Suddenly i saw one player with a dagger (i suppose it was a dagger, it was smaller than a short sword) and since i was searching all the world for a dagger i write on the chat "where you bought it" he doesn't answer... ??? so i put myself in front of him and chatted "**hisname** etc..." nothing happens :sweatdrop: i tried jumping, telling... He went on his way... :'(
This is an example but i found that also I sometimes catch by the games.. the monster or from hundreds of other things... :-X ..I forgot to look at the "chat" tab also if it's blinking... :-[ sometimes i look at it too late.. other times i don't have the phisical time to follow chat, group-tell, and other things...
From the description it is obvious to me that that player did not suffer from any of the issues you mentioned. You were simply being ignored, on purpose. For what reasons I can only guess, but there are some that are likely:
- different language: The player doesn't understand / speak english, even though PS is officially english, some people simply refuse to speak anything but their native tongue. Maybe they simply fear to be laughed at for bad wording or misunderstandings, though misunderstood national pride is another possible reason, which is just equally bad. Either way, that may have been it.
- plain old PL: the player might simply not be interested in the communicative aspect of PS, and merely abusing it as a levelling / ranking system. No words, just fight, gain loot, rinse, repeat. Maybe they were on the system log tab so they could see the damage dealt better, uninterrupted by polluting chat.
IOW, nothing short of a modal dialog could have made the player even look at your messages.
The solution is making an important message (like "help me" or "where ican find..") easyer to see. i don't know how.. for example adding to /tell something more (but i think that /shout was created for this scope :sweatdrop:) or when someone shout the other receive something on their screen (hoping that this does not happen already :oops:) i'm thinking about messenger's pop-up those that say "you have a new email" ;).. An icon on a corner of the screen...
Bad, very bad idea, except maybe the icon on the corner (which will be more easily overlooked than a blinking chat tab AFAICS).
The reason is that /shout is
not meant for anything but
real shouting, in character. With the added drawback that it has a way larger radius than RL shouting, akin to using a megaphone.
The problem is that it
will be abused, and I am 100%certain that >80% of the uses of that system would be plain abuse, making it a highly annoying feature that would, in no time, be requested to be removed. It would even be more annoying than the duel / guild invite spam before a system was put in place to counteract it.
What you were looking for is the help channel, which has it's own tab in the chat box.
Or it can be a shortcut command that allows you doing something particular ,something that means you want attentions (more than simple jumping) and when you see a player doing that gesture (for ex. raising an hand in order to ask attention) you wait a moment or you can look in the chat tab..
It will be a great step making people transmitting ideas with their body (3d-model) but this for me is the frst to do.. because if you have attention you can start a discussion..
Aye, emotes like this are a good thing, and present in many games, though to different extent and for different things. They are a must-have in an MMORPG AFAICS, and therefore will eventually be in PS. However, ATM, PS doesn't even have the most basic animations, like /sit and death, so things like that will have to wait until there are no more pressing things to do.
Also, this would not have solved the issue you had, since gestures would be just as easily to ignore as jumping (which is, due to it's constant abuse by clueless / annoying players, mostly interpreted as a sign of foolishness). IOW, it'd not have helped in your situation.
Pressing the "h" letter (for example) will be like saying "ehy you, yes you please stop a moment and listen to me" or "i'm here can you see me?" It would be fun :lol:
You can already do that by setting a shortcut and then assigning a hotkey to it. Would, however, not have been different from using the chat box directly.
I think that you, unless you made some really big mistake, simply have had the questionable honor to meet the wrong player(s). Any decent player would respond in
some way to a question that looks honest. While most players indeed go about their journeying silently, for the simple reason you do the same IRL, in addition to knowing that most players you meet will, indeed, ignore you for one of the reasons above, the decent ones will always reply when prompted (a reasonable attitude given), unless they're AFK (but 1) have auto-reply on and 2) sending a /tell when they get back).
i've got an other idea... :whistling: it is possible making the sentences in the chat/tell/group more visible if the person talking is near to you and less visible (dark or half-transparent) if the person is at a certain distance? it will be great! no? you have a greater perception of the sentences sayd near you (in your ears) and if someone is distant you hear it "distant" :D
The issue with that is that /say is already, as you noted, hard to follow sometimes. Adding more obstacles to that, like making reading even harder by fading text into the background, isn't that good, considering that it isn't always easy to position yourself near the source. However, if done well, this could indeed be a good thing; for example, talk from the next table would be more easily identifyable than talk on your table, i.e., you don't have to sort by name (thus speeding things up).
It would tie in well with the variable distance proposal, which I think is good as well. What we also could have is
focus. You could, for example, focus on a player / group of players. Maybe a temporary focus list that is added to / removed from by CTRL-leftclicking a char. Also, people on your BL could be assigned a default focus, since it is likely you will talk to them with the same emphasis all the time.
That focus would modify your chat by making the not focused chat blend into the background, by both making it less prominent and suppressing it on shorter distance than usual. Without focused-on people nearby, things would be normal. Also, the focus list needs to de-populate when the focused-on leave some radius, which needs to be larget than /say range.
