Regarding the latest changes to Emote muting:
In the client patch on October 26th, we neglected to mention one important change in the listed notes. Our patches often contain large amounts of changes and bug fixes, and from time to time something big slips by our noses and doesn’t get mentioned. Most of the time those unmentioned changes are relatively small, such as the change we made to the way Practice Coins are highlighted so they’re not so easy to miss.
While incomplete patch notes are a separate problem we’re taking steps to improve on, the particular important change we’re talking about here is in regards to the way players can mute Emotes.
The unlisted change was as follows:
- The “Mute all emotes” button has been removed from the Settings menu
- To mute your opponent’s emotes, you must right click on your opponent’s orb and select “mute emotes” to block them for the rest of the game.
First of all, we recognize there are a lot of players who were already attached to the settings menu option - or who want such an option to exist, regardless. This change is something we’ve, as always, put a lot of design thought into. We feel it’s worth explaining why we’ve done this.
Let’s start off with a real world example.
Imagine you walk into a game store and start playing any random friendly game against someone.
You might likely introduce yourself with a polite, “Hello!”
Now, imagine you receive no reply from this person. Just complete silence.
At this point, you’d probably be wondering: “Why?”
- Is this person in a bad mood?
- Are they too busy thinking?
- Are they ignoring me?
- Do I smell?
The rest of your gaming experience is probably lessened for the remainder of that match as you wonder if you remembered to put on deodorant that morning.
Let’s jump back into Faeria now.
The above example was previously a normal occurrence in Faeria games simply due to the toggle option merely existing. We don’t want to make people feel isolated or alienated by the fact that emotes exist. We believe the vast majority are trying to be friendly and interactive by using the emotes, only to end up being completely ignored when they otherwise might receive a quick, friendly reply.
We are certain that providing the option to dismiss the only global social interaction in Faeria entirely with a wide-sweeping toggle isn’t the right approach to build friendships and promote player interaction within the game.
Now, we do recognize that some players will try to abuse the feature or use it only in a negative way. However, assuming that everyone is potentially a jerk and wanting to protect yourself from them at all times doesn’t mesh with our philosophy of player interaction and friendship building. Our original goal for emote muting is not for players to be able to go into a “Do not Disturb” mode for emotes and shut themselves off from all interaction, but to give players an option to deal with those players who are annoying or negative with their emote use.
We’ll be actively looking at ways to automatically silence those players who tend to be routinely abusive or negative with their use of emotes. While we don’t want to get into specifics right now, know that it is on our mind and something we aren’t oblivious to.
In the meantime, muting players who are annoying you should remain extremely easy to do, and take a matter of seconds.
We hope you understand our position a little more after reading this, and thank you for taking the time to do so.
- The Faeria Team
