Now that the PS3 is dead, can we get a toggle for player speech bubbles?

So now that the ps3 is no longer weighing down QOL development, can we please get an option to give players the same speech bubbles that npcs have?

I've got this real problem with how xiv's emotes and chat functions work.

On one hand we've got the most extensive and detailed animation and emote list that I've seen in any mmo. Unique motions for each race and gender (and clan if you're hyur!), all context sensitive depending on where and how you place your character.

And on the other hand, I can't see any of it, because if I'm interacting with another player, I'm focused on the lower left hand corner of my screen, nowhere near where any of these beautiful animations are happening. I don't even bother to use them in any social context anymore, really they're only for gpose for me right now. :T


Take this scene as an example
http://i.imgur.com/Qbz5GwT.png

Take note where my chat box is, and where my characters. I've got the chat box where it is so that I can see the game world while running around and engaging in combat, this means it need to be fairly far away from my character. And to be honest this placement is the standard for mmos.

Now, if I were engaging in a real conversation and I wanted to talk with someone while still observing the animations my eyes would have to dart from the chat box, to the center of the screen, then immediately back to the chatbox, and since our brains aren't wired for multitasking it'll go a little something like this:

http://i.imgur.com/ROVjEPo.png

Not getting enough information from either chat, or emotes, depending on how rapid the chat scrolls and how naturally the emotes are triggered. This method is inefficient at best, and fatiguing at worst. Plus it causes you to miss chat or react sluggishly, so to avoid being rude, I, and I assume many people, experience their social interactions like this:

http://i.imgur.com/wrfmfSG.png

Ignoring the entirety of the game screen save for the chatbox. Ignoring all those animations, all the work on character creation, and glamour that both you and the people you're talking to have done, and just using the game as a massively resource intensive IRC

pmuch the same as using chat rn:
https://www.planet-source-code.com/u...7820426362.gif

So, to fix these (admittedly personal) issues I suggest allowing players to toggle on player speech bubbles for each individual chats, like they can toggle on visibility of different channels in their chat box. The bubbles could even be tinted for the different chat channel colors you've selected. (like not exactly, but if you have a bright green FC chat, maybe the fc chat bubble could be a light, desaturated, lime green. If party chat is a bright sky blue, the bubble could be a light powder blue, etc.

Just something to bring my eye back to the center of my screen and interacting with people with all the tools available.

http://i.imgur.com/TOVcjEX.png



(side note, party speech bubbles would help immensely when trying to guide someone in the middle of a pull. People rarely are looking in the corner of their screen when they're fighting something, so having your message displayed right where the fighting is happening would be a boon to party communication!)




Here's how other games handle their speech bubble sizing:

Keep in mind these are the maximum lengths I could force. Regular use of these things rarely see the entire length used.
GW2
http://i.imgur.com/rZMnv2B.jpg
The best imo, roomy but not too much, and the textbox fits in nicely with the whole aesthetic of the game's UI

Wildstar
http://i.imgur.com/3AqdFHN.png
Not great, but better than nothing. It allows you to fit a LOT into it, and people rarely use that much (and the length might be due to an addon idk). The transparency is nice, but not for everyone.

Blade and Soul
http://i.imgur.com/IGsCjZl.png?1
Simple and fits in with the UI. I enjoy that it shows the player's name on it. Though the image doesn't show it, these bubbles have a problem with not being scaled with distance. Meaning if someone far away has a bubble visible, it is hard to distinguish from the foreground/more relevant bubbles, and its actual graphic could eclipse the speaker's entire character and those behind them.

Tera
http://i.imgur.com/accg7Xt.png
Kinda weird behaviors when the character is close up. It has a good length, but it may be too wide and have too few lines. I much prefer gw2's use of text wrapping.

SWL
http://i.imgur.com/YVfaOPC.png?1
Not a fan, but once again, better than nothing. Imo it's too small and cuts off waaaaaaaay too much of the sentence. Due to the cut-off it's hardly useful for anything meaningful.

I can support this along as this is optional and by default is turned off, I'm sure along with many others as myself we don't want excessive things on the main screen when playing.

