Its our backup when EVEYTHING else is down, and I mean EVERYTHING. I would also like to mention that it gets very silly.
^ Yeah it'd be convenient to just have in game chatting through irc. Especially for those on portable devices alot.
We had an IRC channel but nobody used it, so the vote was to remove it, and, get this, within one week everybody wanted it back :O Sounds a lot like weather...
People only wanted it back because of fancy chat, it wasn't linked to the irc for months before it was removed.