Seeing 'Stars' on tells received in chat

[Andreah]

I put star ratings on quite a few people I've teamed with. Star ratings are held privately on your computer along with notes one may have added about a player. These are by global name, and no one else sees the star ratings you assign to others.

 

I would like to see the star rating, if any, I have assigned to player in tells they send to me. When I recruit for a team and receive lots of requests to join, I'd prefer to give priority to those whom I've given good ratings to in the past. I could pull up my notes individually on each player, but usually there's a lot of them and I'm pressed for time. If the character's name in the tell response was immediately followed by any star ratings I have for them, that would be helpful.

 

Similarly, if I receive a tell from someone to join their team, I'd like to see if I've already assigned stars to them in the past without needing to pull up notes. 

 

Finally, I wouldn't be opposed to having an option to see those stars everywhere in chats. I could see reasons against this too, so I suppose I'd be ambivalent. I mainly would like to see them for team-forming.

 

I suppose having the /search window include a column for my star ratings would be helpful too.

[mechahamham]

This seems like a great idea to me, Andreah. I've been thinking of a way to try incorporate star ratings into the invite process since it's almost always by tell, and simply having it inline in the chat evaded me for some reason. Great suggestion!

[lemming]

Might not be a very clean interface.  I do notice that the only time it updates a note with known local names is if you say Edit.  And we don't get global name unless we ask for it.

 

If feasible, putting it in the search window might not be bad depending on how many queries that would be for.  I suspect the interfaces are not setup for group grabs of the global.

Edited October 3, 2023 by lemming
missed a word...

[Greycat]

28 minutes ago, lemming said:

 And we don't get global name unless we ask for it.

 

 

/getglobalname charactername will give it to you.

[Rudra]

26 minutes ago, Greycat said:

56 minutes ago, lemming said:

 And we don't get global name unless we ask for it.

 

 

/getglobalname charactername will give it to you.

I still read that as asking for it. I admit I have a weird point of view, but I don't differentiate between asking the player and asking the system for a global name. The point @lemming is making, if I understand correctly, is that globals are not immediately available for us to see. So we have to post an inquiry (whether to the player or the system) to get it.

 

So the question becomes, at least to me, can the various chat channels and the tell system automatically access or be made to automatically access a player's global to reference the stars a player assigned them? (Followed by, does that follow them if they change their globals?) If those two questions are "yes", then hopefully the devs can find a way to implement the OP.

[JasperStone]

51 minutes ago, Rudra said:

I still read that as asking for it. I admit I have a weird point of view, but I don't differentiate between asking the player and asking the system for a global name. The point @lemming is making, if I understand correctly, is that globals are not immediately available for us to see. So we have to post an inquiry (whether to the player or the system) to get it.

 

So the question becomes, at least to me, can the various chat channels and the tell system automatically access or be made to automatically access a player's global to reference the stars a player assigned them? (Followed by, does that follow them if they change their globals?) If those two questions are "yes", then hopefully the devs can find a way to implement the OP.

Makes sense.

I do see the benefit.

 

Would like the option to keep global private and only available through permission.

[Andreah]

Yeah, reading the local file(s) with the notes/stars should be trivially simple, but matching it up to a global name entry in it may be harder. CoH does some things in ways a non-developer may find odd.

 

For example, player ABC who you have a note for under their other character name DEF (and whose global is @ xyz) sends you a tell. The client program can read the notes file which has an existing entry of five stars for character DEF under global @ xyz. The client has to ask the server "What is the global name for character ABC?", receive it as @ xyz, and then find the entry, retrieve the stars, and then display them with the tell.

 

Maybe that's easy, maybe it's hard. I don't know.

 

Alternatively, the global name of the sending player could be attached to each and every tell anyone ever sends. This would normally be unseen data with the tell, but the client could use it to look up entries in the local notes files. In this case, one could potentially do this for every communication message in every kind of channel, and display the stars for those. That's how I would do it "in bulk", as it were. But again, maybe that's easy, maybe it's hard, and maybe it's expensive in compute or bandwidth even if it is easy.

 

A final option I can think of is to store stars data server-side. I don't think that's a good idea. That would require data refactoring and it might be considered "client private", like the text notes where you say someone is a <bleep!>.

 

A developer would have to look into it if the "Seeing Stars" capability were one that was worth investigating.

 

 

[Rudra]

10 minutes ago, Andreah said:

 

Alternatively, the global name of the sending player could be attached to each and every tell anyone ever sends.

Oh please no... this was how tells worked back on CO, and it so totally sucked.... Sure, in CoX, it probably won't be as bad since we wouldn't have to include the other player's global to send our tells, but still, please no.

[Andreah]

38 minutes ago, Rudra said:

Oh please no... this was how tells worked back on CO, and it so totally sucked.... Sure, in CoX, it probably won't be as bad since we wouldn't have to include the other player's global to send our tells, but still, please no.

I don't mean it in that in-your-face sense; rather that the data packet that contained the tell also contained the global. You would not see the global with the text content of the tell (or chat). However, the client computer program could access that part of the data packet and use it to look up the star rating in your local notes file. You would not see the global name of the sender unless you clicked on their name to check for it as you would do today.

[lemming]

5 hours ago, Andreah said:

I don't mean it in that in-your-face sense; rather that the data packet that contained the tell also contained the global. You would not see the global with the text content of the tell (or chat). However, the client computer program could access that part of the data packet and use it to look up the star rating in your local notes file. You would not see the global name of the sender unless you clicked on their name to check for it as you would do today.

Yea, that's what I meant by "We have to ask"   The system doesn't send that back as default and I don't know how much extra DB call happens to enable that to happen.

 

And a call to local files for your notes section if you want the stars to be shown.

