I like the emoticons and the fact it displays your character’s face in the chat, but otherwise the chat system needs a lot of work. I’ve written down a summary of what I’ve seen on the forums, plus what I would like to see.
Needs a fix:
- There is no way to move the cursor, if you mistype something, you have to delete everything you typed up to that point
- The scrollbar can not be controlled via mouse - all clicks are ignored. You should be able to click on the up/down scrollbar arrows and click&drag to scroll the chat. Mouse wheel scrolling works, though
- When scrolling up the chat, a new message forces the chat to scroll down a bit. This shouldn’t happen - only start to scroll down on new messages again when the user has scrolled all the way down.
- There is a weird empty space above the “all” tab - as if a channel is missing. Shift the “all” channel up.
Usability:
- Channels should be only changed via the tab key if the chat window is focused
- Make enter send message to different channels based on modifier keys (e.g.: enter -> send to current channel, shift+enter -> send to party, ctrl+enter -> send to guild, alt+enter -> send to shout), maybe make modifiers configurable.
- Typing, say,
/s
followed by enter key should change the channel, not send/s
to the current channel. Changing by tab should still be possible though. - Allow re-sizing & re-positioning the chat window in both dimensions (currently only re-sizable vertically)
- Allow re-arranging the order of channel tabs
- Give us an option to show the timestamp along the message
- As stated here, clicking on the name in chat should allow interaction, like putting
/w charname
in chat - Give us an option to toggle whether the chat input stays open after sending a message.
- In mouse mode, clicking anywhere except the chat input should close the chat input window. This is intuitive and enables using the skill keys in one click
- The chat currently saves the input if you haven’t sent it yet. Add the possibility to use up/down arrows to cycle through recently sent messages - useful when someone misses a message because of a disconnect, etc.
Bonus usability
- Instead of fixed channels, give us a system where we can create up to x channels, then configure each of them, picking what we want to be displayed from a list. This would allow to view multiple types of messages in a tab, instead of having to follow all channels to not miss anything.
- Give us a “system” channel/option that shows info like damage dealt/received, exp earned etc
Readability:
- The difference in color between party chat and normal chat is not immediately clear
- Allow customizing the various channel colors
- Use less whitespace around the text for the chat bubble, or alternatively allow switching to a plaintext format. This would waste less space.