Hm why am i reminded of WoW shenanigans?

I swear i remember this being in the game and on by default during 2.0?

Why did they remove it? Or what happened to it?

I asked for this long time ago but dogpiled by the YDF because I mentioned wow and pso as an example.

Now that the PS3 is dead will people stop scapegoating it?

The answer to that is the same as this idea: No.

I only brought it up because it was the main excuse when this was last requested. :T

Fairly sure there was a QnA that gave that reasoning as well.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fealow

I swear i remember this being in the game and on by default during 2.0?

Why did they remove it? Or what happened to it?

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Probably because of RMT spam would create a wall of text. Notice how close you have to get to NPC's just to trigger it.

The correct way of fixing this however is to simply map it to people on your FC or Friends list only, but then it causes attention splitting.

So perhaps a "line of sight" setting is better where:
a) If the chat log is closed, switch to "bubble mode", if the chat log is open and "also show bubbles" is enabled, text that is displayed in bubbles is bold lettered in the chat log.

b) Bubbles from friends and FC members will always be displayed

c) Bubbles from players over level 17 and completed the MSQ to this point will display text without their name like a NPC. Players under level 17 and not completed the MSQ thru "Into a Copper Hell" will only display auto-translate text in bubbles. Text will be limited to 140 characters like a text message or twitter tweet.

d) Bubbles persist for 30 seconds, or until the player walks more than 5 yalms away from the player talking. Bubbles will also persist if the player is targeted. Bubbles will close when an emote starts, but text after an emote will bring a new text bubble up.

e) Bubble shape can be "whisper/tell", "speech/say", or "yell" by which the bubble will change respectively.

f) To prevent RMT spam, Bubbles will crop everything after 140 characters, and strip all letters that are not normally part of localized language (eg no emoji in bubbles.)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fealow

I swear i remember this being in the game and on by default during 2.0?

Why did they remove it? Or what happened to it?

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Probably because of RMT spamwould create a wall of text. Notice how close you have to get to NPC's just to trigger it.

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This was never in the base game of 2.0, or in any of the betas I participated in, so RMT was not the reason for the lack of this feature.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The correct way of fixing this however is to simply map it to people on your FC or Friends list only, but then it causes attention splitting.

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I don't think it even has to be this complex, though I would prefer if the "friends and fc only" were an option rather than a standard. No other mmos have such rigid constraints, even ones with severe rmt problems.
Honestly I think a block would solve that specific fear though. I mean we wouldn't delete /say and /shout just because rmt makes walls out of text for those. Hell, the speech bubbles would be a lot less visually oppressive than the chat box since culling and draw distance are a thing.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

So perhaps a "line of sight" setting is better where:
a) If the chat log is closed, switch to "bubble mode", if the chat log is open and "also show bubbles" is enabled, text that is displayed in bubbles is bold lettered in the chat log.

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This seems kind of like a complex system for complexity's sake. But it is a novel idea to have some kind of distance fall off for relevant chat. Though it is quite unstandard for mmos.

Though I wonder, where would you enter text if you closed your chat box? (also you can close your chat box??!)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

b) Bubbles from friends and FC members will always be displayed

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Could be a decent toggle button

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

c) Bubbles from players over level 17 and completed the MSQ to this point will display text without their name like a NPC. Players under level 17 and not completed the MSQ thru "Into a Copper Hell" will only display auto-translate text in bubbles. Text will be limited to 140 characters like a text message or twitter tweet.

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Interesting anti rmt solution, though needlessly punishing new players by not allowing access to a basic mmo ui element and communication tool since rmt advertisements are likely to be quickly blocked by the populace and localized in very specific hotspots. I'd prefer to see a spam throttle where if you send x messages in y seconds your bubbles will stop displaying for z seconds or you will be unable to chat at all for z seconds. It's a pretty standard practice.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

d) Bubbles persist for 30 seconds, or until the player walks more than 5 yalms away from the player talking. Bubbles will also persist if the player is targeted. Bubbles will close when an emote starts, but text after an emote will bring a new text bubble up.

