Guild Wars 2

/say is a command that shows text you type in a white font colour, visible in an approximate 2000 range radius.
/emote is a command which allows you to create “custom emotes” by showing “[Character name] + [whetever is said after /emote ]” in grey text, like emotes such as /dance. This appears to have double the visible range of the /say command.

Guild Wars Wiki

As a roleplayer these two commands effect me a lot when I play. A fair number of you have probably at least run into or across a few people roleplaying somewhere in the game. If you haven’t, it’s basically just people “playing pretend” to immerse themselves in the game’s world and setting. Like pretending to be a charr soldier or something.

Say and emote range have always been a bit iffy, but a few patches ago emote range in particular became really wide. (this was pre-HoT)
It was never announced, and so likely a result of some other change in the spaghetti code. Still I would like to humbly ask that the visible range of these two commands are looked into or some form of slider added to adjust your visible range of these two commands.

Easiest might be to just set the range to something else. But there’s no reason you’d be able to hear someone say something from 2000 units away.
Maybe 600 units for both to display the text message is more reasonable, but that’s just my opinion.

Of course there’s more pressing issues. But this is a peeve of mine and several of my roleplaying friends in the game and so I wish only to voice it as a concern.

I’d be reluctant to suggest reducing the range of /say because it has a lot of uses outside of role-play.

For example people often use it during guild missions or things like the Silverwastes Meta event where you want to give instructions or updates to people doing the same event as you but don’t want to use /map or /squad because other people are doing different events at the same time and you don’t want to confuse everyone with instructions only relevant to some of them. (Otherwise you get things like one person yelling to kill the adds and another person arguing that it will make the fight longer and wasting a lot of time arguing until they realise they’re talking about two different fights with different mechanics.)

Reducing it to just the range you could actually hear someone talking would be hugely impractical for those situations, because people shouldn’t be standing that close together. The current range is about right for that.

I do agree however that emote range could be reduced. At the moment it seems to cover most of a city, and a large chunk of the explorable maps. To me it would seem sensible to make it the same range as /say.

(I also think it would be nice if they added extra options for role-players like the ability to whisper a group of people so you can have a private conversation with more than 1 person.)

Perhaps adding a “/yell” that has similar or greater range of the current say would be good then? A lot of other games have such for local area chat.

/say range is fine as it is, but /emote range indeed is way too wide.

For example while being in Royal Terrace, I can hear all /emotes the Roleplayers are doing in the whole other part of the city, the bar in Ossan Quarter. This is a bit too far range.

Reducing /emotes to same range as /say would be good.

As far as I remember, the /emote range used to be a lot shorter. Back when they had that character culling, causing characters being a bit away from you to not show up on your screen and everytime you got close enough for them to come into view, you saw they redo the animation of what they were doing already. Like for example, if I group of people were sitting and you were maybe 2000 range radius away from them, you did not see them on your screen nor did you see "X sits" in the chatbox. But when you came close, you got the emote from everyone as you do now when coming into view, and all the characters suddenly appeared standing on your screen and then sitting down.
When they removed that culling in a patch so you can see people at a distance, the emote range became as it is now.

Another thing I would like to suggest is to not show emotes in the chat like X sits, X busting out some sweet moves whenever you come into range of someone already doing those things. I have not seen it in any other MMO. If you come close to someone sitting, you just see them sitting. You don’t get the emote posted in the chat everytime you come close to them. Or in GW2’s current state, when you are almost half a zone away.

I also agree that the /em range is too wide. It never used to be as wide, but it’s probably been as wide as it is now for longer than when it wasn’t.

Luckily it doesn’t affect my RP as much, since my guild tends to RP in PvE areas more than cities, or sometimes in Salma District (when doing a Level 80 RP mission ). But when I do like to do relaxed RP in Divinity’s Reach, sometimes I do get overwhelmed by emotes from further away than necessary.

I agree with this, and if I got to dream, my ideal solution would be a slider for both /s and /e range. The slider could be maxed out at more than 2000 range too, allowing for tactical stuff mentioned previously.

My main reason for wanting this is that I’m part of a relatively large roleplaying guild, we can easily be up to 25-30 people attending events. When the entire camp is covered by the /s range it can be quite difficult to keep track of the conversation going on around you, and being able to scale it down would help focus and immersion.

But, if a slider is not feasible for reasons, I’d back a decreased /s range and the addition of a /yell or something.