My opinion? Not even close to a top priority. There are communities on discord, twitch, reddit, twitter etc... plenty of ways to tap into the community already from third parties. And bear in mind that not EVERY gamer wants another social space in their lives ;) Some of us play to get away from the social spaces that fill the rest of our days!

Most of the games in the same genre as Wolcen don't provide this, so I guess the majority of devs don't agree with you either ;)

Mind you, I have no doubt this would be welcomed by some down the road... eventually. Sure! But since it's a network/bandwidth thing it would be neither simple nor cheap so I wouldn't expect it soon.

Yes, a global chat to trade and socialize would be a priority, soon the wolcen team will launch an api and we are developing a sales website as soon as the endpoint comes out, the wolcen builder is also being developed by us, from my point of view the chat is something fundamental since while others play to not socialize others do it for the opposite as it is the case of much of the community, the strong point would be to form groups, seek help and trade ingame easily and directly, I think the game wins a lot with them

I've just purchased the game, been playing for about 2 hours. I'm loving it until now, except for public/general chat being missing.
Yes, it's a top priority for me too. Please Wolcen Studios a.s.a.p.