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I don't think emotes should interact with the bubbles at all. The whole point is to be able to read what people are saying and seeing their animations at the same time. Also I think 5 yalms would be far too short (for me at least) at least for /say and like chats (/whisper maybe). It would be nice to have a radius slider option for that. (I feel like I'm gonna have to mock up this UI at some point :T)

There could also be some kind of system where the higher the chat traffic is, the shorter the draw radius is for highly used channels, like how the game culls players based on how densely populated a space is. Though that kind of process might be a tad resource intensive.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

e) Bubble shape can be "whisper/tell", "speech/say", or "yell" by which the bubble will change respectively.

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This I like, especially for things like linkshell and yell bubbles since we already have cutscene boxes for those to go off of for design

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

f) To prevent RMT spam, Bubbles will crop everything after 140 characters, and strip all letters that are not normally part of localized language (eg no emoji in bubbles.)

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While I think the 500 characters might be a tad much, 140 might also be a bit small, especially since you wouldn't get a warning when you're nearing the cutting point. Most games cut off the speech bubbles at the point in which the chat box will accept no more characters, and I think that SE should follow the same trend, if not this could always be another slider option.




Side note: I'm probably gonna add examples from other mmos to the OP

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

This was never in the base game of 2.0, or in any of the betas I participated in, so RMT was not the reason for the lack of this feature.

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It's the first feature abused in open beta's, regardless of the game. RMT starts in betas.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

I don't think it even has to be this complex, though I would prefer if the "friends and fc only" were an option rather than a standard. No other mmos have such rigid constraints, even ones with severe rmt problems.
Honestly I think a block would solve that specific fear though. I mean we wouldn't delete /say and /shout just because rmt makes walls out of text for those. Hell, the speech bubbles would be a lot less visually oppressive than the chat box since culling and draw distance are a thing.

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My thought on this is how Mabinogi functioned. Basically the chat system in Mabinogi was equal to a separate IRC chat and separate instant messenger. The instant messenger aspect was horribly abusive. But the local chat was pretty much zone-wide, and the more people there were, the more text tried to be rendered, which resulted in a lot more lag the larger the chat scrollback buffer window became. Anything typed (press enter first) appeared in the text bubbles. The fact that it tried to use a better font resulted in all the rendering lag, and switching to the fixed-width bitmap fonts often removed enough latency that people modded their client specifically for that, even though it barely did anything (it was the scrollback buffer that was was impaired.)

So leave the scrollback log in the game but don't render anything more than what the log window would normally have, if you close it, you just get a "enter text" line after hitting enter with a widget icon to bring the log back up.

The problem regarding walls of RMT text is that there is no possible way of throttling it without throttling everyone, and sometimes this becomes needlessly infuriating when RMT decide to block marketboards from being visible with their spam. Hence Level 17. That's about 8 hours of play if you watch the cutscenes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

This seems kind of like a complex system for complexity's sake. But it is a novel idea to have some kind of distance fall off for relevant chat. Though it is quite unstandard for mmos.

Though I wonder, where would you enter text if you closed your chat box? (also you can close your chat box??!)

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The distance falloff/line-of-sight is essentially away on the server-side to basically do an "audio ray trace". If you can hear this person swinging an axe, you can hear this person talking. A distance slider of some sort might be impractical, though given that the game does have some application of this already for /say and /yell I don't think it's terribly difficult to apply to bubbles.

And as I said above, if you hit enter with the log closed, it would just bring up a text entry box with a widget icon to switch to the log mode.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

Could be a decent toggle button


Interesting anti rmt solution, though needlessly punishing new players by not allowing access to a basic mmo ui element and communication tool since rmt advertisements are likely to be quickly blocked by the populace and localized in very specific hotspots. I'd prefer to see a spam throttle where if you send x messages in y seconds your bubbles will stop displaying for z seconds or you will be unable to chat at all for z seconds. It's a pretty standard practice.

