New Emoticons

Beriadanwen wrote: GM Luna wrote: Hello all, Thanks for your feedback on the new emotes. While I think they are immensely clever and add so much more flavor to chat, I can understand if you don't agree. That said... First, the old generic yahoo emoticons are not going to return. I'm sorry.  In the meantime (as what I hope will be a workable compromise) we are looking to add the option to the new upcoming chat system overhaul to uncheck a "use racial emotes" option. So that if you do not like them, you can turn them off and only see the traditional text emotes like :) for example. I hope this helps, but again, this is something that will come with the new chat system and is understandably lower priority than some other things going into that chat upgrade.  Until that time, I'm sorry if you don't like the new emotes. This is certainly a touchy subject and is a matter of personal opinion and taste that it would be impossible for us all to agree upon. Thanks for your patience. Luna Not only do I not like the emoticons - I think I've pretty much decided I don't like -THE GAME- as a whole. It seems every time I turn around, the Devs are fixing something that isn't broken (meaning the function, and no one's complaining about it. I go away for a couple of days and come back to find, basically, an entirely different game. One that doesn't WORK, either. Just changing pages from one screen of the research tree to the next is resulting in a 10-second loading delay. Chat lags. I can't get the world map to move from one city to the other. It's now hard for me, with my visual impairment, to tell an animal NPC from parked neutral army. And on and on and on. And there's little doubt that all these "little" changes, these "new bells and whistles" that aren't -necessary- for the game to work are to blame. Oh, and for whatever reason? Half the forum posts that are new don't have new post stars. I regret having EVER paid ANY money to play this game right now.

Beri, are you by chance using Opera for your browser?  I have noticed that Illyriad's interface is non-functional in a lot of small ways in Opera since well before the latest update.  The resource bar doesn't update, world map city centering doesn't work, random delays and sometimes a page doesn't switch, etc.

And on the forum it is necessary to "mark all posts read" from time to time or it will stop tracking unread posts correctly (probably an issue with the limited amount of info that can be stored in a cookie, which is just one reason why storing it in cookies instead of database sessions is a terrible idea--the other major reason is that every time you clear cookies or switch browsers or computers the info is lost or left in an incorrect/incoherent state between browsers).

tbh if I actually make a less silly post on this topic: I'd say it is nice to have personal touches in Illy like their own set of emoticons. Just copying the mundane widespread ones from yahoo or wherever is frankly just lame - regardless of copyright issues or whatever.

Ok so now we have Illy's own personal emoticon set. I'll admit that they perhaps need some work to make them more distinguishable and interesting but honestly with something as subjective as this you can't expect it to be perfect the first try - small steps people.

Createure wrote: tbh if I actually make a less silly post on this topic: I'd say it is nice to have personal touches in Illy like their own set of emoticons. Just copying the mundane widespread ones from yahoo or wherever is frankly just lame - regardless of copyright issues or whatever. Ok so now we have Illy's own personal emoticon set. I'll admit that they perhaps need some work to make them more distinguishable and interesting but honestly with something as subjective as this you can't expect it to be perfect the first try - small steps people.

Coming up with original emoticons is positive progress.  I even like that they are (in-game) race-specific.  I appreciate the effort that has been made to move forward--making original emoticons has been on my todo list for Butler for a long time.  I don't even like the Yahoo emoticons.  They're oversized, look like plastic, and in many cases misrepresent the expression of the original text (for example :/ should not be translated as a confused face but one with passive/accepting dissatisfaction, and a lot of the reaction-to-humor faces have the wrong magnitude of reaction).  I should even be happy that other people's dislike of the new emoticons has driven more people to use Butler. :P  What's more, because Illyriad now supports a much smaller set, making my own original emoticons is now cut down to a more feasible task and can move up in priority on my roadmap.

But there are two serious problems, and neither of them is being addressed except in a dismissive and at times even hostile tone.

The new emoticons are simply illegible in their primary purpose.  Their appearance screams 90% race and gender, with a tiny etching of emotion in the middle.  The size is appropriate, but the level of detail renders them unusable.  Turning off the emoticons is a sloppy and minimal-effort solution at best to the real issue.  Having none at all is barely better.  Anyone who plays Illyriad has to accept that fixes/improvements/bug fixes will happen whenever-and-don't-hold-your-breath-because-it-might-be-a-while.  But we'd sure like to hear that the new emoticons will be updated for usability some day.  Focusing on short-term non-solutions just tells us you don't care.  Going back to pure text isn't a fix.

An equally huge issue is one that seems to have become a recurring theme.  Why insist on forcing players to constantly gender-identify themselves?  Rill already did a good job of explaining why that's a bad thing, so I won't belabor the point.  What matters here is that player X cannot choose to stop broadcasting gender.  Instead, it is up to every other player in the game to stop noticing it.  That is patently backwards, and why there's no reasonable way to support optionally gender-specific emoticons (nor is it appropriate to mandate them).

Again, I apologize for beating a dead horse here. I think there have been some really great points made on both sides of the fence. 

Edited by GM Luna - 23 Apr 2012 at 16:15