This one's for the devs. I'm not sure whether it belongs here or in the Bugs subforum; it's not a programmatic bug so much as it is, I think, a flaw in the game's information design.
So, up your left corner of the screen, you've got dialog -- semi-opaque dark-gray boxes with words in them. Up your right corner of the screen, you've got your mini-map and any condition indicators (meditation cooldown, overwhelmed by ancestral nostalgia, etc) and possibly your "Set Destination" navigation aid arrow.
And then you have elements of an area which will only ever show up beneath these things, because they are positioned at the extreme ends of the sidescroll. You can't walk farther to the right or left to bring them closer to the middle of the screen, so they are always obscured by these informational elements described above.
It's a common problem with street signs. I often can't use my mouse to activate and choose between them, because they are always beneath permanent or semi-permanent informational elements. Even on the left -- the messages displayed there take the mouse focus, though heaven only knows why they're clickable. (My mouse icon actually changes from an arrow to a text cursor. Why? Am I supposed to be able to highlight and copy text there?)
That's not a big deal in and of itself; I can use my keyboard to activate the sign and choose which, if there are several, I want to go to. BUT I can't read the darn signs, because there's this MAP in the way! Sometimes I can't even see whether there's two or three signs to choose from, there's so much stuff obscuring the view! Sometimes I have had to expand the minimap and set the next area as my destination, just so I'd have the navigation arrow to click on and get me to the right connecting area.
This is a worse problem on the right edge, where the elements are permanent or semi-permanent. On the left, eventually the messages will fade -- though sometimes I'm in a hurry because I need to finish some task before some status condition elapses, making waiting impractical.
Even more frustrating is when the obscured item is a tree. When there are messages in the upper lefthand corner, the mouse clicks on them instead of on the little broken-hearted "Pet me!" speech bubble. Again, I have to wait for the messages to fade on the left -- or I'm sh!t-outta-luck on the right.
I hope I'm doing an adequate job explaining this!
My suggestions for a possible fix would be to give us the option to temporarily hide the mini-map, and give us the option to *not* have messages show up in the upper left (they're always duplicated in Local Chat). Another idea I have would be a key that simply toggles the visibility of those icons -- tab, maybe, or the tilde key (~). You'd hold it down and all those informational elements would vanish or become extremely see-through and "transparent" to the mouse (so that when you clicked in those areas, you'd click on whatever interactive items were underneath them).
I'd love to hear whether other players have been bothered by this issue, and whether they have any suggestions as to a solution.
Thanks for soliciting our feedback, devs!