I've seen many suggestions of animations, emotes, and costumes, but I haven't specifically seen anything on the somewhat related topic of social commands. Many games, typically those that require team coordination and a relatively fast pace, have implemented easy to navigate menus and submenus that let players communicate with voice lines, animations, text, and even game mechanic oriented effects such as putting an "I need healing" symbol over a player's head.
These are designed to facilitate communication and teamwork very quickly and easily among players even if they speak different languages. Since the voice and text is client side, using a command is also effectively using an automatic translator. It also helps players if they have difficulty speaking or typing. Players can use hundreds of phrases, directions, or even silly jokes with a few quick taps.
Examples of games that use this setup are starsiege tribes, tf2, and SMITE to name a few.
The basic idea being that players can reach any desired phrase with 2-4 key presses. If you have, say, 4 distinct menus divided between social, combat, strategy, and roleplaying (just examples I made up), you can have a few nested layers deep in each of those and come up with a huge array of ideas people can use to communicate.
A system like this could even be limited simply to text and animations early on, with any sounds or voices or cosmetic special effects added down the road if desired.
Such a menu system would not replace or prevent players from making their own macros, but would greatly facilitate communication for those unwilling or unable to go that extra mile.
In the context of CoT such premade macros would not necessarily even need to be set in stone, but could serve as a way to ease players into making their own if they could edit these prebuilt menu items.
So what do people think about a similar system for CoT?
If CoT allows for a keybind system like CoH had then much of what you're suggesting here will be possible in CoT.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I... don't have have anything directly against this, though I don't know how useful it would be in the long run since it sounds like the more fast paced a game is the more useful such a system would be.
Only thing I would comment on right now would be the ability of editing menu items. Depending on what you mean by "editing" it could effectively negate the benefits of the whole system, or require MWM to implement a real-time translator. For such a system to be successful consistency is the key. Now if by "editing" you only mean the placement of items in the menu-structure then I'd say "go for it".
Fair point blacke4dawn, I got a bit ahead of myself and kept adding ideas to the post. For a system like that to work well as a translator and communicator you'd want the ideas to be static.
There is not a great need for such a system to be editable if there is a decent interface for players to easily make their own macros. Thank you for bringing that up.
As for CoX keybinds, I remember being able to bind keys to macros in CoX but not to nested menus. Nested menus are the core functionality that I'm talking about.
The sort of system I'm describing would essentially allow a player to access a great many different macros while only using a few buttons. Individually binding those macros to keys would need many keyboards worth of keys. It makes things much easier to use since you can resuse the same few keys (usually keys near each other and near commonly used game keys to further make this fast and easy) tapped a few times to navigate through menus.
A more in depth example of such a system at work for those that haven't experienced it is as follows:
We take all our premade macros, split them up into several different types, then split each of those types into a bit more distinct groups. Perhaps some of those groups are still big enough to warrant another layer of their own menus.
This means a player can walk up to someone, hit a key combination such as V V G H within the span of a second because the keys are near each other and near the commonly used WASD keys (these are examples, they could be anything) and greet a player with a prebuilt hello message, handwave, and the like.
If you have, say, 4 keys used at each menu layer and 4 menu layers you can have 256 macros. This is on the extreme low end, you can go much higher. 6 keys and 5 menu layers gives you 7,776 different macros. The player does not need to memorize these, each time they press a key a brief menu is overlayed in the corner of their screen that describes the next options available.
It gets even more effective really, since each generic macro can be a list of similar responses to make things more interesting and varied. A simple "Hello" greeting could be, say, 20 different premade greeting responses that the game randomly selects from. This also means one selection can be labeled something as vague as "joke" or "snappy comeback" and have a variety of stuff built in there.
All in all it means a huge benefit to breaking down barriers between people and opening up opportunity for social interaction. Those that benefit the most would be players that speak different languages or have difficulty with the more common methods of typing or using voice comms. It also benefits children! While the system was invented for fast paced games, it benefits people that want to relax and take it easy even more so in a slower paced environment as they require less time and effort to get their point across.
Such a system also does not limit or detract from more traditional methods of communication, emote use, or macro use. It lowers the barrier of entry for social interaction so players can easily break the ice.
This is related to another bit mentioned in other threads. People raised concern about how some game features reduced social interaction and made players feel as if games were "massively singleplayer" with people never connecting with each other. This is one way to help alleviate that issue.