Interesting post by poz in response to complaints that the “Suppress Extra Player FX” is currently broken:
The intention of “Suppress Extra Player FX” was to reduce the number of “unimportant” FX displayed. This was targeting city zones, mainly near trainers.
With the Suppress FX options turned on, here are the heuristics used to determine if a continuing FX will be shown.
1. If it’s not a continuing FX then show it.
2. If it’s on you show it.
3. If it’s on a critter show it.
4. If it’s from a villain and you’re a hero (or vice versa) show it.
5. If it’s from you or to you, show it. (So you see all bubbles you cast.)
6. If the target or source is on you team show it.[…] We decided that anything that happened to a teammate or that you triggered was important. This feature was never meant to help on mission maps; it was meant to help spammed group heals at Ms. Liberty and sundry running around town.
Which makes sense, though it may still mean (on some highly-buffy teams or vs. certain opponents) that things get kind of super-saturated.
Poz thinks the thought it’s broken is due to a year-old fix that got rid of teammate’s buff visuals being suppressed if they were debuffed by opponents. But I thought it was an interesting list.