1175 replies to this topic

[Snek Doctor]

8 clicks to reload a Cool Shot between matches = too much effort. Please get your user interface people to start analyzing the most common post-match activity, like reloading modules, and figure out how to reduce the number of clicks it takes to execute those actions.

I stand corrected. It takes 9 clicks not 8. Thanks to everyone that pointed that out. Congrats on epic UI fail.

Edited by HrothgarAstartes, 14 February 2014 - 05:45 PM.

[Mechwarrior807015]

auto reload consumables plz!

[Kageru Ikazuchi]

I read through a few pages of the feedback earlier today, so I'm sure most of this is redundant, but I felt like I had to let you know what I like, things I think could be improved, and things that just make me wonder. Since this is really for PGI, and no one else really wants to read my wall of text, it's all under the spoiler.

Spoiler

Things I like:
- The "loading mechlab" splash screen
- The 'mechs look fantastic
- You fixed the friends list so that it only shows those in game (and not just logged in to the website)
- I like the Inventory list, it allowed me to quickly see that I had a few million C-Bills in Jump Jets, itty-bitty Standard engines, and standard heat sinks that I could get rid of (but I really have no idea how much money I recovered, because it took so long for the C-Bill increase and inventory decrease to register--see below)
- So far, the "impulse sales" (X-5 and YLW for 50% off) have been a good avlue, and they have lasted 24 hours. I'd hate to go to bed one night, and then wake up to find out I missed the on sale I was waiting on.
- I can FINALLY activate my Overlord tag!

Things I think could be improved:
- Any text smaller than the left-side menu bar labels is too small (especially the bottom left in every screen and the bottom right in the mechlab)
- The button that used to be labeled "social" is about as unobtrusive as possible (this is a "team game", right? I know I said earlier that all social aspects of this game need to be front and center, easy to find, and easy to use ... this ain't it)
- The "settings" button is probably about the right size, but it was very hard to find
- In the MECHLAB > SELECT 'MECH screen:
-- With the filter "Purchasable" set, it includes variants I already own (while I don't think I'm quite to the point where I have more variants than I could buy, I'm close)
-- With the filter "Owned" set, it includes the current Trial 'mechs ... while I noticed this in "All", it is true in the all of the other valid menu choices ... I don't own any Trial 'mechs (and until you give me a better incentive than an XP bonus for Champions, I won't)
-- Why don't the 'mech tiles have the skill progression banners and symbols? It would help in finding the 'mechs I need to grind.
- In the INVENTORY > EQUIPMENT section, when you sell an item, it takes a second or two to register the sale, but it doesn't update the quantity remaining in the inventory or your C-Bill total in a timely manner (I'm guessing C-Bills are server-authenticated ... I think they might be using the same server as hit registration for SRMs ... I waited for probably ten minutes, and no change)
- In the MECHLAB > LOADOUT screen
-- The "wall of engines" when I view my Center Torso
-- Click EQUIP to load an item, but no "UNEQUIP" button
-- The first time I saw the AMS hardpoint indicator, I had no idea what it was
-- In the engine info graphic, INT. HEAT SINKS should probably indicate both how many it comes equipped with, and how many extra you can fit ... it could also include the speed and maneuverability details for the 'mech you have selected
-- The G-ECM description is either incomplete or grammatically incorrect
-- Missile launcher descriptions all list per-missile damage (bars and graphs) ... shouldn't it show the volley damage?
-- TAG and NARC descriptions do not indicate range
-- No pop-up descriptions for ballistic weapons?
-- "CHECK OUT" ... wrong term for departing a space that is most often used for configuring our 'mechs with our stuff, not buying new stuff.
- In the SKILLS > PILOT TREES > MODULES
-- In the descriptions for the weapon modules it does not include the units for the nerf. This is most apparent for STREAK SRM-2, "decrease rate of fire by 0.04." 0.04 what? I'm guessing that it increases cooldown by 0.04 seconds, but the description is unclear.
-- Weapon Modules should be their own menu, not lumped in with "TARGET"
- In the STORE
-- When I first saw "Owned" under the COM-TDK, I thought "no, I don't" ... then I saw the zero ... are you going to be able to sort the store in the future, maybe to sort out 'mechs you already own, by class, etc.?
-- ZERO information about unowned 'mechs in the STORE, and really, not enough in the MECHLAB. If you want to sell us something, tell us about it. How is a new player to know which 'mech to buy?
- "PLAY NOW" should be "LAUNCH"
- Where did my "ready 'mech" quad go?

