As per the title, I’m going to bounce off a proposal for reworking services chat insofar it’s removed and converted into what I would think would be a better equivalent.
A Job Board You Walk Into An Inn For
- You walk into an inn to interact with a job board to edit/create your personal spot on it.
- It could have customization similar to that of FFXIV adventurer plates, to help your service offer stand out. These customizations could be exclusive to achievements like CE/KSM/AOTC which would help signal to players that the service provider is legitimate or established. Also could be store-monetized (So Blizzard can see value in investing in this.).
- An unlock requirement could be added in order to deter and avoid the swathes of throwaway spam bot accounts that have plagued services chat since the start. Essentially put the job board on “read only mode” for fresh accounts until they spend a non-trivial amount of time in some unlock quest chain or cooldown period.
- Set+Forget model, instead of the spam model. I’ve found people don’t take a liking to needing to spam a chat channel instead of engaging in content and passively getting DMs and mail for their services. The spam based effort required for services chat self-filters out legitimate community members and is probably a large reason monied interests using throwaway accounts are what’s left of services chat.