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Spam throttling has so far not worked for RMT. As evil as it sounds, if we're talking about QoL features, QoL features should be things that commited players can toggle, not throw-away accounts. Because bubbles will take up an obnoxious amount of screen real estate it's better to only put auto-translate text in bubbles if they're not sufficiently far in the game, and put whatever text in the log if they're not that far along. Maybe place holder it with a (!) bubble to indicate they are talking if you're not close enough to see their mouths moving.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

I don't think emotes should interact with the bubbles at all. The whole point is to be able to read what people are saying and seeing their animations at the same time. Also I think 5 yalms would be far too short (for me at least) at least for /say and like chats (/whisper maybe). It would be nice to have a radius slider option for that. (I feel like I'm gonna have to mock up this UI at some point :T)

There could also be some kind of system where the higher the chat traffic is, the shorter the draw radius is for highly used channels, like how the game culls players based on how densely populated a space is. Though that kind of process might be a tad resource intensive.

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Going back to Mabinogi and at least Ragnarok online, people will abuse persistant chat as a way to sell things, RMT or not. Parties are already abused for this in every game, but at least you can turn that off, or only look at party messages when you're looking for a party.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

This I like, especially for things like linkshell and yell bubbles since we already have cutscene boxes for those to go off of for design


While I think the 500 characters might be a tad much, 140 might also be a bit small, especially since you wouldn't get a warning when you're nearing the cutting point. Most games cut off the speech bubbles at the point in which the chat box will accept no more characters, and I think that SE should follow the same trend, if not this could always be another slider option.

Side note: I'm probably gonna add examples from other mmos to the OP

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How many people can not formulate an idea to less than 140 characters? I picked this as a common theme, but what you really want is people to write short sentences and the persistence of the message is long enough to read. You don't want someone to be able to copy and paste War&Peace and then have their avatar recite the entire thing line for line over the course of a few hours. Likewise most spam simply tries to make their spam posts as large and fast as possible.

Hence, no bubbles near the market boards, aetherytes or bells. Outside of the home zones, where spammers seldom go, you can tone down the draw distance limits so that you can have a party walk/run/ride together within 30 yalms of each other and not miss anything.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

It's the first feature abused in open beta's, regardless of the game. RMT starts in betas.

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Yeah I'm looking back at all my screens and videos from open beta and I'm seeing zero signs of speech bubbles. Are we talking about 1.0 now?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

My thought on this is how Mabinogi functioned. Basically the chat system in Mabinogi was equal to a separate IRC chat and separate instant messenger. The instant messenger aspect was horribly abusive. But the local chat was pretty much zone-wide, and the more people there were, the more text tried to be rendered, which resulted in a lot more lag the larger the chat scrollback buffer window became. Anything typed (press enter first) appeared in the text bubbles. The fact that it tried to use a better font resulted in all the rendering lag, and switching to the fixed-width bitmap fonts often removed enough latency that people modded their client specifically for that, even though it barely did anything (it was the scrollback buffer that was was impaired.)

So leave the scrollback log in the game but don't render anything more than what the log window would normally have, if you close it, you just get a "enter text" line after hitting enter with a widget icon to bring the log back up.

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It's been a good long while since I've played mabinogi, so I can't comment on any of that, though that sounds horrendously inefficiently designed. :x I've never experienced lag due to chat scroll in any modern MMO...
And your second paragraphsentence makes sense.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The problem regarding walls of RMT text is that there is no possible way of throttling it without throttling everyone, and sometimes this becomes needlessly infuriating when RMT decide to block marketboards from being visible with their spam. Hence Level 17. That's about 8 hours of play if you watch the cutscenes.

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I just don't see how blocking the nuisance doesn't solve that problem :T And I feel like the throttling that would affect RMTs would not affect normal play usage, and if it did affect a non RMT player, they'd probably be spamming just to troll, which would be a good use of the throttle anyway. (i'm talking about the throttles that silence a character for like 30 minutes or more for rapid spam after a number of warnings, not the ones that are like "you must wait 5 seconds before you're allowed to type in /say again")

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The distance falloff/line-of-sight is essentially away on the server-side to basically do an "audio ray trace". If you can hear this person swinging an axe, you can hear this person talking. A distance slider of some sort might be impractical, though given that the game does have some application of this already for /say and /yell I don't think it's terribly difficult to apply to bubbles.

