The subject of how to make WoW a more sociable game is an unbelievably complicated and controversial topic with many differing opinions.
But let’s start off with an easy one.
Stop making players put in effort to see player chats.
By default the chat box is unreadable. It is cluttered with so much useless information that many players are unlikely to bother.
Any GUI designer will tell you that the more boxes someone has to click through, the less likely someone is to bother.
If our chats won’t be read, players won’t talk.
The useless info tab should be the second tab. If your UI designer absolutely needs this info delivered to us, please put it somewhere else where it isn’t competing with player chats.
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What useless info tab are you speaking of?
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Reputation gains, profession skill ups, NPC barks, etc.
By default they show us this in the main window.
So, again, what useless info are you speaking of? Chat, loot, reputation, those aren’t useless.
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They shouldn’t be competing for space with player chats by default.
Have wow hijack everyones microphones so that theyre always on.
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“Competing for space” is a way to put it, considering that they have over 100 message rollback, and each of those is a different color. I’d much rather it share config over all my characters than spend time removing default features so they have to be re-enabled.
I am not saying it shouldn’t be visible I’m saying it should be the second box not the first.
You are insisting players put in effort to see player chat which means it is unlikely to be read. Player chats are by far the most important thing to see.
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As someone who chats in local, party or raid chat, General, Trade, and LFG, the only thing I had to do beyond default settings was move Trade Services to a seperate tab, hiding it like the combat log.
Even with basic settings, haven’t really had an issue where player chats were hard to see unless you were trying to have a chat during loot rolls but at that point you’re doing something besides sitting and a socializing.
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Oh I am not doubting that this takes like 5 seconds to fix on player end.
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Of course they’re on by default.
You aren’t going to think you have to go into the settings to enable NPC dialogue in the chat.
You’re looking at it from the perspective of someone who is already familiar with everything. Not the new player experience.
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My ultimate point is that this info shouldn’t be competing with player chats.
If this info needs to be shown, please show it somewhere else.
I don’t think rep gains, currency, etc are occuring often enough or at key times that would interfere with social interaction.
Therefore moving them to a new tab would only reduce / complicate usability, not enhance it.
You only see these notices when you’ve just performed a relevant action which - by virtue of having just performed it - is more relevant to the user at the time.
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It absolutely is interfering with player chat. It’s so hard to read player chat by default.
In the 15 years I’ve played WoW i’ve never been in a situation where reputation gain info text has gotten in the way of me having a conversation, so I guess I just don’t grasp the issue to the same degree as you.
NPC dialogue should indeed be in the chat, though, even if there was another place to put rep gains or whatever.
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Have you tried increasing your chat window size or reducing the font size? It’s possible chat is being buried if either are too small or large.
I can’t speak to the default chat and font size atm, but it’s possible that could be improved. But I’m sure developers want to balance that with the rest of the UI as well, so it may be a moderate size with that intention.
I already fixed it on my end. The point is that players shouldn’t have to fix it themselves.
So chat window and font size was a problem you resolved? Maybe this is the greater concern, than removing possibly important notices / allowing the user to decide to move them.
This is a bit complicated, because I think window size, viewport size, and UI scale may also play a role. Again, I’m really not sure what it looks like on a standard screen with default settings. It’s possible Blizzard could put more effort into scaling the UI based on these factors - I have add-ons that help me scale the UI because the default options are insufficient (omg small as frick transmog window).
No the problem was not being able to see what players say because it is full of miscellaneous information that I didn’t need to know.
It’s possible other users feel differently re: what is important info, and the important thing is you have the option to change and scale the UI.
Users don’t necessarily think like you, you’ll have a different UI for every user.
I appreciate the suggestion on optimizing the default though.