[MakeshiftWalrus]

It's no secret that many of us are longing for a better level of quality of life when it comes to our ability to role-play in the game. We've gotten many visual, and performance upgrades to the chat, and the way we write in the form of the RP bubble utility, and the wonderful new UI.

But we also still lack many of what most would call basic features, and likewise are there things which are currently very annoying to work with. This thread's purpose is to draw attention to which areas can improve, and why. From my own perspective, at least.

The Console Bar:


We've had this ever since the game launched, as far as I'm aware. Unfortunately, it's been showing its age for a long, long time now. Let's go over the bullet points:

Pros:
- Very simple to use.
- Since everything in the game is a verb, can be used to do a ton of helpful shenanigans.
- All the role-play utilities are compacted along it, giving easy access.

Cons:
- If this is your sole method of writing, big posts are suffering because you can't navigate it with your arrow keys. Your character will move around if you try, forcing you to navigate with the mouse instead by dragging along your text. This is especially annoying if you're scrolled all the way to the right from what you've written, and want to double-check for errors.
- To my knowledge, the buttons that automatically add the various commands to the console bar are never used by anyone. To me, it's a giant hassle because I swap between emotes, says, whispers, and looc almost every post I do.
- No spell-checker.

Solutions / Suggestions:
- Ideally I would want the console bar to be a toggle in the settings menu, and for it to be replaced entirely by a bar purely meant for role-play in some fashion.
- The buttons should all be changed to pop out the respective writing-boxes we get from merely typing in the command, instead of dropping the respective command in the bar.
- Potentially, a spell-checker based on IE's browser-settings could be made.


The Writing Box:


It's strangely under-utilized. Probably because it's a little janky to bring out in the first place, but it does its purpose very well despite how plain it looks.

Pros:
- Offers a simple, and easy way to write without hassling you with anything you don't need.
- Mercifully allows you to navigate using the arrow-keys, compared to the console bar.
- It does exactly what you would need it to do, and nothing more.

Cons:
- No way to know it exists other than being told, or discovering it by accident, as it doesn't appear unless you hit one of the prompts into the console bar without additional text.
- It does exactly what you would need it to do, and nothing more.
- No spell-checker.

Solutions / Suggestions:
- It would be nice to have integrated buttons for bold, and italics in this menu, as since those were added, they've been extensively used.
- Once more, a spell-checker would be nice. In this box more than any other.
- Though it isn't necessary, a neat UI update for it would be nice.


General Writing Hijinks:

There's a lot of small things that add up to a bigger evil here, some of which will be repeated here from previous threads:

Bold / Italics:


Currently, we use ` if we want to use any italics on our text. As one might expect, this is really annoying, because it creates accents on most vowels, meaning you have to actively account for it when you write, and this can lead to multiple attempts of getting it right if you're a big dumb-dumb like me. For bold, we use **, which is slowly getting more standardized everywhere likely due to Discord's influence.

My proposal here is to change the ` into a single * so we don't have to groan èvery` time we fail to write out a slanted word.


Paragraphs:


It's currently impossible to do line breaks in the game, and trying makes it look like this:

It'd be nice to get the ability to break our posts into paragraphs, because some people like to wall, and it just gets super muddled really quickly.


Font & Size:

As seen above, text can be quite big in the new UI. It'd be nice to have a few variations in the options for font, and the ability to make the text itself a little bigger, or smaller would help those of us lacking in screen-space, or are poor of sight.

Additionally, it'd be cool if we could get coloured text between our "", a bit like this:


Admittedly a sloppy photoshop example isn't the best, but it gets the point across.


All these are just a few suggestions I've had in mind, or were brought up in the past. I'd like to hear what everyone thinks, even if they don't agree. Criticism is well-encouraged.

[SolAndLuna]

Only thing I could note from all of that is that, even if you provided a toggle for an alternative to the console bar, I'd rather it was just there as the default, personally, mostly for the sake of the testing server as well as the few things that require separate commands to be typed in. Aside from that, though, this is good.

[Cerrik]

A bit belated but I seriously do support everything Walrus put forward. Roelplaying can be painful with how the 'console bar' works. Quality of life regarding how we can improve and present our roleplay would go a really, really long way.

[Autumn]

Being able to change text color would let me stop using Bold to separate my dialogue in emotes as well, and could go more than a long way.

[Aqua]

I am in agreeance with the rest above in these suggested changes. Being able to do this would go a long way.

[Snake]

Either that, or the addition of <red> </red> to the stuff you wanna colorize (swap red with a color name or hexcode). Additionally, yes, if doable that thing being also automated will be welcome if written between " ".

This would be a direct buff to Demon Hunter roleplayers...

My proposal here is to change the ` into a single * so we don't have to groan èvery` time we fail to write out a slanted word.

ALSO YES, PLEASE. PLEASE DEV. EVEN IF THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO IMPLEMENT, AT LEAST MAKE THE KEY BE _ (So in case of _sampletext_, it outputs sampletext), SINCE DISCORD USES THAT AND I'M USED TO IT. ;_;