And as I said above, if you hit enter with the log closed, it would just bring up a text entry box with a widget icon to switch to the log mode.

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Aye.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Spam throttling has so far not worked for RMT. As evil as it sounds, if we're talking about QoL features, QoL features should be things that commited players can toggle, not throw-away accounts. Because bubbles will take up an obnoxious amount of screen real estate it's better to only put auto-translate text in bubbles if they're not sufficiently far in the game, and put whatever text in the log if they're not that far along. Maybe place holder it with a (!) bubble to indicate they are talking if you're not close enough to see their mouths moving.

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Real talk, I'm on balmung. The only good thing that's come of the server lockdown is that I've never had any persistent interaction with RMT in this game, so I don't know how aggressive the RMT is vs how aggressive SE is at suppressing it. But I highly disagree with the idea that new players can just be denied QoL features because they're new. To me this is like if until you're level 17, you can acquire and spend gil, but you cannot see how much gil you have because it makes life less convenient for gil farmers.
Turn it off for trial accounts, sure, but my recruit-a-friends paid for this game so they can experience the same game I play and they shouldn't be punished because SE's spam detection sucks.

But, if you insist on restricting low level players because of RMT, at least be consistent. Take away the chat functionalities of anything you don't want to see a bubble for, because they can be abused just as badly, and even more intrusively now, since they actively push away lines from level 18+ players.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Going back to Mabinogi and at least Ragnarok online, people will abuse persistant chat as a way to sell things, RMT or not. Parties are already abused for this in every game, but at least you can turn that off, or only look at party messages when you're looking for a party.

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If someone is spamming hard enough for their speech bubble to be persistent, then the spam filter should pick them up, if not they should be reported for spam, because, considering the typical lifespan of a speech bubble, they are repeating their line way too quickly to be reasonable, and probably have a macro/bot set up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

How many people can not formulate an idea to less than 140 characters? I picked this as a common theme, but what you really want is people to write short sentences and the persistence of the message is long enough to read. You don't want someone to be able to copy and paste War&Peace and then have their avatar recite the entire thing line for line over the course of a few hours. Likewise most spam simply tries to make their spam posts as large and fast as possible.

Hence, no bubbles near the market boards, aetherytes or bells. Outside of the home zones, where spammers seldom go, you can tone down the draw distance limits so that you can have a party walk/run/ride together within 30 yalms of each other and not miss anything.

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Well, we can start the count at two, since the forum yells at me when I try to respond. :P
And you can't copy and paste war & peace in this game in one go. The chat box already has a limit to how much you can type. So no need to be afraid of bee movie script attacks.

My thing is, be consistent with this (well, any really) design. If the chat box currently allows you to type 500 characters, then either the speech bubble should allow that, or close to that, or the current character allowance needs to be lowered. And It's not really about the average use of the element. I fully believe that most of the time people will be only using twitter-length or double-twitter-length messages anyway, but for consistency's sake it should match the upper limits of the chat box.

Same with the no bubbles near market boards/aetherytes or bells. I'd rather see a toggle for not showing bubbles in cities like I have on one of my wildstar addons, than having these weird voiceless voids around objects where I might happen to get too close to one of them and accidentally ignore someone because I'm used to seeing a bubble pop up. Basically, the more consistent something is, the more predictable something is, the more intuitive its design is and the easier it is to use.
Plus, we already have tools that allow us to get around the crowding around useful objects. X! That same button can hide speech bubbles just as it hides nameplates and suppresses player selection.


Honestly, where I'm coming from is really just faith. I'm putting faith in SE's designers to mindfully create a usable and visually friendly chat system using the resources they have. I don't expect them to slap on some stock text boxes, that have no character limit, no max draw distance and no occlusion culling. And I'm certain that they will be able to keep these worries in mind if/when they design their implementation and that they will be able to handle those worries in ways that are the least intrusive to the normal players of the game.

