I think in an older thread it was said that the reason this hasn’t been done already is because of PS3 limitations. Speech bubbles for PCs would be client side and a city full of people chat bubbling would use up more memory.

But even after PS3 support was dropped and quest UI changed, SE still doesn’t seem interested in adding this. I’m sure part of it has to do with 1.0 spaghetti code.

I can’t speak for other people, but the reason I don’t want it even if it’s something I can turn off is that there’s so many other things broken with this game that I’d rather have the team fix than add a completely new thing that I’m not interested in and I think is really annoying in other MMOs. If this came as part of a package of more things to boost RP, I think that would be OK.