There is this wonderful thing called Teamspeak u know lol ?
I had it installed for my MMO guild a couple of months ago to listen to instructions, what's your point?
Are you suggesting I force everybody on my friends list to install TS? Are we all supposed to alt-Tab out of the game if we want to type anything?
Edit: you know what, I give up, no need to answer. I don't have high hopes for text chat - it doesn't look the PC UI has room for it - a text box would ruin its design. To all the poor mic-less people like me, any Europeans who don't want to embarrass their language abilities, the girls who don't want to reveal their gender,etc, I tried. But I'm resigned to the fact that BioWare, even though they made their name as a PC games company, are now primarily a console games company.