While I do agree that some font size settings and other styles would be nice, I think the real issue here is finding a balance where players can effectively express themselves with the text hat, while not taking away from the experience of others. The current text hat, in my opinion, strikes that balance better than the legacy one. The main issue with the old text hat isn’t necessarily the font, or the fact that it had a few bugs, it was the way players had the ability to oversize it, how bright it was, and it acting more like an accessory than a UI element. The current text hat acts more as a simple addition to player’s usernames in the UI, while the old one, in my opinion, had the ability to be a little too in-your-face.
Self-expression can be a good and bad thing, depending on the person. While most players use the text hat to write something about themselves, or some other fun text, some players can write some less nice things on their hats. While the text usually isn’t anything hurtful, it can sometimes be just plain uncomfortable. I don’t love walking around plaza and seeing giant floating text with sexual comments or edgy jokes stuck on my screen. Its a lot easier to ignore if its more subtle.
At this point you could block the person if they make you uncomfortable, but what about in other situations, like players that display socials or youtube/twitch links? Some players feel like this could be considered an advertisement, and a lot of players feel pretty strongly about ads in games. It could even feel a bit exploitative if, say, a player is streaming and someone else pops in with their twitch link on the screen. It’s pretty much the same thing as hopping into someone’s twitch chat and pasting a link to another stream without permission. If the text hat is oversized and super bright, it becomes more and more obstructive for the other players. While it will probably not pull viewers away or anything, it’s just not a nice thing to do if the player didn’t want to see it in the first place. Blocking the player is a bit extreme in this case, and could even escalate the situation.
SUGGESTION: It might be a good idea to add a moderation setting that allows a player to disable a specific player’s text hat from their view. That way, if someone is using it in a way that is problematic, you can just silently turn it off from your end. The hat still keeps its functionality, and the players who do not like it do not have to be subjected to it. And, the player that turned it off can still see the other text hats that they are ok with. In cases like condos, maybe a permission or location volume setting can be made to allow host to disable text hats in certain areas. We can already disable voice and text chat for moderation purposes, but players can bypass this with text hats. Yes you can turn off all nametags with location volumes, but it would be nice to be able to keep nametags on still.
If this setting is applied, then it would be a lot easier to be more lenient with the current text hat. If we can choose to hide it on our ends, font size/style changes and brightness changes wouldn’t affect players negatively. I still think, however, that it should not be too obnoxious. Even though people would be able to turn it off, it still doesn’t look good for tower for new players to pop in and potentially see giant text hats of who knows what.
