Chat Text Bubbles over Player Characters?

[Rongway]

I want to see where they say this. Where is this limited number you speak of and how is it any different from an NPC speech bubble regarding what can be "drawn" if it is already in the game but for NPCs

I'm still looking for the specific instance I mentioned where they talked about icons and a finite limit to the number of things that the UI can handle at once, but here's a fairly recent answer from PLL LX regarding a question with similar technical demands:

Q: I’d like a feature that displays job icons on the side of characters’ nameplates. I think it’d be really helpful in large groups of players, like FATEs and alliance raids!

A: I definitely understand what you mean! While I’d like to do something about it, at the moment we can only use two icons on nameplates.

One is reserved for indicating your online status, and the other is used for signs (player markers). In order to make this work, we would have to override one of these icons, or make it possible to display another one.

Adding another icon, however, would increase graphical-related resource strain and would be quite difficult. (Job icons are displayed in the Feast by overriding the online status, which was given an exception since it was limited to certain content.)

Yoshida: When we were future-proofing the UI on our in-house game engine during A Realm Reborn, nameplates were the number one cause of strain on resources. Nameplates are a 2D interface element displayed based on a character’s 3D coordinates, which is more resource-intensive than it may seem. If we were to make this happen, I think we would consider seeking another alternative other than increasing the number of icons.