I would like to suggest a change to the emc pm system. Currently, all pms are shown with purple text. This gets confusing real quick when having more than one conversation. I believe we can help solve this issue by having different colored text for pms from different group levels. These levels being separated into "staff members," "members on your friend's list" and "everybody else." This would greatly help with the confusion that I sure face when messaging my friends and then accidentally clicking a different person from town chat and messaging them personal info. It might even be nice to add a feature where you can choose the color of text from a specific member.
i feel like there is easier ways than this... if you are pming more than like 3 people at once you are probably spamming lol and if you cant keep names separate from three different people then how do you even manage to talk in community chat? everyone has the same color there?
yeah but like do you really struggle telling them apart? and if you do then how do you distinguish people in town chat lol? idk if they make chat all colourful for this reason give us the option to disable it too. theres already too many dang colours from the frequent announcements
This would be a cool. I'm not a developer, so don't listen to me, but I would enjoy it personally I think I would prefer it more if you could assign different colours to different people you're messaging, like you said, over the other options
+1, just because I'm often bombarded with questions, lol. Though I'm rarely in-game anymore, heh. I believe mods like Tabbychat can help you, but I'm not sure too sure since I don't use it.
In the past when I was more active and was trying to sell something I was getting 3 or 4 people trying to PM me questions and it got very confusing so +1 from me.
+1 However, I also think there should be a 4th color for people who are both staff and on your friends list (I have a few of those and talk to one quite often).
I deal with this on more than just EMC. By now I'm used to it and don't really need it Despite that, I think it would be useful so +1
-1 Sorry, but I'm not a believer here. My main concern is that I'm afraid that the chat will slowly turn into a rainbow interface. One of the main features of the Empire in comparison to "those places we do not speak off" is the sane chat interface. You don't get dozens of different colors thrown your way, which makes it much easier to follow. Right now the PM colors are pretty much separated from anything else (in general) which makes them stand out much more. I also don't believe in separating PM's (but that's just me!), in the end a PM from a supporter is just as important as a PM from staff and my friends. Another issue is that I don't think this is going to solve much, at least not for me. The #1 reason for me to send PM's the wrong way is because someone is talking to me, and instead of clicking on their name (or use @@ <enter>) I insist in continuing to use shortcuts. Sometimes because I already am engaged in a dedicate PM session. So I continue with using @@ to respond to the PM (or /r) and (if applicable): @r for residence chat, @c for town, whoops: community chat, and so on. So if someone then sends me a PM out of the blue right before I typed "@@ <my response here>" then they'll get the PM instead of the person I was talking to. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the color. It is for that same reason why I sometimes also manage to misplace local chat, residence chat and community chat. Even though those channels all have different color and channel indicators. So yeah, I like your suggestion but I don't really agree with it
I argree with Shwl for the part of the rainbow interface, but the mian thing is is that I (even thou I tend to talk with a lot of people at once) usally don't have problems with doing so, I can easyly see who I'm typing to, as there is a "conversation with [name] started" thing, if you are (like me) able to read something else as you type, you can just check of you're tiping to the right person whist typing, if not, just look at wich one was thhe last "conversation started" before you hit enter, if it is the wrong one, copy it, go to the right PM and paste it there. It really isn't that dificult. (I can't recal a time I send more than one message to the wrong person) It might help that I'm usually talking in different lagues, so I don't easyly mess up who wrote what. so, for me, personal, -1
TL;DR - I give a +1 to the idea of providing users with a way to color code their chats, but a -1 to the method the OP describes to achieve this. I think there is a better way to achieve this, which I described below. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As a staff member, I've had multiple instances where I will be following and engaging in a conversation in community chat, while also having discussions with 2+ people in pms. (One day in particular I was the only staff member online, and for a couple hours I had a revolving door of pms going, in which I was talking to 2-4 people at any given moment, in addition to talking in town chat. It was a very crazy day xD) I've quickly learned how to be able to manage this many convos going on at once, and usually can navigate them easily. So for me, color coding chats in the way described by the OP wouldn't actually be that beneficial. However, there is a better way to achieve this in my mind. Community chat is usually a wall of white text, and I have noticed how it can be straining on my eyes to keep up with it if there is a lot of discussion happening. That is why tables in Excel have a feature where you can give a light grey background to every other line (or different color combos, of your choice). I think that this sort of capability, where every other message seen is a light gray color, would make following Community chat much easier. The light gray would be different enough from the white to create a contrast, but could still be easily identifiable as 'Community' chat. This would be my main concern as well, as well as many other's on EMC. However, I do want to point out that any system like this, if it were implemented on EMC, would be opt-in, not opt-out. Meaning, if there was any potential for 'rainbow chat' it would be solely created by the user themselves, and not affect anyone else's chat. Some people may prefer that type of setup, and that is their personal choice. (Keeping that 'Play Your Way' mentality) Personally, if I were to color code pms, I would want to set up a 3 color system, where if I am sent a pm by a different player within 2 minutes of a pm being sent by a player, it uses a different color for that person. This way, different convos would be easily identifiable within your chat. I don't think the intention is to separate chats based on importance. Rather, this was the best method the OP could come up with to identify 'who' was pming them. Since Supporter, Friend, Staff, and Other are pretty diverse groups, it would split the chat up fairly evenly. The colors really wouldn't 'mean' anything though, since like you said, who says what isn't really important. They are just there to color code chats and make it easier to follow them. This also means that because the chats are being separated in a meaningless way, they really won't be of much benefit to the player. Rather, a system that allows you to color code chat in a meaningful way (to the player, since everyone would have diff preferences) would be much more beneficial. (Just want to add also that I wasn't singling out Shel by quoting him. His arguments were very valid and I felt they represented the two main issues that people could have with this suggestion, so wanted to discuss my thoughts on them.)
+1 I think separating staff members would be a good idea, since you're usually not going to have multiple staff members in PM. Maybe it's something important from staff (like an alert that Toade is in vanish). Separating friends and non-friends is probably not very practical, since you're probably going to be talking to your friends most of the time. Since it would already be colored from the supporter ranks, I think what they could do is add a player setting to toggle the colors for "groups" instead of supporter ranks. Agreed, but then not really. I think EMC has just the right amount of colors, but really, recoloring a name wouldn't change much, as I mentioned above.
