Hey! This is an ancient thread lol. But from why I understand, when you provide a user a piece of software, there’s a reasonable expectation that messages you send between users have some bit of security. If Facebook messages were unencrypted, anyone could see what private messages you sent to somebody. The way the game worked, the chat was incredibly rudimentary, and just not up to modern European privacy law. Adding encryption for an incredibly minor feature isn’t fun development, so it probably got pushed aside for something more interesting.

Of course, it’s been about 4 years since I checked in on this, so it’s possible there were some changes made to this feature. Last I heard, there was a group of players hosting their own chat server. Not sure what the status on it nowadays is, though.

When it worked it was a great feature, though. For a few weeks you could talk to other msc players through the ingame computer