%s%s says %s chat problem? how to fix!

Llidoryc · September 2019

Try disabling any addons that affect chat. for me it wasnt a singular addon, but a combination of two. Something in the patch changed how the api affects chat related addons.

Thunderclap · September 2019

Same for me. I will only see a time stamp in front of each players chat text. I will never understand why Zeni don't add such simple feature by self. So we must use addons for that.

Before this patch i can use ChatStamp. Now i have switch to pChat. That works.

How should we call such changes without any note in the patch nodes. Bug?

mairwen85 · September 2019

Thunderclap wrote: »

Same for me. I will only see a time stamp in front of each players chat text. I will never understand why Zeni don't add such simple feature by self. So we must use addons for that.

Before this patch i can use ChatStamp. Now i have switch to pChat. That works.

How should we call such changes without any note in the patch nodes. Bug?

Unfortunately it isn't a bug in eso. It's on the addon developer to keep their addon maintained and up to date. ZOS may not be aware of the impact changes to their api will have on every addon out there. Addons are community creations, therefor outside the scope of ZOS control. The community curate them, and provide them. You should post a comment on the developer forum or esoui thread associated with the addon(s).

It couldn't hurt for them to put a small note in patch notes referring to api changes. However, depending on individual addon behaviour, actual change to results can't really be known (as a previous poster says, this isn't due to one but several addons in use together).

amir412 · September 2019

Did you just put Python string formatting in the title? :troll:

UrQuan · September 2019

Thunderclap wrote: »

How should we call such changes without any note in the patch nodes. Bug?

It's not a bug, it's a change in how chat and the chat API works due to this in the patch notes:

Patch Notes wrote:

Fixed an issue where a large number of a specific characters appearing in chat could cause the client to become unresponsive.

See this for why addon authors weren't notified in advance about the change in API that would break certain addons (emphasis added by me):

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

sirinsidiator wrote: »

This is caused by a change to the chat system in today's update. They changed how the chat text is formatted. Before it would use character sequences like "<<1>>" to mark placeholders for content to be added during the formatting step. After today's update it now uses "%s" instead, but addons don't know that yet, so you'll have to disable them and wait for an update.

It would be really nice if changes like this that happen in an incremental instead of a major patch gets documented in the patch notes, @ZOS_GinaBruno. We kinda expect addon-breaking changes in major quarterlies, but not in incrementals, so call-outs of changes that affect incrementals are necessary.

While we normally try to save these for larger updates, this particular issue was serious enough that it needed to go into an incremental patch and due to the exploitative nature, we weren't able to give addon authors a heads up.

There were people taking advantage of the issue and using it to lag other players out by whispering them, so they didn't want to spread the method being used to do that by alerting everyone to the change that was being made to fix it. There has already been a wave of bans for exploiting it.

Addon authors will have to make changes to their addons to accommodate the chat changes.