Eve Online - Interview @ WarCry

WarCry: In a recent Dev blog, Local Chat is mentioned as possibly being removed. How does the new Voice Comms that is being developed in partnership with Vivox affect this? And does Local Chat spamming really affect client performance to the point where it can cause considerable lag?

Noah Ward: EVE Voice was never going to be available for the local chat channel or any other public channels including NPC corporation chat; however, that's not the reason for wanting to remove local. The main reason is so it's not used as a reconnaissance tool. Lag isn't really an issue. We don't plan to remove local until we can assure the social aspects of the local user list can be retained. The reconnaissance can be replaced with new scanning tools in the solar system view, but the question is how we replace all those smiling faces in the user list.