A toggle for player speechbubbles - yes, please!

Hmmmm you know what? I actually agree. They really should like add the option for chat bubbles. It has a sort of charm, you know? Maybe it would make people more social too.

Yup, far easier to read the speech bubbles for dialogue and boss attacks instead of looking down at the chat box for something that scrolls by too fast as is sometimes. I us eit in WoW all of the time and RMT abusing it hasn;t been a problem for many years.

They were horrible in Star Wars Galaxies though and really distracting, especially when people abused them.

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Originally Posted by Roda

Real talk, I'm on balmung. The only good thing that's come of the server lockdown is that I've never had any persistent interaction with RMT in this game, so I don't know how aggressive the RMT is vs how aggressive SE is at suppressing it. But I highly disagree with the idea that new players can just be denied QoL features because they're new. To me this is like if until you're level 17, you can acquire and spend gil, but you cannot see how much gil you have because it makes life less convenient for gil farmers.
Turn it off for trial accounts, sure, but my recruit-a-friends paid for this game so they can experience the same game I play and they shouldn't be punished because SE's spam detection sucks.

But, if you insist on restricting low level players because of RMT, at least be consistent. Take away the chat functionalities of anything you don't want to see a bubble for, because they can be abused just as badly, and even more intrusively now, since they actively push away lines from level 18+ players.

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I'm on Excalibur, the RMT spam tends to only show up during periods where there is no queue to get in (right now the queue averages about 20 from noon to 11pm), I tend to play between 5pm and 4am. So I do see it, I've even sat there at the marketboard over the course of two hours and counted how many new RMT bots.

Cue
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...t_kneeling.png

Roughly, a new bot appears, it starts spamming, I hit report RMT, it keeps spamming for about 5 minutes, pops out of existence, and then a new bot arrives a minute later. Repeat about 20 times.

As for how bad spam can get in a mmo... I went through all my mabinogi screenshots and pretty much remembered I took great pains to get screenshots that don't have rmt spam in them, though I did find this one in Mabinogi:

http://i.imgur.com/W126VQA.png

This is standing in the "market" on channel 1 Alexina sometime during November 2009. Also every single one of those shops are bots, so you often saw the rmt spam bots right on top of the rmt shops. Nexon only started to do somethings to curb the spam abuse years later, but this is typically what the market looked like on a day with few bots.

I have screenshots from Wizardry and Archeage beta's/release versions that have similar problems, but it will take a while to locate them, so let's just let me say that this is not the worst.

Bad is when the bots appear and just stay there, worse is when the bots appear and disappear only for another to take it's place, thus rendering the blacklist useless.

FFXIV's report RMT AFAIK at least just creates a ticket for the GM's to look at and hopefully ban the physical accounts, but it's not good enough when the only thing that stops RMT is by preventing new characters from being created in the first place.

Perhaps that's where RMT combat should be addressed. Anyway, staying on topic of the bubbles.

In most cases, the bubbles you see from NPC's are about 1 and a half lines, probably because they are translated from Japanese and Japanese is a little more concise with the amount of space it takes up.

What I'd suggest is maybe 66 characters across (typical type-written letters are this wide, as well as emails) and 3 lines being the maximum.
http://webtypography.net/2.1.2

That would give you 198 characters to fit most text. If we want to consider making that larger, I'd suggest auto-line breaks, so that if someone writes a 500 character post, it displays it one sentence at a time, and bumps the previous line up until there is three, then deletes the top most line before it adds the next line so that only 3 lines are ever displayed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

How many people can not formulate an idea to less than 140 characters? I picked this as a common theme, but what you really want is people to write short sentences and the persistence of the message is long enough to read. You don't want someone to be able to copy and paste War&Peace and then have their avatar recite the entire thing line for line over the course of a few hours. Likewise most spam simply tries to make their spam posts as large and fast as possible.

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Ugh... *Flashbacks to PSU days....* *HAPPY BIRTHDAY SONIC!!!!!* Please make it stop...make it stop....

