Skype

[aerelm]

To be honest, I find Skype really helpful, but only in theory.

When it comes to the actual faction chats, its more of a spamfest (And trust me, I've been in 25+ chats during my disco-time, and none were any better than the other) than anything else. People like to sit in faction chats and talk about non-game-related stuff for hours, and even though I have nothing against that, it pretty much nulls the "Skype is mandatory for faction activity coordination" argument.

On the other hand, Skype is actually useful for factions when they want to get a number of members ingame, or when someone needs help and whatnot, or even for quick questions or heads-ups about whatever matter that might concern the faction. Sadly, most of these stuff get lost in middle of all that off-topic chatter.

This is why factions need to have a 'Spam' chat for non-faction talks, a 'Discussion' chat solely for discussion of matters at hand which concerns the ingame RP of that faction directly, and an 'Emergency' chat for when a member needs help and whatnot. But again, sadly, this have been tried too many times and failed for whatever reason, so most factions just have one chat, where many expect others to read through the +9000 msgs when they go away for a while and cant read them right away.

So in theory, Skype is rather useful for factions... But when it comes down to actually using it, eh, not as useful as it seems.

Is there any way you can keep skype "on top" while playing without using windowed mode, so you dont have to alt-tab back to the desktop to read it?

No, and that's why people should actually start using Xfire.

Sure, Skype works better for faction chats, coordinating events and whatnot, but once ingame, Xfire makes things -Much- easier, as you can just press a combination of keys, and have the chat screen pop up without having to Alt + tab. So, if all members use Xfire and Skype, they can talk about stuff in Skype faction chats, and just drop a quick PM at someone to come and help when they're getting shot at by 10 ships, without having to worry about getting killed while tabbed out.

Not to mention Xfire also lets you take screenshots, videos, browse web while ingame, and whatnot.