WowAce

A feature idea for controlling the text to use for unknown substitutions, delimited with the exclamation point as:

<target!Unknown>

Instead of failing the substitution on an unknown target and showing the literal text "<target>" in your speech macro, this would see that you have fall-back text defined and fill in the user-provided text.  This would be optional.  By default, the text for an unknown substitution would continue to be the substitution itself.  This would allow you to customize macros in context to show something that looked like natural speech when a substitution is unavailable or undefined.

For example, in a battlecry that triggers upon entering combat, if you get flagged for combat without a target, the target name in your battlecry doesn't work, so this feature would allow you to specify something like <target!_randomtaunt_> to fill in a silly insult name in place of the unknown target name.

In full context with other special substitution syntax, it would still be possible to mix with gender and first person pronoun forms as:

<target *male*female|me!unknown>

Recommending the exclamation point for this since it's not already used for any other special substitution syntax.

This would not be limited only to <target> but would apply to any and all substitutions.

In RPHelper, I'd check for substitutions prior to selecting the random phrase. If there was nothing to be substituted, I'd skip that phrase in the random pool. That way it'd still work without the user having to think about it too much.

That's definitely a good idea too, and it's awesome how we're on the same page, because I was also thinking about adding some logic along those lines too.

In the specific case that inspired this ticket, I'm "entering combat" and announcing a random battlecry, something like "Kill the <target>!"  I have other battlecries that don't mention the <target> and it could pick one of those instead to avoid the unknowns.

In that case, I would ideally like to identify what mob aggrod on me, and usually I auto-target it as a result of it hitting me, but if I'm "in combat" but haven't been hit yet - like I just body pulled - then I still don't have a target.  Or worse: I might have myself targeted, or a friendly player, and then my selected target is really not the same as the target of the "entering combat" event.  It's too bad that PLAYER_REGEN_DISABLE doesn't include a parameter to tell you who you got aggro against.  Maybe there's a way to search the aggro tables to figure it out?

But there's still the more general case of unknowns, and several possible enhancements we could make in that area.

Another option would be a GUI and underlying data table where you could define what you always want to say for an unknown <target> and a list of all other substitutions that could be unknown.

Increased priority because this got votes.

I'm re-assigning all my tickets to Duerma

Unassigning tickets that are not actively being worked on