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

[Roda]

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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??!)

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

Could be a decent toggle button

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.)

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

[KisaiTenshi]

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.

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

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.

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.

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??!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

[Roda]

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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")

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.

Aye.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[KisaiTenshi]

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.

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


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:



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.

[Paladinleeds]

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.

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!

[FallenArisen0990]

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.

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