Things I wonder about:
- All the premium Founders and Phoenix 'mechs are now "Champion" 'mechs? ... whatever.
- I found the easiest way to track down modules ... in the INVENTORY > BATTLEMECHS section ... click on each 'mech until you find them (one click per 'mech, but better than the MECHLAB). Just be careful not to click "SELL"
- Can we get more description about the engines than "A standard engine with a 160 rating"?
- Why do the statistics and redeem code buttons just link to the website, why not have them in the U.I.?
- When you push "ESC" in a match, why are the SETTINGS, QUIT MATCH, and EXIT GAME buttons are so tiny?
- In the mechlab, every one of the yellow bars (ARMOR, FIREPOWER, HEAT MGMT, TONNAGE, JUMP DISTANCE) are scaled to the selected mech, except FIREPOWER. How can I get 250 FIREPOWER on a Commando (or any 'mech, for that matter)?
- Why isn't SPEED also one of those yellow bars (also scaled to the 'mech)?
- Why can't I sell excess armor or ammo?
- Why isn't there a way to compare different pieces of equipment (i.e.: select both a medium laser and a medium pulse laser to compare the two)?
- Why can't I see the 'mech tree (or at least the banner and symbol) for 'mechs I've previously owned, played, improved, and sold?
- In the SKILL TREES > MECH TREES section, the symbols are kind of confusing ... in the list of 'mechs, I guess blue = zero owned, yellow = some owned ... in the mech selectors, I guess grey or no symbol = no basics (or working on basics), blue = basics complete, green = elites complete, orange = master complete ... yet the banner and "efficiency level" bars are different (one above what I would expect) ... I don't understand ...

OK ... this might be useful for everyone ... I found the easiest way to track down modules ... in the INVENTORY > BATTLEMECHS section ... click on each 'mech until you find them (one click per 'mech, but better than the MECHLAB). Just be careful not to click "SELL"

[Elder Thorn]

i just wasted c-bills on a mech, because it said nowhere, how many Heat Sinks i need to drop into a match. I could check out without any problems, starting a match is impossible though.

[Surtosi]

I'm physically sick from the stress of playing with your new UI. It sucks and whoever designed the layout needs to go back to school.

Why can't I see any engine values?
Why do I need to click through 3 menus to sell my mechs?
Why can't I buy multiples of the same mech?
Why are there so many menus for everything?
How can I sell my components?
Why is the "Accept configuration button" called CHECKOUT and why is it so small and in the corner?(biggest issue by far)

I know I should have been part of the testing to put these thoughts forward, but I trusted you. What makes me sick is how let down and betrayed I feel at just how insensibly complex everything is now.

[Caswallon]

Dear Lord what a storm...

PGI I'm not going to add to the lambasting here so don't let me down (I fancy myself more sorta "Grey Knight" for the record)

• Thanks for putting it out ON DEADLINE, had you missed this even by a day you would have 10X the **** storm that we have so props for that
  
• Thank you for posting it was going to be full of Bugs (You sure delivered on that one!) But I admit there were a few more than I expected.
  
• I see we can have our Phoenix badges in game if we so choose. Good thats another promise (albeit very minor) kept
  
• I shall hold off critiquing the mech lab mess as you have stated your gonna give us a more smurfey like option in due course already. But light a fire under that pretty please!

Now can we have an approximate timeline for the UI 2 tweaks, or even a list of acknowledged "issues" that you plan to work on.

Not going to add to the long list of "FIX THIS!" that others have listed. They are ALL correct.... But as I haven't seen it mentioned yet can I ask that when you select "Mech Lab" you go automatically to configure the currently selected Mech. You really do not need to scroll through to the currently selected mech here.

Overall fair job but now show us that the bottle neck has been reduced and keep up the promised revision bug fixes and bring us some more CONTENT as repeatedly promised.

[Poldi]

The UI 2.0 is worse than the old one imho.

It takes me several clicks through different menus to get some basic information I was getting with just 1 click in the old UI (weapons, modules etc), and the new fonts are just too small to get a good overview of whats left information-wise.
Now you use the complete screen and waste half of it for the mech list - the old list-style would have been totally sufficient if one could just sort mechs there in a sensible fashion. Like sorting them manually, or sort them by chassis or just your current favorite mechs.
Now I have to select the match-type before each match again? Total waste of time!
I have to log out first and confirm that decision to be able to exit the game in another step? Total waste of time!
Instead of integrating the social stuff into the main window you added more windows to it - more complicated than before!

