Suggestion: "Out of Battle" Option for Display Name and Title Settings

Please allow me to first describe the problem I have experienced, that I may better explain my suggestion.

When I am being social, I want to see how other players present their characters, including their titles. But when I am in battle - especially large group battles such as Alliance Raids, World FATEs, Critical Engagements, and Large-Scale Assaults - titles are a distraction at best and prevent me from seeing mechanical tells at worst. Thus I do not want to see titles in combat, that I may better work with my fellow players.

What puts these two desires in conflict is that the only options I have for seeing a character's title are "Show" and "Hide", without any context sensitivity. Yet some system must be able to change nameplate displays based on whether I am in battle, since for character name displays there is a "During Battle" option.

So I propose that the display options for character names and titles be unified and expanded to include an "Out of Battle" option. Based on the existing options for character name display, the new list could look like:

• "Always" / "Show" (unchanged)
• "During Battle" (unchanged)
• "Out of Battle" (new)
• "When Targeted" (unchanged)
• "Never" / "Hide" (unchanged)

I hope that this change will help all players better customize their interface to suit their own needs and gameplay.

If it is convenient to add further options while working on this part of the interface, I can imagine good use for more advanced options, such as different name abbreviation settings depending on whether one is in combat. But I can also imagine that doing so might involve difficult technical and/or interface work, so I quite understand if this is not possible. Even the main suggestion alone would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for reading.

This is a good suggestion and I would def use this feature.

I've been wanting this for hotbars. I would like to hide a few while out of combat to make my UI cleaner.

Maybe have an option to show them while in combat OR while you're in an instance. Walking around in a city or my house, meh, I don't need to see most or any of them really.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Krojack

I've been wanting this for hotbars. I would like to hide a few while out of combat to make my UI cleaner.

Maybe have an option to show them while in combat OR while you're in an instance. Walking around in a city or my house, meh, I don't need to see most or any of them really.

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While you wait for an official implementation, you can work around the system by using a macro that toggles the share states of your bars:

Code:

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/mlock                            // makes sure the entire macro executes, so bars aren't in mismatched states
/hotbar share 1                   
/hotbar share 2
/hotbar share 3
/hotbar share 4

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Toggles the share state of bars 1 through 4. Toggling bar sharing will hide your job-specific bars and show the shared bars of the same number, or vice versa. If the shared bars are empty, the bars can be made invisible. Or the shared bars can be a less obtrusive set of out-of-combat-only actions, since you don't need to see out-of-combat-only actions when you're in combat.

This is simple enough to use a single macro as a toggle.



Working around the nameplate topic is a little bit more involved. There are namplate commands that can be used to change several settings quickly but the nature of the "display when?" option doesn't allow for a single macro toggle, so you need two macros, and if you want them on the same button as if they were a toggle, you will need to store two versions of the bar and swap them out with the macros.

However, there is no slash command for showing or hiding titles. If there were a title display command, you could do something like this:

Code:

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/mlock
/nameplatedisp self 1        // display self nameplate
/nameplatedisp party 1        // display party nameplates
/nameplatedisp alliance 3    // alliance nameplates when targeted
/nameplatedisp other 3        // other PC nameplates when targeted
/nameplatedisp friend 3      // friend nameplates when targeted
/nameplatetype all 4          // set all nameplates to initials only
/titledisplay all off        // turn titles off

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Code:

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/mlock
/nameplatedisp self 4        // hide self nameplate
/nameplatedisp party 1        // display party nameplates
/nameplatedisp alliance 1    // display alliance nameplates
/nameplatedisp other 1        // display other PC nameplates
/nameplatedisp friend 1      // display friend nameplates
/nameplatetype all 1          // set all nameplates to full name
/titledisplay all on          // turn titles on

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but to reiterate, the /titledisplay command doesn't exist, so you'll only be able to customize nameplate display and nameplate type until they add a /titledisplay command.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

If it is convenient to add further options while working on this part of the interface, I can imagine good use for more advanced options, such as different name abbreviation settings depending on whether one is in combat. But I can also imagine that doing so might involve difficult technical and/or interface work, so I quite understand if this is not possible. Even the main suggestion alone would be greatly appreciated.

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I don't think any of what you asked should be particularly complicated, but it would require some slight UI redesign. Much simpler would be to add the /titledisplay command, and then let players macro the actual display changes themselves.

I've wanted this for forever. I had Display Names and Titles on for all of ARR then I hit trials and it was like "This isn't great but I can still play" and then I hit my first Alliance Raid and I was hit by a wave of titles and it felt like I literally couldn't see anything. After that I turned names and titles off which is annoying because I love seeing people with cool or funny names and their titles.