Various Needs for in game chat

Hello everyone,

This week my guild had its first RP event in our town. It was a typical tavern night and we all had a blast.
The even did however bring up a plethora of issues with text in game and chatting overall. I think this game can and should learn a lot of Ultima Online. Some of these suggestions will overlap with that games functionality. Anyway here we go

1. Overhead chat needs adjustable font size
2. Overhead chat needs to stop clipping through walls and corners
3. Overhead chat needs ability to have custom colors chosen by player
4. Overhead needs to support /me emotes: IE /coughs -> *coughs* overhead. should still say 'playername coughs' in chat box
5. Overhead chat needs to support whisper, normal, and yell each of which have an expanding radius of readability. Whisper should reach out only to players standing directly near you, normal should fill a room, and yell should extend a bit more and pass through walls.
   
6. Overhead chatting in buildings should not appear in the chat log when I am in a separate room unless that person is yelling.
   
7. In game options often reference chat bubbles but they do not exist. perhaps they should and they should be toggleable
8. An emote hotbar is a damn near must for RP heave conversations

A lot of this is to really help players gauge what is going on in heavy conversation groups and make text more readable in the journal/chat box. Colored text per player will help tremendously.

Thanks for reading. Would love to entertain more suggestions but I think this is a good start.

 

9. Auto complete emote names.

 

Capital letters should be useable in emotes. It's a bit disheartening to work so hard on an emote only for it to not capitalize anything

 

#8 definitely, especially with custom emotes in it. That's one of several things I really miss from LotRO.

 

A more flexible system like this would b3 very beneficial! I miss many of these features...

 

I think we really need some help with keeping the journal readable and to better follow conversations and interactions ingame.

My personal must-haves are:

• Don't let speech go through walls and closed doors, or at the very least not outside of player-owned lots. It would be so nice to be able to have private conversations in separate rooms of a house. But at the very least, if I am in one house of the little housing disctrict I live in, I don't want the guy in the other house to hear everything that's being said. Sure, at the moment we solve this with whispers and party chat when we really want to be secretive, but I would expect better game mechanics for this.
• Emotes need line of sight. Even more disturbing than the speech is that you can "see" the emotes another character does in a different room with a closed door. That's very disruptive to immersion, and also hard for newbie RPers to ignore (they will act upon it even if it makes absolutely no sense).
• Text emotes should show above a character's head and not only in the journal. They are easy to miss otherwise.
• Custom colors for one's own text, so that in the journal it becomes easier to distinguish who said what.

 

Request: Hit tab to auto complete avatar name.

 

That works if it finds a unique name with the starting letters though unsure if it uses your friends list or global, haven't tested it enough.

 

Seems it only works with the whisper command and the name has to be in your friends list and requires at least three letters to trigger on tab.

 

All fantastic suggestions. The ability to set our own colors for certain types of chat would be especially useful for me. This enables emotes to be better differentiated from local text, and zone chat (often used for OOC information during roleplay) as well as our own text if desired. I can't count the number of times i've typed in zone when i intended to type in local. :/

Yes please also to leaving capitalization alone in emotes! That really throws me off.

Also the ability to autocomplete names when using emote commands for nearby avatars! I can never remember how that works. It used to be some arcane %% thing or am i imagining that?