Few suggestions to improve QoL of chat and other features:
Chat window should not be obstructed by other menus and should always be fixed to the very top. PoE does this well by attaching chat to the leftmost visible part of the screen, so if you press C, the chat will fix itself to the right edge of the character menu, allowing you to still chat and see chat with a window open.
Chat shouldn’t completely fade away if you haven’t opened it recently. Fade individual messages away without the window actively open to prevent text from covering a large amount of the screen while you’re playing, but if you have chat on, you should be able to see new messages in global. Turning chat “off” can hide chat for people who don’t want to see it.
Notifications and sounds for friend messages and friend invites should be a thing. Messages from friends should also pop up on your screen even if you haven’t used chat recently.
Gambling should be 2-3x as fast. As weird as it sounds, waiting for the item to roll for several seconds is incredibly annoying.
Creating hotkeys and methods to quickly respond to the last person that messaged you. Ctrl+Enter does this in PoE, and Ctrl+Up arrow allows you to cycle through the people who most recently PMed you.
Although some people don’t really care about the story of ARPGs, I think writing should still be a top priority. Most of the dialogue in the game isn’t top quality, like what you can find In some other games. The writing tone is a little bit weird too, very positive and lots of “!” for it being end times where everyone is about to die. I hate to bring up PoE once again, but taking a lesson from them when it comes to dialogue and lore writing will only help. For as many problems as their game has, their lore, writing, voice acting, and sound design is 11/10. Following in their footsteps in that regard will improve the quality of your game a ton.
Chat delay is weird, I’m sure you guys are aware of this.
Linking items in global chat would be really nice. Set a limit and make it function like poe, hover over to see all stats. That way we can ask chat advice on whether an item is good or not or how to proceed with crafts.
I cannot stress #2 enough, as have many others in-game conversing with each other in general chat.
Some people like to zone out and not be bothered with chat, which is fine and they can turn it off too if they like. However, there are also players who like to multitask and be social while actively playing. At the moment, you need to stop what you’re doing to open up the chat window again and see if there are any new messages.
I would say bottom, not top. The top left is an information zone (active minions) and should stay as is: all the top is an information zone.
I feel the zone at the bottom is more appropriate for a chat box. If you want to compare to other games, see Diablo 3 for example.
I just searched for PoE ingame images and I understand why you propose top, but LE has a very different UI and I’m pretty sure bottom would be more appropriate.
If I remember right the whole chat system is being worked on while they work on the multiplayer features. So I bet many things will change in there in the near future.
And yes, it’s annoying that the chat fades completely away and you miss discussions there unless you keep pressing Enter-key to make the chat become visible again.
I’d like an ability to link items in the chat, but that is also coming hopefully in the MP release later on.
As for the position of the chat window, would be nice if the window could be moved/positioned freely in the screen area.
Not sure if this option is already in the game and I don’t see it (or if it’s a bugged feature) but there needs to be a toggle to disallow the chat window from resetting every time there is a new chat message (or do it by default).
Most chat windows do this by default when you scroll. However, in LE if you scroll up to view a message that already scrolled out of the window you can’t stay scrolled up because new chat messages continuously reset the window down to the new message making it impossible to read messages that are not the most recently posted messages. This is pretty annoying when there is a busy chat…which is often in LE (that’s a good thing).