Edited October 4, 2023 by lemming

[Greycat]

One of the main problems is that those local files are ... local. Not a big deal to some, but I (for instance) have two desktops - one in sorta-retirement I don't really game on these days much - and two laptops, and those local files aren't necessarily in sync.

[Arc-Mage]

2 hours ago, Greycat said:

One of the main problems is that those local files are ... local. Not a big deal to some, but I (for instance) have two desktops - one in sorta-retirement I don't really game on these days much - and two laptops, and those local files aren't necessarily in sync.

You know you can combine those files if it’s desired?

[Ghost]

13 hours ago, JasperStone said:

Makes sense.

I do see the benefit.

 

Would like the option to keep global private and only available through permission.

Bad idea to allow Global names to be private

GMs ask for the global when reporting a troublemaker.

Allowing people to hide identity a global identity so they can act a fool on a throwaway toon could lead to more childish behavior.

[lemming]

7 hours ago, Arc-Mage said:

You know you can combine those files if it’s desired?

I'm trying to remember what happens when you get a dupe global in that.  May have to test that

[JasperStone]

2 hours ago, Ghost said:

Bad idea to allow Global names to be private

GMs ask for the global when reporting a troublemaker.

Allowing people to hide identity a global identity so they can act a fool on a throwaway toon could lead to more childish behavior.

Good point.

 

Speaking from the perspective of my global matching forums during Live.

Childish person hated...hated...that I disagreed with them on forums and harassed me a bit in the game.

 

The reason my forum name doesn't match my in-game one.

 

 

[SeraphimKensai]

I'm curious what star rating I've earned. Probably a Blue Dwarf rating.

 

I'm indifferent to the request. I personally wouldn't likely use it, but I don't see how it negatively effects anyone other than someone who was an asshole and was given a bad rating from being able to hide on a new toon.

[Rudra]

11 minutes ago, SeraphimKensai said:

I'm curious what star rating I've earned. Probably a Blue Dwarf rating.

I have to double check, but I think I have you rated between Black Hole and Neutron Star. 😜

[Ghost]

16 minutes ago, SeraphimKensai said:

I'm curious what star rating I've earned. Probably a Blue Dwarf rating.

 

 

⭐️

Edited October 4, 2023 by Ghost

[UltraAlt]

On 10/3/2023 at 5:02 PM, Rudra said:

So the question becomes, at least to me, can the various chat channels and the tell system automatically access or be made to automatically access a player's global to reference the stars a player assigned them? (Followed by, does that follow them if they change their globals?) If those two questions are "yes", then hopefully the devs can find a way to implement the OP.

 

On 10/3/2023 at 6:01 PM, Andreah said:

Yeah, reading the local file(s) with the notes/stars should be trivially simple, but matching it up to a global name entry in it may be harder. CoH does some things in ways a non-developer may find odd.

 

I'm assuming that /ignore information is held locally.

The number of listings in the /ignore had been limited to stop the lag of its use when chat is posted.

 

The star/rating system as it is now, only activates in two ways that I know of. When you actively check it, and when you have your settings set to show the stars over player character's heads. I'm also wondering how even simply showing starts over character's heads may affect lag in say Motel Hell/666 situations.

 

I'm assuming if it is going to interface with chat the way that /ignore does, that the number of people you have have starred and ignored may need to be limited to the same number that ignore is currently set at now. 

 

[Andreah]

2 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

I'm assuming that /ignore information is held locally.

 

This would be very interesting indeed. If so, then the global handle of every chat you receive would have to be included in the chat data packet to be checked against the local /ignore list so the client program could decide whether to show that chat's text to the player or not.

 

If it's already done like this, then the lag may come from a very inefficient means of checking the ignore list, such as a exhaustive end to end search. More efficient schemes, like a hash table lookup, would be vastly faster. Any developer worth their pay would recognize this and be loathe to implement such a beast so poorly unles they were under huge time pressure (possible); and this hints to me that it's held server-side, and the lag limitation comes from another source.

 

The worst case is that the ignore data is held client side AND chat packets do not include hidden global handles, so the server has to be queried for every chat received to retrieve the global handle to test against the local /ignore list. This is so utterly bad in my mind I can't believe it is done that way. But... I've seen worse elsewhere.

 

If it is held client side, then an internal hash lookup of the /ignore and also the notes/stars ratings could be made very efficient on the client if the devs decided to pursue this.

[Greycat]

3 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

I'm assuming that /ignore information is held locally.

 

 

Nope.  Not sure why you'd think that. You wouldn't want someone to be able to start harassing someone again just because they've reinstalled or gone to another PC.

 

Also, you can see what's stored locally. It is, after all, stored locally. The only thing there is playernotes.txt. (Easy, on Windows - on the launcher, click on Screenshots. Brings up your screenshots folder. CLick on your COH install directory in the tree up top, then go to accounts and pick yours. You'll see what's local.)

[Doomguide2005]

As i don't for 99.99% on Live and here it's non-existent use the system what would happen if in the example abc and def had different star ratings.  Or are they all only linked to the global.  Sorry in advance if that's a truly dumb question.

 

Edit:  After all bad days or new pairings/AT could lead to different ratings handed out to the same player type issue

Edited October 5, 2023 by Doomguide2005

[lemming]

1 hour ago, Doomguide2005 said:

As i don't for 99.99% on Live and here it's non-existent use the system what would happen if in the example abc and def had different star ratings.  Or are they all only linked to the global.  Sorry in advance if that's a truly dumb question.

 

Edit:  After all bad days or new pairings/AT could lead to different ratings handed out to the same player type issue

The star is assigned to the global name.  You do have the character name attached that was when you assigned a star or did any note editing.

Each line in playernotes.txt is formatted

"Global Name" "0-5 stars" "Character One Name, Character Two Name, etc..." "My note about this global person"