My Chat is not working!

[Grace Macbane]

Every time I get on Abassa my chat gets all funky. lol. Some one will walk up to me and say "Hi" or they whisper to me and I reply. Then I wait and they repeat them selves so I say "hi" and then they usually say "Do you talk?” I crew them they say something...no reply. Today I was having this issue and then I whispered to my one friend and he could read what I was saying!! Grrr I'm getting so mad at my stupid chat. Sometimes it does not work even when I am not on Abassa. Help? Is there anything I can do to fix this aggravating problem? I am really POed about it.

[Dr. Zeppers]

All I can think of is that some people cant see what your typing because they have some form of parental or other control on the account and either cannot see any open chat, or require the + be on in order for them to see it.

However, I have heard others speak of occasional glitchs with their chat.

[Rackat]

I usually repond once with regular chat, then if I get no reply from the other player, I turn on the "plus" sign in chat and try again. That usually helps.

[mlratto]

take it from someone who has been there and done that! yes it sounds like exactly what was hapening to me. i had my chat setttings set to a kids setting so i could not hear anyone who was not using the + next to the chat box.

I have since changed my setting so i can now hear everyone but now i have to remember to use the + when talking to pirates with the kids setting turned on.

The major pain in the backside is not knowing what a pirates chat settings is set to. It would be nice if the players name appeared with some sort of icon next to it representing the pirates chat setting.

[AR_FiberNeoPirate]

yea! that's like the time where somebody teleported to me and we were havin this Lovely conversation- and then BAM! no more seeing them- no more nothin! lol. (ok i lied about the nothing) but i couldn't see them. so it's either seeing or "hearing" which one do you want?
:P

(JAG,E.D.M.)
J<>J


"I love weddings- drinks all around!"

[Chris]

Yup they might have a parental blocker on or there are bugs and on Abassa there is usually lots of lag.

[Your Gladiator]

push plusthing chat or go on piratesonline.com to get it changed to anything you can say

[Edward Edgemenace]

Originally Posted by Grace Macbane

Every time I get on Abassa my chat gets all funky. lol. Some one will walk up to me and say "Hi" or they whisper to me and I reply. Then I wait and they repeat them selves so I say "hi" and then they usually say "Do you talk?” I crew them they say something...no reply. Today I was having this issue and then I whispered to my one friend and he could read what I was saying!! Grrr I'm getting so mad at my stupid chat. Sometimes it does not work even when I am not on Abassa. Help? Is there anything I can do to fix this aggravating problem? I am really POed about it.

I am very sympathetic with your plight. Chat simply does not work. I have taken a lot of time and effort trying to get around the chat deficiencies, to no avail. Creating separate LINKED accounts instead of the one my son initially set up, I'm able to get the [ ] and [+] and [>] things that people talk about, as if everyone has them. Depending on what Disney thinks the age of the person who created the initial account is, you won't get the [ ] nor the [+] if you don't go to the bizarre run-around of creating separate accounts and linking them, "JUST SO." I don't recall how many hours it took to get it straight initially, but it requires a new account each week, linked back to the original unlimited account, or else the screen gets wonky with the free border/small size thing going on, just to arrow back to the linked unlimited account. Subsequent logins are to the temporary one-week account, not the original unlimited account.

With my unlimited expired, I can't even tell if that is supposed to be how it works or not. But oddly, I can fix the bug where their "advertisements" steal window focus (a bug that is often fatal to a pirate character, when at an inopportune time) by doing the same seven-day preview linking nonsense. While Disney certainly has the right to insist on displaying the ads, I seriously doubt they mean for the ads themselves to be so destructive.

All that aside, the chat features still often do not work. There is no rhyme or reason as to when or why it fails. "Landing at Porc" or "Landing at Ile de Porc now" both are red-flagged messages for no apparent reason. Trying to say either of those phrases wonks my chat out for the remainder of the session WITHOUT WARNING. That is, I'll have no way of knowing that from that point on, no one can hear me, nor can I hear most messages.

