When I receive a chat message, there is no notification. So sometimes, I miss messages.
When you open the chat system, you have to close it before you can resume game-play. Therefore, missing messages.
When someone PMs you, (the default is) you reply with whatever alt you may be using, instead of the character the PM was sent to. It becomes awkward - you have to PM them back & explain that you used an alt to reply to them.
Solutions:
Add an in-game “chat notifications always on” setting.
Add a toggle in the settings to make chat “always open”.
Change the default chat reply function to use the character that was PMd.
A more prominent, persistent chat ui would be helpful (like in Trove, WoW, RS, etc)
I hope you guys will consider making a few changes. Thank you for reading this.
Seems the only chats that works well are “say” and “shout”. Most all the other chat options are delayed by mins. We have resorted to talking in discord unless we are together on the same planet.
Our guild chat gets used rarly. I may talk in it once to twice a month.
Chat is much better than year ago but it is still too clumsy and slow to use.
Personally I feel that alt tab to discord or other platform does job much faster than in game. For me it is very slow to try to switch those public community channels thru, that might be used by new players who look answer only inside game.
I hope chatting interface gets faster to use and would have more tabbed system than menu diving like it is right now.
Whisper works well too, always instant as well. The rest not so much…
Worse is when someone uses a mailbox so you don’t know the person, you are doing something where you don’t have time to reply immediately, good luck trying to find the PM afterwards! I’m sure I’ve missed several messages this way.
Besides, PM’s are highly unreliable, often enough they aren’t even being delivered and quite a few times I received PM’s from a friend send ages ago when I PM’d them (received for the first time). Kinda annoying how it all works so I avoid using it…
When I’m doing a lot of things and I accidentally open chat real quick, close it, go check on something…then the PMs are gone. I have no idea who said what. I wish the active messages were not tied to “viewed” or “not viewed” & instead it would just permanently show the last 20-50 messages regardless of whether or not you’ve read them (& you could scroll up to read previous ones).
Edit: Hmm. I just was just looking at some PMs and was able to scroll back to some from the 15th from the same person. However, they replied again today and the PM was in a different area - not with the previous ones. If I wasn’t clicking around on everything, I wouldn’t have seen it.
Yep… This is what I looked forward to the most with the chat update, but it has never worked properly, and so has actually made nearly no difference at all to my in-game communication. Even a forum PM has been more effective to communicate more immediately with my friends in-game.
Edit: To add something a bit more constructive to the thread, I do think that the chat could do with some general improvements like what the OP mentions and something like knowing whether someone within say distance is typing or not, like a chat bubble “Typing…” overhead, in the same way as “Trading…” or whatever.
Ahh but that’s the thing, whispers are ALWAYS on planet, if they are off planet they go from yellow to purple which makes them PM’s and those are indeed highly unreliable!
I think the UI and multi-channel/multi-character management need a complete overhaul. When the changes were announced, like them adding a global help channel, I thought it would be awesome, that I’d be hanging out there all the time. In reality it’s 3 clicks just to join it (rather than for example just clicking a tab) and then it… prevents you from seeing any other messages including world chat? It makes you choose and that’s why those channels seem as dead as they are.
Same with guild channels, except the multi-character management makes it even more tedious. To simply respond to someone you have to click, click, search and click. This hurts any players that don’t want to join third party chatting or voip software.
Doesn’t always happen for me. I’ve been pmd on discord because I never got the pms in game. In fact I’ve been waiting more than a couple weeks for a response from someone. I don’t know their discord so can’t message them on there.
Just like the notifications for the shop stands. There’s been times where there was no log for the item being sold.
completely agree. This may seem like a small quality of life change that doesnt seem like it should be priority but you would be surprised how annoying little things like this can turn a player off to a game.
Well silence has fallen in a sense in boundless… now waiting on the Pandorica
(this is partially from a post in the “what turns you off playing” that I made, this should not be this big a frustration in 2019).
PlanetWide Chat (Like shout, but covers the whole planet… since shout does often not reach the other edges of the same town it gets chopped in pieces… but is the most used way to communicate in an area now
Centralized Chat server for PM/Guild Chat, since not entirely sure how it is done at the moment, but the lost messages (2 guild chats not looking the same between different PC’s) & up to 8 minute delay from sending to it gets to the receiver is a dead conversation quickly, specially when mixing going from PM’s, to Whispers, back to PM’s, it looks a mess.
GUI … well not sure if it was made this way because it must support controller also, but it feels very clunky from my point of view.
-A tabbed system with indication for new messages in other tabs.
-The ability to use your own filters of what to show in a tab, mix some guild chats
-The ability to change per chat source message coloring
-The ability to have the chat always shown
Would very much love something done about it, it is so annoying to communicate with others in this game, more often than not I end up going to discord, search the boundless server for the person that is trying to communicate with me and just see if possible to chat in discord instead.
An example of interchanging communication ways a long the way does NOT work out well… so if you want to have a conversation you are grounded in place.
The chat system in Boundless (at least as of build 223) is wretched. It’s like not having an in-game chat system, only there is an in-game chat system that just is better off avoided.
busy, but please please please consider giving the chat system priority after Spookfest & the block update.