, we've found that cross-battle chat provides no benefit and is instead used for insults, provocations, and other inappropriate behavior. Instead of aiding good gameplay (which, I reiterate, is the number one reason FOR battle chat), it ends up hindering it by being used to disclose placement of allies and distracting others from the game.  This is also why we didn't choose to make cross-team chat optional--even if an individual can choose not to read the exchanges, it's not going to stop a teammate from disclosing an ally position to the enemy team--it's just that they'll be unaware of it.    When observing the reasoning of people trying to argue the benefits of cross team battle chat, we've mostly been seeing responses that more or less boil down to this: "the whole point in this game is to DESTROY ur enemy physically (tanks+skills) and spiritually (strategy + troll).." (this is from an actual post).   For those of you arguing that all this does is displace the toxicity rather than get rid of it: This actually does get rid of a large portion of toxicity. To mitigate the possibility of people being toxic within team chat, we've added the ability to mute them. Also when hovering over a nickname, you will be able to send a complaint about a player, add them to a blacklist.   You can also enable the option of receiving private messages only from friends or disable private messages at all.   Hope this clears up the logic behind this decision. Obviously it can't make everyone happy, but it's become apparent that this move will improve players' gameplay experience in general.