Chat bubble limit far too short.

The implementation of chat bubbles, while grand in design, has fallen short in functionality.
The character limit being only around 60 character/two lines is far too small of a limit for chat bubbles to be useful, especially when they shine brightest during RP or Venue gatherings where players may want to say more than half of a sentence.
Needing to stop reading the chat bubble to then look at the chat log to see what the rest of the bubble would have said is extremely frustrating, and goes against the very function of chat bubbles.

Would it not be better for the chat bubble to be as large as it needs to be to fit what someone is saying? If a player doesn't like how long the chat bubble is, they could always limit their own down to as many lines as they would like, and since that feature is already implemented with players being able to choose if their bubble is 1 line or 2 lines (1 line seems completely useless) it would give players the agency to make sure their chat bubble limit is within their comfort, while allowing anyone who seriously wants to use the chat bubble feature for RP immersion to actually use the feature, instead of needing to fallback on reading the chat log whenever the bubble gets cut off.

Seems like a huge waste of resources to release a feature that doesn't actually fully do the thing it was meant to do.

What's the point of chat bubbles if you have to stop using them and just read chat log?

It honestly has to be a placeholder. You can barely say anything.

Yeah, there obviously needs to be a hard limit, but 60 is a bit much. At the same time, we don't need room for people to write essays. I'd say a character limit of 120 is reasonable, but definitely no larger than 180 characters.

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Originally Posted by Hallarem

It honestly has to be a placeholder. You can barely say anything.

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You bring up a compelling point. Start small, then respond to player feedback and increase it accordingly. Which would be a good thing if it weren't for the fact that any increases won't likely come until the next major patch which is four and a half months away.

I've only ever seen chat bubbles, even in WoW, as a good indicator of 'who' is talking and 'when'. I've never seen them as a substitute for a chat box. I don't want my screen flooded.

Spend five minutes with that, in the middle of Balmung's Quicksand.

I dare you.

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Originally Posted by Haru304

Spend five minutes with that, in the middle of Balmung's Quicksand.

I dare you.

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Time and place, as with all things. It's frustrating when you're in a party discussing mechanics and it cuts off the text. 180 characters would be far more reasonable.
I'm betting they went with 60 characters because they developed this in Japanese, in which case 60 characters can convey a lot more of sense.

This only goes to show how little the devs understand about the culture of chat bubbles. They're one of the most request and used feature in any roleplay circle on any game. Was it too hard to make it cap at the exact same length that the chat log paragraphs cap? If anything I've seen what the *gasp* mod that enabled bubbles until now was able to do, and it didn't seem invasive on what I've been shown.

And like everything, just give options to players for our sake! Allow people to turn them off, turn them on, set the limits at which they cap... Why is this so hard to understand?

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Originally Posted by Haru304

I've only ever seen chat bubbles, even in WoW, as a good indicator of 'who' is talking and 'when'. I've never seen them as a substitute for a chat box. I don't want my screen flooded.

Spend five minutes with that, in the middle of Balmung's Quicksand.

I dare you.

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You can already control how many bubbles appear on your screen, as well as the length of the bubbles (either 1 line or 2 lines) so you already have a lot of control on how much of bubbles you see. I don't see how adding the ability to add more lines if you want to would do anything to hurt anyone else's player experience, even if they are in balmung during peak hours.

More letters too expensive?

Really though as others have said this is easily one of the most requested features they’ve had over the years, so it’s pretty disappointing to see them throw out an ‘unfinished version’ to appease players instead of actually putting in the time/effort for it to be fully realized for release. Is that too much to expect of them? Idk

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Originally Posted by Hallarem

It honestly has to be a placeholder. You can barely say anything.

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Should be. But this is SE we are talking about.
There will be no feedback taken and nothing will change.
In their mind they implemented what people wanted and are most likely done and over with it.

Why would you be discussing the mechanics outside of party/alliance chat, out of curiosity?

Or even giving us the ability to set the limit to a max character length ourselves, as a variable.

Some folks will want 60, some will want 120, some will want 500 and wrap around text.

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Originally Posted by Haru304

I've only ever seen chat bubbles, even in WoW, as a good indicator of 'who' is talking and 'when'. I've never seen them as a substitute for a chat box. I don't want my screen flooded.