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Originally Posted by Roda

Real talk, I'm on balmung. The only good thing that's come of the server lockdown is that I've never had any persistent interaction with RMT in this game, so I don't know how aggressive the RMT is vs how aggressive SE is at suppressing it.

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I'm on Louisoix. There's often multiple spambots in a city area, all advertising the same website. They're literally popping up faster than we can report them!

Yes, please. A toggle for player speech chat bubbles would be awesome. I always enable it on games that allow me to do so.

I loved this from WoW, would be nice if we could get it here too.

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Originally Posted by Roda

I only brought it up because it was the main excuse when this was last requested. :T

Fairly sure there was a QnA that gave that reasoning as well.

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Need you to link it then. I went through and couldn't find it. The proof that PS3 wasn't the cause is the very existence of this thread. If the PS3 was the real reason we would've had more QoL stuff at SB launch. The real(and for some reason blatantly ignored) reason why this game is held back is that its 2017 and this game is running on a 2010 game engine(it uses the same one 1.0 did).

So everyone that is blaming a piece of technology that had its strongest tech at 2009 released is uninformed and uneducated about the game's history. Like I mentioned above, if it really was the PS3 holding the game back Yoshi P(in multiple interviews) said he would've discontinued support sooner.

All this PS3 hate is just a scapegoat because fanboys think the devs can do no wrong.

The game engine is from 2010. A lot of other MMOs have upgraded to more modern(I know BnS off the top of my head runs on late 2012/early2013) engines.

No thank you... it's tacky. Use your chat log.. it's fine. I don't support this in the least. Developer time can be better spent on other things.

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Originally Posted by SomeRandomHuman

Need you to link it then. I went through and couldn't find it. The proof that PS3 wasn't the cause is the very existence of this thread. If the PS3 was the real reason we would've had more QoL stuff at SB launch. The real(and for some reason blatantly ignored) reason why this game is held back is that its 2017 and this game is running on a 2010 game engine(it uses the same one 1.0 did).

So everyone that is blaming a piece of technology that had its strongest tech at 2009 released is uninformed and uneducated about the game's history. Like I mentioned above, if it really was the PS3 holding the game back Yoshi P(in multiple interviews) said he would've discontinued support sooner.

All this PS3 hate is just a scapegoat because fanboys think the devs can do no wrong.

The game engine is from 2010. A lot of other MMOs have upgraded to more modern(I know BnS off the top of my head runs on late 2012/early2013) engines.

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It was stated as it being a memory limitation issue due to the PS3. They had to use many tricks just because of that reason. I can't find the post where Minagawa-san explained it, tho.

Why we didn't have more QoL stuff right with Stormblood's launch? Maybe because it was low on their priority list, and there were other things that they had to work on (like the new job UI). But that doesn't mean that we can't get them.

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Originally Posted by Yshnal

It was stated as it being a memory limitation issue due to the PS3. They had to use many tricks just because of that reason. I can't find the post where Minagawa-san explained it, tho.

Why we didn't have more QoL stuff right with Stormblood's launch? Maybe because it was low on their priority list, and there were other things that they had to work on (like the new job UI). But that doesn't mean that we can't get them.

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Where was it specified that was a PS3's memory limitation and not the memory limitation of the engine? I know they said the reason au'ra faces and horns being locked was because of a "memory limitation" but it was never directly said it was PS3. The strongest PS3 was released 1 year before this game's game engine, so the first fault lies with this outdated engine. People need to stop scapegoating.

People have to feel like they're special and the easiest way to do that is to crap all over something else

The devs have never cited PS3 as a reason a feature couldn't be introduced. That is, and always has been, player speculation. In actuality, when the devs want to add a feature that PS3 can't support, they simply add it just to PS4 and PC, or give PS3 a degraded version. For example, the shiny floor effects, or the half-sized W Crosshotbar. It is possible that there are features that the devs wanted to introduce but couldn't because of the PS3 - but if they exist, it is not an excuse the devs have ever used.

