Make GM chat show up in my [Tell] channel

Here's a quick thought experiment - can you tell me off-hand which of your chat tabs you would look at when expecting a GM to get in touch with you? Do you know which channel it shows up in? Because the answer might surprise you. GM personal messages show up with a [Tell] tag in blue text, but they do not show up in any of the chat channels we have control over. Instead, they show up in whatever is your currently-active "top section" chat tab, and only in that one tab. If you swap tabs in the middle of a conversation, that conversation will follow you through tabs, but if you swap back, you'll be missing a chunk. If your currently active "top section" tab has combat spam in it and you're fighting at the time, or if you have busy global channels active in it, GM chat will get scrolled off the screen before you even know it happened.

My suggestion here is simple: Let GM chat show up in the regular channel for personal messages, and show up in whatever chat tab I have personal messages put in. I suspect the idea is for ANY player to be able to see GM chat regardless of that player's chat tab settings (say, a player who doesn't have personal messages in any of his tabs), but that doesn't mean GM chat can't show up in the tells channel AND whatever your active top tab is. I mean, [Admin] messages about server shutdowns broadcast to all tabs, so why can't GM chat?

Furthermore, why does GM chat show up in a TOP tab, when the game by default puts all of your personal chat in your BOTTOM tab? Even if I were a brand new player, I'd still be seeing GM chat in one tab and responding to it in another, creating two monologues instead of one conversation, which makes following instructions rather more difficult than it needs to be.

And, really, I know where to look for GM chat because I've been in contact with them many times before, so I've deduced how it works. But the first time I called for a GM, I never even saw the tells because they weren't where'd expected them to be and they looked like NPC chat at a glance. And the only reason I bring this up now and not anywhere in the past seven years is because I've had to call for a GM twice in two days now, both over map geometry blocking doors and making missions uncompletable, and this AFTER I used my mission drop feature to complete a defeat-all mission with NPCs missing from it. Once in a blue moon, GM chat is tolerably bad, but there really is no reason why it can't be GOOD, instead.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'm just going to wave my "I agree!" flag here.

Consistency is a virtue in interface design, and while having GM Tells have a different color to stand out is a good idea, they're still Tells and should show up in the [Tell] channel. It's just good interface design practice to do so.

By the way, it turns out I was wrong about where GM chat shows up. It shows up not in your active TOP tab, but in whatever tab you currently have active, top or bottom. It's where the "Active Tab" chat goes. You know that tiny little A on the end of the tiny little letter icons above your chat line? Like that

That just goes to show you how confusing this is

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.