courteneyfish:WGT have said that they won't waste resources on this when people can use Skype or several other systems for free. It's understandable really.
But Skype and the alternatives don't have the significant advantage of being built-in to this site. Playing AS with strangers, you don't know which voice/text chat/IM apps (if any) your partner has, and it's a nuisance to manually set up to connect to them. It would be so much better to have a simple one-click interface in the game for private chat with a teammate or any of your co-competitors you might want to "whisper" to.
Also badly needed, the ability to mute any individual competitor in the public (or private) chat. I have had numerous players "talking trash" and generally being as offensive as possible without explicitly violating TOS, whom I wished to mute so as to be able to continue chatting with the others, but the only option WGT gives is to close Chat completely... and then when it's closed, you get that extremely distracting BRIGHT ORANGE, BLINKING button, which is almost as bad as the chat I didn't want to see in the first place.
Finally, I don't find it understandable at all. Real golf, and WGT, are supposed to be social experiences. If WGT can't be bothered to properly implement simple social interaction features that have become the de facto standard
(full-featured in-game chat, pre- and post-game chat in a "lobby" environment which allows previewing of available multiplayer games, and setting multiplayer games up in accordance with conversations with friends and/or strangers beforehand)
on almost every other gaming site in existence, and considers doing so a "waste of resources", then WGT has no accurate concept of what it means to be a social gaming site.