As for speech bubbles, I see no value in them if they work like the NPC speech bubbles. If the NPC is moving around, those speech bubbles are just about impossible to read - and even if they're holding perfectly still, it's difficult. As for distractions from moving and emoting, you pretty much have to have the camera zoomed in close to appreciate emotes properly, and if you're doing that then you're in a low-key enough situation that it's not difficult to quick-scan the chat box.

Someone brought up boss mechanics being difficult to read out of the chat window - just what mechanics are those? Any attack with a cast time is going to show up on the boss's cast bar, which a player is generally keeping an eye on during combat. Some bosses have mechanics that they "emote" to the player, such as Chimera's Violet Eyes / Blue Eyes in Cutter's Cry - those are pasted right across the middle of the screen, as well as in the chat box.

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Originally Posted by Fealow

I swear i remember this being in the game and on by default during 2.0?

Why did they remove it? Or what happened to it?

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Was never ingame
There was once a thread about it, and the majority census was "NO"

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The devs have never cited PS3 as a reason a feature couldn't be introduced.

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It was the reason that zones were introduced in 2.0 instead of the stupid tunnels they had in 1.0 - the PS3 has 128 MB of RAM and could not hold the entire pre-loaded zone in memory, even with the undrawn parts of the map being hidden by the mountains and tunnels.

This would be so awesome I don't know where to start. Jus make it toggle-able for all nay-sayers and let's gooooooooooo. :)

I wouldn't mind as long as I can turn it off.

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Originally Posted by SomeRandomHuman

Need you to link it then. I went through and couldn't find it. The proof that PS3 wasn't the cause is the very existence of this thread. If the PS3 was the real reason we would've had more QoL stuff at SB launch. The real(and for some reason blatantly ignored) reason why this game is held back is that its 2017 and this game is running on a 2010 game engine(it uses the same one 1.0 did).
So everyone that is blaming a piece of technology that had its strongest tech at 2009 released is uninformed and uneducated about the game's history. Like I mentioned above, if it really was the PS3 holding the game back Yoshi P(in multiple interviews) said he would've discontinued support sooner.

All this PS3 hate is just a scapegoat because fanboys think the devs can do no wrong.

The game engine is from 2010. A lot of other MMOs have upgraded to more modern(I know BnS off the top of my head runs on late 2012/early2013) engines.

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The mention of the PS3 was more an expression of relief that instances like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme.../chat_bubbles/ would no longer happen/
And it's not the main point of this thread. Two parts of this thread mention the PS3 excuse being dead, and the rest is about how having speech bubbles will improve the usability of the chat function, allowing players to look at the center of their screen more. the only reason why I'm not arguing about why "memory limitations" = "ps3 limitations, please understand" is because it's irrelevant to this thread.

If it offends you this much, I can edit the OP so that the discussion can be more on topic.


And many, many MMOs launched before 2010 have incorporated speech bubbles just fine, and this game already has them available, but only for npcs. I don't see why SE shouldn't currently be continuously working on their engine like every other aging mmo.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

RMT

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Yeah that screenshot is what I'm talking about. I think SE has enough sense to not have bubbles without an upper limit like that. :P

"Something something servers something somethings unstable something somethings we can't do it"

On top of that believe it or not there are a lot of people who will defend the lack of bubbles with their soul (heck people defend the lack of pets into dungeons), so I doubt this will ever happen.

But if it does well, hope so!

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Originally Posted by SomeRandomHuman

The real(and for some reason blatantly ignored) reason why this game is held back is that its 2017 and this game is running on a 2010 game engine(it uses the same one 1.0 did).

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Gonna need citation for this (seen this claim pop up a lot more recently, oddly enough) particular bit...

Considering this interview from 2011 pretty much says they were developing a new engine that wasn't the one used for 1.0 (it also puts a kibosh on the other misconception I see from time to time and even thought was true myself for a while, that FFXIV uses the Luminous Engine...it doesn't, though Yoshida-san apparently considers them sort of "sister" engines because some of the same engineers worked on both and there are a few similarities as a result) - https://gamerescape.com/2011/10/19/g...-is-out-there/

On topic with the OP - would definitely like to see this added as a toggle-able option, especially if we get some extra options like "display FC/friends/party only" thrown in.