Please add a UI element over players' heads when they are typing.

From an immersion perspective, in real life you can tell when someone's about to say something to you. In SotA, you may be attempting to type "Hello, might I ask you a question, my good fellow?", but by the time you hit enter, that person has run off, entered another scene, died horribly to the undead, and so on...



For the purposes of aiding each other to communicate better in spontaneous environments, I would ask that we have something, even as minimal as an animated ellipses graphic, to let other players know when we are typing in local or zone chat.

As always, thank you for your amazing efforts, and thank you for your time.

 

+1

 

i am torn here. i don't want your suggestion, but i want to give you a like for mal.

 

It's a good point. A lot of times I am waiting for someone to answer and they are just afk and not typing. But, I'd rather have a gesture (emote) or a subtle effect on character nameplates rather than an ellipses. (That's just a little too "gamey" for me)

 

+100

 

A gesture would be good even if something else were included, like the ellipses. Though, personally, even as someone who likes immersion, I don't find the ellipses worse than the emoticons, abbreviations, mispelled words, punctuation marks like ? and !, and everything else you just see in player chat text over their heads.

Though the ellipses, or anything else they include other than the gesture, would be something you'd want to turn off with F9 when the UI is hidden. (To be honest, a lot of times, I'd like the option to turn off all chat text with F9, but that's another post I'm working on). Also, the game would have to ignore anything that starts with "/", so a player doesn't think you want to chat with them just because you're entering a command.

But I guess my only point about the ellipses is that you can't hide the fact that player conversation is basically text chat, and maybe is a mistake thinking that way about it. I mean, I often type in "..." just for the purpose Jack is describing. But, I guess, yes, only gesture would be better if it were equally effective. Its something you'd want to be visible on the overland, too, either way. Because sometimes players run right by me on the overland map before I get a chance to say something.

 

Disagree - we didn't need it in UO, and it worked fine.

Instead of asking someone "Hello, might I ask you a question, my good fellow?" when they're running past you, maybe you should just say "wait" and then if/when they stop, you can say whatever else you have to say.

Alternatively (or in addition), expanding the distance of how far we can be heard would be an option. I have no idea what the current range is.

 

Which is exactly why I have the overhead chat turned off. I keep all the "mun-messiness" in the chat window.

 

I would also like to know, definitively, what the range is for /local and for /zone, both inside a scene/POT/town and on the overworld map. It's easy to miss conversations because you assume people can "hear" what you are saying.

 

@x_Selene_x ,

Its worth noting that ellipses are also a literary convention (that you would expect to see in talk bubbles in comics, for instance), so its a step better than all that chat stuff

But also worth noting there's another solution to this that I almost forgot about...
We're eventually going to be able to drag emotes to our hotbar (I hope!). So, getting someone's attention with an emote will be as easy as pressing a numeric key. Maybe there will be a "Halt!" emote or "Wait!" emote, and then by putting in the hotbar, we could assign a key to it.

 

Heh, I just remembered this ...





Of course, Pokemon also has this type of stuff, too,

 

We could say yoo hoo like the merchants. I love that and it is really nice to hear it on the merchants in Wizarards Rest, it does add some aliveness to the town.

 

Like some other things off the mark, its hard to catch a conversation with people running past. I like the idea of incoming text icon. Even like the idea of hiding nameplates until your name is asked but I like a little hardcore rp