Is there anyway to cut down on combat spam.

The sheer volume of things rolling through my screen makes it impossible for me to even see what I am supposed to be targetting.

Any hints or tricks here, cetain attacksclasse sliterally are blinding me, the player, with an unreadable mess.

You've run face first into the number one reason I got a system. One way you can help with the spam is have certain things highlighted. You'll recognize what's happened by the big blocks of color flying by instead of trying to read the words. There really isn't a way to reduce the number of words. You could I suppose try to match them exactly as triggers, gagging them, and having your system replace with with something simple. But if you screw it up at all, you'll be dead. Ded dead.

With a curing system, I just let it run its course while I try to pick out of the spam how my attacks are doing and go from there.

Well most people use echos and different colors to distinguish between different things. I don't really pay attention to anything going on in combat spam. If I see bright flashy red I need to run and all my wound afflictions are echo'd in different fashions so I don't really even have to read them to know what affliction I got because they all look different. It's all just time combined with trial and error.

I'd really love if IREs put in the option of combatbrief or concentrated, that is, you only see what happens to yourself. This would make entry combat so much nicer, since group spam just destroys new people - takes a long time to learn all the things to gag.

What you could do, though it would be INCREDIBLY EXTENSIVE, would be to get every single message that seems too spammy to you, and condense it with #SUBSTITUTION. It's a headache to do, but if you hate spam that much, it's a viable option. For instance:

Rodngar beats you in the face with a hammer brutally, causing your nose to explode.

You could substitute this line out to be

Rodngar uses on you!
Rodngar gave you

It's obviously a very rough example, but I condense certain multiline messages down to their briefest form in all of my systems. The sheer volume of afflictions, the speed of combat, and the intensive amount of curing orders pretty much forces all players to get a system: if you want fight and be successful make one, buy one, or use a free one.

I thought this too when I first started combat, and indeed there are a few classes that are really really spammy to fight (hi monks). Unless you want to go totally crazy with gags and subs and echoes like the people above me said, the only way to deal with it is to just practice. As you practice more often, noticing the important things becomes easier and easier until it's basically second-nature and you can see a whole screen of text and know which bits are important. Keep trying and you'll get better, I promise.

Highlights never hurt anybody either, in regards to Shamarah's most recent post. Highlighting what you REALLY NEED TO SEE is good.

In fact, back in Imperian, I used to mindlessly work my Bard offense based on what color and number was on the screen. It was brutally effective.

Well, right, that can help you a lot in determining what's important and what's not if you aren't good at it yet. You might want to highlight the line where the monk gives you a mangled leg but gag the line for his mod that gives +10% wounding or whatever.

You might also want to highlight the lines for instant kills and have big warnings you CANNOT MISS EVER UNLESS YOU ARE CLOSING YOUR EYES.

Even closing my eyes won't work, my system plays sounds.

First step is to not freak out when you see spam. Unless it's making your computer/client slow, then it's okay to throw a fit because you're about to get owned.

I had this problem too back in the beginning. I was a pretty crappy fighter (not that I'm amazing now, but certainly better than I was), and so I said to myself: what is the number one reason you lose? The answer was 'lack of information'. I couldn't read the spam, so I basically ignored it and hoped for the best.

What you want to do is process the information the game is sending you to pick out the important parts. I made highlights that extended to the very edge of the screen (I play in full screen mode) that alerted me as to when I had balance and equilibrium back. I also made toggle buttons on the side right next to my command prompt, so I immediately knew when I could do something again. Also important to be able to recognize when seriously hindering afflictions have been cured, or obtained. for example, I had a flashy line of text that blinked whenever I became or cured paralysis.

I also made an 'active affliction list' on the side, above my equilibrium and balance buttons, as well as a little paper doll shaped series of buttons, to display wounds. This lets you know how poorly (or good) you're doing, as well as if the group has decided to target you (you can also highlight the word 'you' in game), so you can better know when to switch from offense to trying to tank the best you can.

Another important feature to me was a status bar that sits right above the command line. I had it actively update who my current target was, who my current angel's target was, how many soulless rubs I had, and what the reading was from my last contemplate (for absolving).

The problem I have in IREs that I don't have in other MUDs is that the spam is SO much that it slows my computer down. Eg in the Seren zerg during Ascension, it took me 15 seconds to get my dirge alias to go through, my computer was just hiccuping and scrolling line by line. #gags and #subs don't help in that regard, I believe, as you're just tossing more things at your system to process.

IREs are the first MUDs I've played that have no option to limit combat message views to ignore 3rd party stuff.