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