Well thanks, too late for me. I am staying out of chat from now on and will participate less in the fleet. I have often felt ignored in the chat because when i say something or ask a question i just get dead air. If someone had of taken the extra energy to type in what you just did I would have been able to participate. However the lack of caring what people are asking in the chat is apparent and causes such misunderstandings. Popularity factor 0 equals being ignored regardless of the relevance to the game. Popularity factor 10 talks about passing gas and everyone is all over it. I stopped playing the popularity game when I was in high school. From now on I am a ghost until I find a better place to haunt.
I respectfully disagree with that assessment. Mainly because I don't see how such a popularity structure can develop in a group with such high turnover. I went away for a month on vacation and I come back to half a new fleet (including you!) and in a few months lots of people we see all the time will be around less and other people will be around. It's hard to have a popularity hierarchy when the vast majority of people barely know each other's names.
Also, when I first came on-board last year, people would talk to me in chat if I made a joke or something and I knew no one. I still don't know people that well since I'm the worst Team Speak user in the fleet, and I still feel like people listen when they're around. On the other hand, I'm a fleet captain now and I can write things into the ether of fleet chat that get completely ignored, like even this past weekend.
Last, during an event it's hard to follow what's going on in chat. For example, I was setting up Mine Trap (a 20-person queue) yesterday and, in order to fill it, I had to announce in multiple channels (we just don't have enough fleeties interested in it to fill it). Voleron@akrilon wanted to join and I couldn't get him in by right-clicking his name, and I was switching between 4 tabs and checking out the 6 channels I was announcing in while trying to get the players already in the queue organized so that we wouldn't completely fail... while some of those players were yelling at me in chat to start the queue already even though we didn't have full teams yet.
So, in the mayhem, I forgot about the quotation marks trick that can get around the invite bug. I apologized to Voleron later, but the point of this story is that someone with a popularity factor of infinity like Voleron can still get lost in the mess of in-game chat, and that organizing stuff is hard (and uncompensated) work so maybe we can be gentler with those folks who are trying to put something together.
About questions outside of events: I answer a lot of questions when I'm online if I'm looking at fleet chat (I minimize the chat window when I'm in episode content and sometimes I'm chatting in other channels). My guess is that dead air just means that no one who saw your question knows the answer, and everyone's waiting for someone else to give the answer instead of saying they don't know.
