How to use the unusable buttons

Hey everyone,

I'm new to this game, just started over Christmas.

I was wondering how to use the very tiny buttons on the chat window. I can't read them, apparently they contain the following (Paragon Wiki):

• L - selects the Local channel
• B - selects the Broadcast channel
• T - selects the Team channel
• S - selects the Super Group channel
• R - selects the Request channel
• F - selects the Friends channel
• C - selects the Coalition channel
• A - selects the default channel for the currently Active chat ta

You can click on the buttons to change what your default chat channel is - that is, the channel your chat will go to if you don't put /local or /team or anything in front of it.

If the buttons are too small to see, you can also click where it says "Team:" or "Local:" or whatever, to the left of your chat entry box, and it gives you a pop-up menu. In that case you might also consider also increasing your window scale in settings, especially if other parts of the interface are too small to see as well.

Personally, I usually leave it on Team or League because that is where the vast majority of my chat goes, plus they tend to be the most time-sensitive messages: the difference between typing "I am disintegrating" or typing that, then backspacing over it and re-typing "/league I am disintegrating" can be life and death. But YMMV.

Pressing one of those itty bitty buttons (I've noticed that the devs seem to have great eye sight or huge monitors) is a short cut for selecting which channel your text will go to.

Its often easier just to click the current name eg the word broadcast and select from the list.

The ingame help (press H and lookunder social) has some good info on how to use the differnet chat channels.

Lots of people use global chat channels for teaming and social functions. Each server has thier own main ones, and they let you talk across red/blue/goldside or across servers (shards) though mostly they are used for forming teams within a server.

You can right click an empty bit of the chat window and do a channel search. Try with the name of your server, eg virtue will bring up virtue TFs (virtue taskforces), RP Virtue (for role play teams) and virtue LFG beta (general teaming). SOme servers thebusy ones might be servername badge etc etc. Check the forum for your server to find out which is used, should be a sticky.

They well worth checking out, it will open lots of teaming choices.

Also, welcome to the game.

Depending on what I'm doing, I generally use the buttons to set my chat window to either "Team" if I'm teaming or planning on teaming, "League" if I'm running some sort of trial or waiting around for one to launch, and "Local" if I'm planning on doing a lot of RP.

I'm hate having to click a tiny button each time I have something to say in a different channel, so I've gotten pretty good at directing things via slash commands:

/g for Team or Group [since /t is for "Tell"]
/l for Local
/b for Broadcast when looking for group or to add more players to an existing group
/sg for Supergroup chat
...and I've finally started using a hotkey to bring up the "say PrivateChannel _______" command for a friend's private channel we use to set up teams.

That's probably 98% of my channel use on a given night, and I'll use buttons for the exceptions.

Even with the slash commands, I'll still usually manage to confuse myself in the heat of combat and mistell/mischannel some sort of remark at least once a night, but I've found that my mischannel comments INCREASE when I try to stray from my above system and try to use the channel buttons.

I tend to leave it set to (A)ll, and define a Default channel for each tab. Then, I name the tab after the Default channel. Anything I send while that tab has focus is where the chat is going, unless I place a /command first, to redirect it.

Of course, the tabs for Rewards, Combat, and Tells don't get Default channels, since they're there for tracking purposes/pressing Backspace will reply to the last /tell.

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Biggest Troll on the forums? I'll give you a hint:

I can't read the buttons either but I see what I've switched to in the text field and click again as necessary.

It's useful to me to use team, league, local, broadcast, and coalition chat at different times. For global channels I switch to the tab for that channel and us all, and make sure it's set to the channel.

But I'm working with a knowledge of what order the different chat channels are listed in at least. They should be bigger, I can see how a new player wouldn't even know where to start with them.

The ___________ (insert your favorite extreme negative) itsy bitsy teensy weensy buttons in various parts of the UI are my single greatest, and almost only, HATE for this game.

My wife has a slight palsy from necessary medications, and simply cannot use them, even with a resized UI. I think her frustration with this totally unnecessary gotcha is one of the major reasons we dropped our second account back to premium, since she just would not play anymore after trying CoH out for many hours. With the shift to widescreen monitors this problem is even worse.

If everybody else is in love with these skill testers, could us older folks with older eyes and hands at least get an option to have double size buttons. We have a option to pick the old or new Team UI after all.

Please believe I would have liked to make this a FLAME, but just don't have the flame gene. Even better would be to pay a sky writer to put "FIX the ____ Buttons" in letters a 10,000 feet across above the Paragon HQ. Shame I ain't rich.

Jak

Most of the time I use slash commands.... Or if I know I'm going to be talking in say.. League more than coalition... Id right click in the chat box and set the chat to league and use /c for coalition chat or /sg for super group..

Then like in atlas park I find myself setting chat to local and using /b for broadcast /request , /team /f for friends /Ac for arena chat /ma for mission architect but hardly ever used. /hc for help chat..

For channels like global task force stuff can be seen by right clicking in chat box or clicking on the channel name and hit "send message" ex: /send "Sovereign"

I've never found them to be useful, and simply ignore them. The ability to simply click on the channel name and get a listing as Hopeling pointed out has always been more efficient to me (and of course the channels which I use the most often have binds or I've given them their own chat tabs).

Instead of using the little tab buttons, you can use:

/chatcycle to cycle through default chat channels
/tabnext to move forward (/tabprev to move backward) in your chat tabs
/tabselect <tab name> to select a specific tab

If you only swap between two chat tabs, you can use /tabtoggle to go between the two. It makes the previous active tab the current active tab, which allows a circular rotation of the two.

The /tab<x> commands will open a chat tab if it is closed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Changing Tabs I do via a Popmenu. I assign a tab to the numbers 0-9, and set those as accelerators. Then, when I press the number, it executes the tabselec [TABNAME] command, where [TABNAME] is the name I gave the tab.

I also added one for my League chat tab, with L as the accelerator. That tab ONLY contains the League channel.

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Biggest Troll on the forums? I'll give you a hint:

you get the same menu (with a few more options) right clicking on any chat tab.

The really odd thing is that for the past 7+ years i have been using those unusable buttons in addition to slash commands and right-clicking chat windows. It never even occurred to me that they were unusable. i've used a variety of monitors over the years of varying sizes and resolutions (both of which have trended upwards over time) and never realized it was an issue. Maybe i started with a relatively low resolution monitor and grew accustomed to the layout early on.

I can't read them either, on my new 23" monitor. But I can read the channel names in the little tab. So I usually wind up more or less randomly hitting the microbuttons until the tab reads what I want, and then using that channel until something forces me to probe the microbuttons again. I'll have to try clicking the channel name for the pop-up menu, sounds interesting.