Spend five minutes with that, in the middle of Balmung's Quicksand.

I dare you.

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Hey, you can turn the chat bubbles off from options if you just want to read chat box. Problem solved?

If they just had to limit it, five rows would have worked because of how small the bubbles are.

I thnk char limt of 60 is gr8 & ok, we shld all wrk w/ it w/ cre8ivity

My friends, welcome back to the days of T9 speak ;)

-sigh-

give them an inch, and they'll ask for a mile

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Originally Posted by XiaoShengwu

-sigh-

give them an inch, and they'll ask for a mile

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People ask for a completely optional way to talk more easily and casually, especially in RP, and the devs take a year and a half to develop said function taking extreme precautions to make it optional and STILL arbitrarily limit it to the size of a small sentence, and we over here being called entitled because they don't want to increase a number of characters a little bit more.

Few of these posts making me feel like time skipped lines so hard, life before 10 years ago literally just doesnt exist. Never happened, any of it.

Anyway, so actually years ago chat bubbles used to be common-I know, very strange and completely unheard of now. But it used to be normal.
The chat bubbles were as big as whatever the person said. "WELL BUT IMAGINE-" I dont have to, that was exactly how it used to be. Lol. I know exactly how it looks. That's what I personally prefer and advocate for. but a middle ground would be fine too.

As it stands now, the bubble in my opinion is far too small. It's a great start!!! But as someone else pointed out, it kind of defeats its purpose. Because I see the chat bubble, and then have to look down anyway to see what they said. At that point, its no longer a chat bubble but more like a chat notification, which we already have sound notifications for different types of chats. So now its a sound and visual notification that I need to look down and see what they said. Alright then. Please make them bigger, that is all.

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Originally Posted by Bunyon

People ask for a completely optional way to talk more easily and casually, especially in RP, and the devs take a year and a half to develop said function taking extreme precautions to make it optional and STILL arbitrarily limit it to the size of a small sentence, and we over here being called entitled because they don't want to increase a number of characters a little bit more.

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imagine if you will, walking into balmung. and seeing now, not only all the characters needing to load, but now additionally all the chat bubbles that move at a mind blowing speed. add into that all the spam chatter, macro emotes. it's ....idk man. just not a good idea in my mind.
Yes i'm taking it to the extreme of a heavily populated world. but that's where the stress testing of it needs to be looked at.

edit: ...what's wrong with in terms of RP as you brought it up....looking at the already resizeable text box provided?

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

I thnk char limt of 60 is gr8 & ok, we shld all wrk w/ it w/ cre8ivity

My friends, welcome back to the days of T9 speak ;)

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...1 533 4 235u2f4c1n9 0f 7h3 1393nd42y 4nd c2yp71c 13375p34k

Why can't they just let us decide how many characters we want on the screen.

The character/line limit feels far too restrictive and makes the speech bubbles feel pointless. The point of having them is so I can keep a conversation with the people I'm close to without having to dart my eyes to the corner of my screen to read what they're saying.

I totally agree, and in case this thread drops off at some point, I've had one going in the much slower moving Interface Subforum.

It's so bizarre that they added an option to limit the size, but made 2 lines the absolute maximum. Why even give us the choice at that point?

People are just going to keep using the plugin.

I agree that it could be a lot bigger. I understand there being a character limit but basically being two-ish sentences feels a bit too small.

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Originally Posted by Wasselin

Why can't they just let us decide how many characters we want on the screen.

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Probably building carefully upwards, so nothing crazy happens with it, from the system itself and from the players by doing funny things with the chat bubbles by entering weird text strings or a whole length of words stuck together into a single one.

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Originally Posted by Arrius

Probably building carefully upwards, so nothing crazy happens with it, from the system itself and from the players by doing funny things with the chat bubbles by entering weird text strings or a whole length of words stuck together into a single one.

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I think it's more likely that it's what was theorized earlier in this thread, namely that they designed the limit around katakana and kanji and decided it was good enough.

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Originally Posted by XiaoShengwu

imagine if you will, walking into balmung. and seeing now, not only all the characters needing to load, but now additionally all the chat bubbles that move at a mind blowing speed. add into that all the spam chatter, macro emotes. it's ....idk man. just not a good idea in my mind.
Yes i'm taking it to the extreme of a heavily populated world. but that's where the stress testing of it needs to be looked at.

edit: ...what's wrong with in terms of RP as you brought it up....looking at the already resizeable text box provided?

