[Mistwraith]

Originally Posted by Clouds

IRC is old technology and it limits what you can do with it nowadays, whereas with Slack you can do a lot especially with Planetarion. Folk will still use IRC for recruitment because Slack isn't a public server - Slack is privatised as you need to invite team-members.

Not really a place for a dicussion on the merits of another communication tool but heres my tuppence on the subject.
Irc was the 1st tool used for pa, at that time it was not integrated, I've gone through the years with galaxies and alliances that used various tools, msn chat room, irc, whatsapp, a realtime chat verbally one i cant for the life of me remember the name of and now this one.
Once upon a time many alliances owned their own irc servers, now i suspect its just us ( netgamers like pa was notoriously unstable in the early rounds ).
Its just the new toy, another will replace it and it will if the rules change on encryption/traceability by security services of messages be subject to not being totally private just like whatsapp and any other direct communication tools.
Players need to connect with everyone in the game not just their alliance, without community this game isnt all that much fun.