You have the notification goto the room for the relavent Team/Project. Then only people who are in those rooms (even when offline!) get those notifications.

As I said, I work on about 8 codebases concurrently (shared across just two or three projects). I can't have 8 chat rooms open, that's just silly. Every time I want to find a window I will have to cycle through them.

"I can't have 8 chat rooms open, that's just silly"

Why is that silly? Why would messages about all 8 projects be going into the same space? Shouldn't they be separated? That's exactly how we filter out all the different messages. And Hipchat has shortcuts to switch between different rooms, and highlights rooms that have new messages. Works pretty well, from my experience.

Do you have your email program open with 8 different mailboxes, one for each project you want to receive communications about? I doubt you do.

Notifications like these are conceptually a queue of stuff that requires your attention. There is no point in separate notifications into multiple queues, they are all equally important. If project A is throwing a fit, it doesn't matter if I'm currently working on project B, it needs my attention.

I don't know Hipchat, but with Campfire and Propane, each chat is designed to be in a separate window/tab. If you bury the room behind a kind of modal selector (as seems to be the case, there's a sidebar with each room?), that's really no better. After all, if I've focused project A and project B starts blinking, I need to switch there. That's an unnecessary switch when all I want is a queue of items to read. (And no, email is way too heavy for this, and I don't want it interleaved with my regular email. We used to use email, those were bad times.)

It's not unusual for all projects to have incidents during a day, whether it be deployment information, exceptions or monitoring alerts.