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I feel like I'm on crazy pills, goddamn.

"Imagine if you saw these huge text boxes everywhere, wouldn't that be awful?!"

They give you MULTIPLE OPTIONS to select the MAXIMUM SIZE AND TEXT of the bubbles. If I was in the scenario you described, I'd lower that maximum! What are you talking about?? No one is asking for a complete redo of the feature, just an upper limit. If they programmed this feature properly, this is likely a single variable that needs to be increased. "It's has to be stress tested" NO IT DOESN'T JUST LOWER IT IF ITS ANNOYING, ITS AN OPTION

I'd also rather if they let us decide how cluttered or not we want our screens to be. Limiting to this small size however is disappointing. Also the duration is too short! I really hope they work on that.

https://i.redd.it/rnvccule5ihf1.jpeg
:rolleyes:

60 characters is plenty of space. In Japanese.

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Originally Posted by Emitans

60 characters is plenty of space. In Japanese.

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Also reminds me how painfully small our search info can be. 60 characters really isn't a lot to work with unless you're using a lot of acronyms or the auto translate dictionary.

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Originally Posted by Bunyon

I feel like I'm on crazy pills, goddamn.

"Imagine if you saw these huge text boxes everywhere, wouldn't that be awful?!"

They give you MULTIPLE OPTIONS to select the MAXIMUM SIZE AND TEXT of the bubbles. If I was in the scenario you described, I'd lower that maximum! What are you talking about?? No one is asking for a complete redo of the feature, just an upper limit. If they programmed this feature properly, this is likely a single variable that needs to be increased. "It's has to be stress tested" NO IT DOESN'T JUST LOWER IT IF ITS ANNOYING, ITS AN OPTION

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Where did i say "huge". i didn't. please don't put words in my mouth.
What i proposed in that scenario, is multitudes of people all using the chat bubbles. Creating visual clutter. Some of them using said chat bubbles for macros designed solely for the purpose of spam.
I'm not arguing that those who do not want to see them, don't have said options to remain keeping them turned off. (i haven't even gone looking for said option to turn them on, let alone mess with it) i'm merely stating my personal opinion & thoughts on the matter. Why are you getting upset?

What I remember Mabinogi had really good chat boxes. Though it has been a while since I touched that game it could just be nostalgia.

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Originally Posted by XiaoShengwu

Where did i say "huge". i didn't. please don't put words in my mouth.
What i proposed in that scenario, is multitudes of people all using the chat bubbles. Creating visual clutter. Some of them using said chat bubbles for macros designed solely for the purpose of spam.
I'm not arguing that those who do not want to see them, don't have said options to remain keeping them turned off. (i haven't even gone looking for said option to turn them on, let alone mess with it) i'm merely stating my personal opinion & thoughts on the matter. Why are you getting upset?

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Okay, so you weren't complaining about big chat bubbles? Do you realize that's the purpose of this thread? What are you complaining about then?? That there might be a lot of them??? Wouldn't that already happen???

And let me quote you exactly then:
"...what's wrong with in terms of RP as you brought it up....looking at the already resizeable text box provided?"
Yeah, lets not use the new feature that is ideal for having fun with friends and setting up plays and scenarios because of an arbitrary limit imposed by devs who are trying to protect... who exactly? It can't be used in battle, it has options to turn it down AND off.

I just don't understand the argument.

Please increase the limit, it should be able to fit the max characters you can type into the chat box.

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Originally Posted by Kunzite_Lockhart

https://i.redd.it/rnvccule5ihf1.jpeg
:rolleyes:

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This gave me a legit chuckle. Thank you ❤️

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Originally Posted by Emitans

60 characters is plenty of space. In Japanese.

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Yep, I feel like this should definitely be reconsidered for both the bubbles and /seacom

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Originally Posted by Haru304

[...]I've never seen them as a substitute for a chat box. I don't want my screen flooded. [...]

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Just make an optional limited, so people could have a bigger limit or a lower limit however they want.

I turned them off immediately because they were simply too small for any decent use.