KI mute button is confusing

[dgelessus]

There's a button on the right side of the small KI that mutes/unmutes all game sound:

This button is quite confusing if you don't know what it does. Clicking on it has no obvious effect if you're in an area without much noise or background music or you don't have your speakers/headphones on. This makes it easy to mute the game by accident without noticing it. Most people in this situation won't think to click the KI mute button (because they have no idea what it does) or the equivalent mute option in the audio settings (because they're unaware that they muted the game), so they simply think the game sound is broken. (We occasionally get questions in Cyan Chat #moula-tech-support about broken sound - most of the time the real cause is the KI mute button.)

This situation should be improved somehow. Possible solutions:

• When clicking the KI mute button, display a system message in text chat ("All sound muted"/"All sound unmuted").
• Change the button's icon to something that's more recognizable as a mute button. The current icon is meant to look like sound waves I think, but it's not very easy to recognize IMO. It's even worse in the "off" state, where the button is currently blank with no icon at all. Perhaps the icon should be replaced with the standard speaker cone (with sound waves when on) and/or have a strikethrough line when off.
• Remove the button entirely - make it not clickable. No functionality is lost this way, because there's also a mute option in the audio settings. That option requires more steps to reach than the mute button on the KI, but I don't think muting the game is such a common operation that it needs a dedicated KI button.

[Hoikas]

These are all good observations and ideas. I'm a little wary of taking away functionality, so I think I have a preference for going with at least the first option... and also making sure that the KI mute button and the options menu mute button are always in synch with each other -- currently they can get out of synch.

I don't think muting the game is such a common operation that it needs a dedicated KI button.

You might be surprised as to how much I use it, but my use cases are probably not typical.

[ZarothYe]

When clicking the KI mute button, display a system message in text chat ("All sound muted"/"All sound unmuted").

I personally like this first option, probably because this seems the clearest and most straightforward (and something I feel like I could implement myself) without changing existing GUI or behavior, potentially unexpectedly to users. It would probably still be affected by the occasional issue where the KI receives a message but doesn't open the mini-GUI automatically, which I've had seen happen rarely with subtitles and Nexus/clothing status messages but I haven't been able to figure out why. It'd be better than nothing, though, for sure.