In privateering, that is particularly harrowing; there is no way to eject Spanish spies (nor keel haul, nor make them walk the plank, nor mutiny) and even when you kick someone from crew and ignore or report them, they pop back in if you don't turn off crew matching lightning fast. (Not that kicking them from crew does any good, anyhow...to get them off your boat you'll have to land and forfeit your score and bounty...)

Sometimes,
sending
one
word
per
line
overcomes
the
chat
limitations,
but even that fails randomly, with no indication of success or failure. Sometimes chat works in "guild" but not "local," "crew" or "privateering." There is no correlation to ideal vs. quiet servers; I first noticed that I could hear only guild and not crew on quiet servers. There is no correlation to how much memory is being used by the game on my computer - sometimes it seems to work at first, then fails later, other times fails right away. And it is not limited to failing on Abassa.

Because there is some expectation that the software will say "arrr" it did not occur to me (for months) that the software was intentionally discarding some messages instead of "arrr"ing them.

The problem is a hundred times worse when sailing. Your arrow keys (or A and D, or Q and E) are used for urgent steering..."1" and "2" are urgently needed very frequently. How many times do you need to press enter to clear the dumb chat message? One second delay before the chat thing BLINKS then adds a red word to say that, no, it really won't send this message and really won't send "arrr" instead and really won't tell anyone that you were in the middle of typing something but are now under attack, and really WON'T fire your broadsides, even though you have the stupid [+] plus sign on and are pressing one and two to get them to fire. C'mon, how do you spell ARRR?

My personal rule is to vehemently avoid chat while sailing. If I have a tiny crew (one other person) and I know everyone can hear my chat with [ ] instead of [+] beforehand, that is great. But that is also rare. If I'm sailing and a friend comes to me, I really don't know (unless they are one of five people) if they can hear my [ ] messages or my [+] messages - spending a minute or two of chit-chat is never a luxury I have, when sailing. (OK; ALMOST never.) That of course, is many times worse, if crew matching is on and seven people join crew, and three people leave crew all within a minute. (And hey, I recognize that pirate name from one of the Spanish ships firing broadsides at me not thirty seconds ago...right before I sunk their boat.)

Also, I'll mention it is not an "unlimited" vs. "basic" thing. I first confirmed it was happening 100%, while preparing for one of my pirate's boss battles. Whispers and guild messages to one person worked, but not for other people. Crew messages and local messages from that same person didn't work; she relayed much of the discussion going on in crew, to me in guild.

I haven't set up elaborate network traces to determine if the message quashing is happening on the client or server side. Nor have I set up expensive and elaborate network tests to determine if ~70ms network latency is somehow contributing to the chat problem. Just a hunch, but I really don't think that has anything to do with "consistently lost messages for some people" problems. It seems reasonable to me, to suspect "mommy/daddy/big-D auto-arrring" as the source of the problem.

A separate, but related problem, is when one word is misspelled. When I press return, it doesn't send the line. It should. The line should be sent with the misspelled word replaced with "arrr." The temptation to arrow backwards to the word is very large. But when sailing, that can kill every pirate aboard my ship.

A separate problem, is chat at the start of a boss battle...when I really need to have my voodoo staff out, and really need to have "3" or "4" actually do something, and really need to have CTRL start the spell right away, it is not amusing to see that the chat window killed me again. Once again: there is no way to guess how many times I need to press return to make the chat window go away. Are any words red-squiggled? Won't know until the screen renders...until it is too late. If I press enter three times in less than a second, can you maybe make the chat window thing just go away?

A completely separate problem, is when I press return, and the line blinks (no red words) instead of being sent. Don't do that. Just replace the whole line with "arrr" and send it, please. Don't give me a one second delay and make me hit return again. After all, I just pressed the left arrow five times and "2" five times, wondering again, why they didn't fire after I sent that message. <Pulls hair out> THE STUPID THING ATE MY MESSAGE AGAIN? AND NO RAMMING SPEED? NO TAKE COVER? NO BROADSIDES? STILL NO REPAIRS? ARRRRR! [ F7] Now where did I put that book?

[Davil]

now thats what i mean by showing The Mouse whos boss!Keep it up Edward show em whos boss!