Currently when my character is stood idle he hardly really moves. Every now and then he looks left and right. What would be nice is if I could pick a range of my emotes (including moods) it could activate randomly with a delay between them.

 

The framework for this is already half there as I'm imagining it as a new page in the Abilities menu, essentially a copy of the Vehicles page. So we have a list of all the emotes we've purchased and a tick box next to each which indicates if they are included in our idle emotes.

 

What does this give us?

It brings a little extra bit of life to our characters that and let's us define their personality. Imagine seeing that Sith Assassin player across the room from you randomly playing Sinister emote, shortly followed by Crazy Talk and Furious and Snide moods. Maybe you are a Trooper who likes to do a Battle Plan, Cheer 2, Search, Head Bob combo Some people may just have characters that like to break out random dance moves!

 

I know you can already do this by typing emotes or picking them from the drop down but that (1) creates text in chat and (2) requires constant user interaction. This system shouldn't do either of those things. It might be nice to have a new preferences option to hide default poses.

 

From a sales point of view it might encourage more people to purchase emotes and moods.

Top line: I like the idea. It makes me think of the "Personalities" feature of ESO, except with far more flexibility. There are a few gotchas, though.

 

Your description of the user interface for it looks spot on, except that I think it would require a way to select the time that you hold a mood or emote for. There are "continuous" emotes and "single-shot" emotes, and the same is true of moods. It's true that most of the continuous emotes actually have an internal cycle (watch any of the dances, for example), but they loop automatically. The obvious solution for them is to select the number of cycles you want, but for a "static" continuous thing like a mood, it's in no way obvious how long it should run for before the next change, nor for a one-shot emote.

 

And "talking" emotes (the ones that broadcast actual spoken words around the user) would be barred from the cycle, or would operate in a no-sound mode. Can you imagine what would happen if a dozen or so people set themselves up in the middle of the Fleet with a set of talking emotes going in a cycle on each character, and everyone around them could hear them? (Talking emotes are *already* annoying, and I don't want to introduce a way to make them *more* annoying.)

Love the idea but something tells me it'll make things into a laggy mess regardless of how they implement it. I'd want the ones like how people are gesturing during conversations in the Jedi Temple or the various ones you can see on Nar Shaddaa for sure. And I agree with Steve, they'd probably have to be the soundless ones as players will gladly seek out ways to be obnoxious or annoying just for the lols.

Ha yes definitely soundless! My thinking on the mood specific timing is that if you have none selected then it remains on default, if you only have one selected then that is your long running mood and if you have more than one selected it switches between each equally on a fixed delay.

 

For timing in general everything should just play once and the delay should be one emote/mood update each 30-60 seconds.