Who said anything about MORE attention? Stop putting your own issues into my words. If I'm playing Foobar 2000, and I get a remote tell from Bob @ Unmysterious Manor, asking me what's up… it's nice to be able to chat a bit while the rest of the group I'm in is idle, or at least shoot back a "I'm in a dungeon now, ttyl".

Much nicer to see them being alive and around, rather than getting an email 3 hours later asking "Hey, want to play Manor for a bit? I'm on for a couple of hours."

I dunno… it's hard enough convincing a majority of my friends to all play on the same SERVER of the same game, even when they all WANT to play the same game. Then there's the issue of time and family… if we waited to play until everyone could log in together, we'd play about 1 hour every other month. But, having cross-game chat (even if it's third-party like the steam client, or mumble) means we can at least see one another online and say Hi.

Arguing against that seems like a very anti-social thing to do.

I use something a less limited than I3 for this kind of behaviour, it is called a instant messenger that will work whatever I am doing, and not only mudding.

Man, this is a treasure trove of outlooks/mindsets. It's awesome to find so many like minded people.

Here's my reason:
I only scratch-build what I can't find free or am not allowed to use on my system. For example, a network engineer by trade, I scratch-built a Cisco network manager tailored to my needs because the commercial versions had too many "extras" that were against our network security policies. Otherwise, I enjoy decoding the mind of other programmers because you never know when a neat little piece of coding genius can be found within a "just another server/client".

Sometimes I fail at google and can't find something I need, so I do it myself… I'm sure a few people fall into this category.