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

[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.