Chat control features

[mechahamham]

There are a few features that I'd like to see implemented to make chat a more pleasant experience. Some are visual changes and some are more about controlling what you do and do not see. These are not about controlling about what others do and do not see, and strictly about controlling one's own experience. Accordingly, these could be entirely client-side.

 

• Match filtering of chat - I'd like to be able to hide messages in a given channel if they match a filter. For example, I'm not interested in farming, and probably just more than half of the text that goes through /lfg is farm-related. I'd like to be able to hide lines that contain farm-related terms. Bonus points would be awarded for the option to do regex-based matches!
• Recoloring of default chat channels - You can color global chat channels pretty much how you like. (It's been a while since I've done this, but I seem to remember the selected colors not sticking very well.) However, you cannot recolor the default channels. You're stuck with bright yellow for General, dark blue for Help, and aqua blue for LFG. I'd really like to be able to change those colors to either be easier to see or to stand out less in the case of 'unimportant' channels. This has the additional bonus of making life easier for colorblind folks.
• Larger, preferably individually colored buttons for selecting chat channels - By default, these buttons are only a few pixels across and have very poor contrast. It was difficult to make them out in 2004. 19 years of vision degradation later, they're almost impossible to use. I'm stuck using the dropdown or typing the channel name like /gen, /help, /g, etc... before my messages. The dropdown can be slow and is not the easiest to use despite being easier than the buttons. Using channel names is quicker, but falls apart on global chat channels, where you have to hope that the channel number is always the same between logins. It also has the side-effect of stripping out the default formatting of your on-screen chat bubbles. (I'd love to see that fixed!)
• Easier and more consistent font control - Currently, the only way to change the default Montreal font used in the COH client is to replace it like you would a texture or a sound. It's not a bad font by any means, but the ambiguous characters, like 1 and l, and I, can cause readability issues. Additionally, font SIZE control is very, very bad. You can control it somewhat with slash commands, but the UI scaling in general is a 'tweak it slightly and hope it doesn't wreck your entire layout' affair. I'd like to be able to size the text of each chat channel in pixels or points.
• Limited-time Ignore - sometimes a person is doing something distracting in chat. You don't really feel the need to ignore them forever and ever, but it'd be nice to silence their messages for a bit. I'd like to have an 'ignore for 1 day' command. This could be in the popup menu you get from clicking on their name or used with a slash command like "/tempignore 1 name"
• Return of local ignore - This goes hand in hand with the chat filtering. I'd like to be able to ignore one character without ignoring every character on the same account. For example, some characters are used only for farming, but I have no reason not to listen to a character who's not a farmer and could be a good groupmate. Currently, however, /ignore will ONLY globally ignore entire accounts. I'd like to see a return to that older behavior.

 

Thank you, Homecoming devs for providing a great COH experience. You don't HAVE to do that, but you do it anyway. If any of these ideas are helpful to you, please don't hesitate to use them.

Edited June 1, 2023 by mechahamham

[Saiyajinzoningen]

a dedicated farm chat would be nice to keep other chats clear.

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, mechahamham said:

Recoloring of default chat channels - You can color global chat channels pretty much how you like. (It's been a while since I've done this, but I seem to remember the selected colors not sticking very well.) However, you cannot recolor the default channels. You're stuck with bright yellow for General, dark blue for Help, and aqua blue for LFG. I'd really like to be able to change those colors to either be easier to see or to stand out less in the case of 'unimportant' channels. This has the additional bonus of making life easier for colorblind folks.

Why not just remove the "unimportant" channels from your tabs? You can edit all the chat tabs to add or remove any channels you want. It helps me.

 

1 hour ago, mechahamham said:

Limited-time Ignore - sometimes a person is doing something distracting in chat. You don't really feel the need to ignore them forever and ever, but it'd be nice to silence their messages for a bit. I'd like to have an 'ignore for 1 day' command. This could be in the popup menu you get from clicking on their name or used with a slash command like "/tempignore 1 name"

You can also just put that person on your ignore list and then after a while take them back off. That's something I've done a few times. Placing someone on the ignore list is only as permanent as you decide it is.

[Player2]

1 hour ago, Rudra said:

You can also just put that person on your ignore list and then after a while take them back off. That's something I've done a few times. Placing someone on the ignore list is only as permanent as you decide it is.

If I have to expend effort to put someone on ignore, I am not going to spend additional effort to unignore them.

 

If there was a temporary ignore feature, that wouldn't stress my brain about remembering who comes off the list.

[srmalloy]

16 hours ago, Saiyajinzoningen said:

a dedicated farm chat would be nice to keep other chats clear.

Except that you a) have to get people to use it, and b) stop people from going back to LFG, General, Help, and whatever when people don't use it.

 

I remember back on Live when the Paragon Studios staff tried to crack down on AE farming; one of their tactics was to put filters in chat to squelch messages with banned words, resulting in a cascade of euphemisms for AE farms that changed as the devs identified them and added them to the bans -- for example, the "meow missions". Attempts to force behavior on the player base have not ended well in the past.