Chat 2.0 - Progress update

Hello everyone,

Chedburn and I would like to provide you with a quick update on the progress of Chat 2.0 fixes and our future plans. We also want to hear your feedback regarding any additional fixes that we may have missed or that you believe should take higher priority.

We are committed to achieving perfection for everyone, and features such as group chats will be implemented once we have the base version in a more stable condition. Overall, the new chat will be far superior to the old one, capable of handling significantly more traffic (which is why 1.0 had to be retired) and offering a wider range of features and functionality. We aim to maintain transparency with our community throughout this journey, as our ultimate goal is to provide a system that not only works well for you, but is superior to the previous experience.

Here are the tasks we have completed since the initial release three days ago, based on community feedback and required bug fixes:

Fixed disappearing mobile chats and the lack of iOS chats.
Fixed chat settings not saving; players can now re-enable flash notifiers for areas such as factions.
Added a limit of 100 "met" players to prevent crashes.
Enabled links.
Removed name truncation.
Fixed vulnerabilities, including name spoofing.

There are a few tasks still in progress behind the scenes, and we hope to have them deployed as early as tomorrow. These tasks include:

Preventing type focus from being stolen by new windows.
Preventing auto-scrolling in chats when new messages are received.
Optimizing concurrent connections.
Ensuring players lose access to irrelevant chat rooms, such as hospital or travel chats, when they are no longer in those areas.

Our remaining priorities, to be worked on tomorrow for deployment shortly after, are as follows:

Fixing connection issues with chats on Firefox.
Fixing chat synchronization across tabs.
Ensuring chats don't disappear on certain pages, such as casino games and the race track.
Ordering the "met" list by recent activity.
Updating link colors to be more visible.

If there are any other major quality of life improvements that you believe are missing, please let us know. Additionally, if you think certain items on this list should take higher priority, we welcome your input. This way, we can focus on the optimal development of these features.

Thank you.

Was the name spoofing issue used/abused before it was fixed?

No abuse was noticed here, it was very swiftly reported and will be discussed for bug bounty potential behind the scenes once the dust settles.

With the new chats, should we still rely on external tools for QoL upgrades such as message highlighting for mentions?

Message highlighting and mentions are a feature that will be considered around the time we begin to work on enabling group chats for players, it is something we have looked at integrating into the new system once it is stable.

I'll make and pin this post for popular/key QOL things people have asked for in here and that I've seen requested, not presently listed in the above. Whilst I cannot make promises for such things, and these are in no particular order, it's certainly worth us having a transparent record of the most sought after requests for both so we can show you that we have heard you in one singular area.

I'll update this as we go.

• Show & pin faction/company chat icon on bottom of screen rather than hiding it behind group icon for mobile users
• Copying of chat logs to reliably include senders names and show as distinct lines rather than a singular block of text
• Chat timestamp on bottom of chat box (same as old system)
• Increased viewable chat history
• Notification of new messages whilst scrolled up
• New/unread chats to appear at the top of people page to avoid hunting for unread messages
• Messages typed, but not yet sent, within the chat box to persist even when changing or refreshing that page (same as old system).
• Fix chat sizes not saving