The first thing you’re going to need to do is make sure you have all 4 of your chat windows created. Click the + next to the gear icon pictured above until it grays out. Next open the “Log Window Settings” by either clicking the gear icon next to your chatbox (see image above) or going into Character Configuration and clicking the bottom menu button.

From here you’ll see each of your tabs under the “Log Filters” area. I have mine setup for “General” to basically catch all chat for when I’m not RPing. “Battle” is the battle events. “Event” tab is where I have my linkshells, party, FC and yells (will explain later), then “Local” is strictly local chatter of Say, Emotes, Yells and dice rolls (VERY IMPORTANT!)

You don’t have to have yours setup exactly like this so feel free to just use this as a template to customize to your liking.

First up is the Event tab.

The only thing I have going into this tab are things like my Linkshells, tells, shouts, etc (see image above). Not pictured is that I do NOT have emotes going into this tab. This is MOSTLY an OOC tab but it’s important for RP (more later).

I have Yells in this tab (as well as why I name this ‘events’ instead of ‘chatter’) to make it easier to see what event hosts are announcing. Too often the Yells get pushed off the screen by Text Spam and this helps keep it easy to spot.

Next let’s go over the important one: Local!

The above two images show you what I have for the Local channel. If it’s not shown it’s turned off. The big one is to make sure you go into Announcements and turn on the random number messages since a lot of people use those for games, fighting, random stuff. I do NOT put shout on as it’s mostly OOC junk.

Now that the tabs are sorted let’s tweek the transparency settings for the tabs themselves.

I think Transparency (or lack thereof) is often overlooked but it can be a HUGE help in keeping up with text spam. Here are the settings I use for my two tabs. By having them somewhat transparent I can have the boxes bigger and still -sorta- see what’s going on behind it. The Event tab I keep relatively small and mostly don’t pay much attention to which is why it has a higher transparency.

The other thing in this setting page is your FONT SIZE! Your first instinct might be to lower the font size to get more text on the page at a time, but I’ve often found it works exactly opposite. A higher font size makes it easier for your brain to process the words scrolling past almost subconsciously. This may or maynot work for you, but give it a try. To counter balance this I actually have my local window MUCH BIGGER than usual (well for non-rpers at least).

NOTE: If you leave your local in the main window with the text entry bar you’ll want to adjust the “General” tab settings. The individual tab transparency settings only work when pulled out of the main window.

Now that your tabs are setup what’s left to do? A trick you might already know about but might not. It’s called “Friend Groups”!

Open up your friends list and right click on a friend. At the bottom of the command window you’ll see “Assign Friend Group”. 

From there pick a symbol you want to appear in front of that friend’s name. This can be a HUGE help when trying to pick out what your friends are saying in a crowded room. Sadly this does NOT work in emotes! Maybe one day Square will change this. 

So now let’s go into your chat box layout. Each person can do it how they want but I got used to the two box system back when City of Heroes first came out and I’ve been tweeking my games to the same thing ever since.

This gives you an idea of how you can setup your chat boxes for RP. In the last photo also note that i’m using a different UI layout to hide my normal action bars and show only stuff I might actually use in RP (Well i really need to clear up the clutter in the lower right corner but... moving along...). I really wish the UI layouts preserved the chatbox layout as well, but that’s easy to adjust on the fly.

In any case that’s it for this tutorial!