derangement

Player-created chat channels have unlimited range. You would need to create one of those per small group of people, which is mechanically indistinguishable from joining a team/league and using team/league chat, making walk-up-rp much clumsier and less likely to happen. A grey scale based on distance *could* help in situations of medium congestion, to help distinguish between those lines you care about, and those you can ignore. In very crowded rooms, however, it would not mitigate the unbearable weight of massive chat scroll, and how it forces players to keep their attention glued on the screen or risk missing something important in a flood of ambient noise.

Oh my goodness, yes please! There are a lot of gorgeous player-created clubs and social meeting spots, whose creators have invested a lot of time and passion into. Many of these places were designed to look like they could be a real place: a pavilion with stalls for supergroup representatives, like you'd find in a convention; a cozy little nightclub with a bar by the entrance, a dance floor to the side, and some balconies with seats and tables overlooking the room, for those seeking a little bit more privacy... Sadly, adhering to real world aesthetics makes chat in these places feel too crowded, and it takes an immense amount of personal energy and attention to not miss what the people you are interacting with may have said. I have seen people resorting to team/league chat to try and mitigate this, but it comes with a couple of drawbacks: 1) By moving conversation to a private channel, one closes the group off from most external interactions. A friendly nearby stranger can no longer chime in on something they overhear, making it that much harder for them to engage with an ongoing conversation they would have been welcome to join. 2) to join a team or league within a supergroup base, all members of the team need to be the same faction: heroes cannot invite villains to team, and vice-versa. Creating a short-range public channel like this thread suggests would greatly alleviate the issue, allowing social base builders to focus on creating as attractive a base as possible, without needing to artificially inflate room sizes to try and mitigate how many people would be within earshot of each other on an average night. :)