Overall with the new UI it takes more time to find a certain mech, equipment and modules. Everything is more complicated and takes more time than in the old UI.

Only 1 good thing I found - mech remaining.

So you really needed such a long time to **** it up so bad? I am getting more and more disappointed in PGI/IGP. How can your QA team not recognize the obvious downsides of the new UI?

Bad job PGI, just really a bad job!

Regards
Poldi

[Neogrin]

No Sir, I don't like it.

Devs, I beg you. Take someone off the street that has never played this game and put them in front of this UI and see what happens. If that person doesn't throw up his/her hand in confusion and walk right out of your studio, I will eat my hat.

I was that person 3-4 months ago, I sat down in front of your old UI, having never played this or any other Mech game and figured it out and was happily playing in a matter of minutes.

Now...well, there is over 29 pages explaining what you did wrong so I don't need to re-cover it.

What I will say is, I logged in today ready to play for hours (and also to buy some MC so I could get one of the Hero mechs you had on sale) after trying to customize one of my mechs, I thew up my hands and walked out. I didn't buy that MC I was going to and I played only one match.

I am not a fanboy, I play (played) MWO because it was fun. I liked fighting but I really liked fiddling around and customizing my mechs. Could spend hours figuring out a loadout....What was once a joy, is now a pain in the a$$.

I'm out, contact me when you get it straightened out, you have my email.

Edited by Neogrin, 06 February 2014 - 05:27 AM.

[Rhialto]

THIS!
(you all have to go LIKE that post)

I think I've read they are already working on something similar, right? I mean more inspired from Smurfy's MechLab, right?

[Ascheriit Davion]

I can't say much about the UI2.0, but (and some maybe already mentioned these, I'm to lazy to read all 29 pages):

1. Mech configuration, I really get a headache trying to figure which part of my mech body I.m trying to configure, can't we keep the old way, click mech and slot appear kinda thing.

2. I can see my weapon description in weapon grouping, but in the mech loadout, all the weapon have are: weapon name, price, quantity owned......and uhh....where are all the weapon data......do we have to memorize weapon weight, range, etc now? Is something supposed to pop out when I hover my mouse on a weapon or something? coz nothing came out

3. mech store, ummm i can't see the mech default load out.....or if something actually need to pops out....well it doesn't

many other thing, but i can't customize my mech now....just soo frustrating

Edited by Ascheriit Davion, 06 February 2014 - 05:50 AM.

[Ascheriit Davion]

Shignog, on 06 February 2014 - 02:03 AM, said:

Hey how about you fix the game and get rid of the ui 2.0 its very very very
bad.

Just more comment from me. Can we have the old UI back soon.......really soon.....if possible within hourly ....you know like when you're using window recovery option, while you fix the UI2.0. I want that UI2.0 eventually....when its better than the old UI. Right now well....

[HeavyRain]

Well, at least they are going to be able to implement all these suggested improvements very quickly now.
The backend of the UI is so advanced and modular after all these months of development that it now makes it trivial to implement changes when interface problems such as these arise.
I expect them to have fixed most of the complaints within a week or so, with the help of the brand new foundations of the game.
Happy days.

[Hannibal Chow]

3 crappy months in Afgan - come home looking forward to playing my favourite pvp game - load the patch and find UI2........

Mostly in the right direction but the mechbay loadout section is so clunky and non-obvious that I have given up, let me know if and when its fixed.

I'm off to play a game that gets beta testing!

Edited by Jaz 249, 06 February 2014 - 05:58 AM.

[Mylardis]

You know guys what will happen? You just have to compare the forums and twitter.

All good ideas and also criticism happens here, and, judging by experience, will be ignored.
Whereas on Twitter the devs are happily retweeting those precious few "ooooohhh, we loooooove your work" tweets.

Don't want to sound harsh, I've invested far more money here than I'll ever admit publicly. I enjoy stomping. But I've finally lost faith. I also work in the software industry, and judging by this UI after 1 year delay, the product has failed completely now.

I'll keep this account, playing forum warrior from time to time - I'll bet though, that nobody relevant will ever post their reply to our criticism. They get nice tweets, though, that matters.

Taken from a popular story (German language), I gather they'll be singing something like "Ich mach mir die Welt, widdewidde, wie sie mir gefällt...".

[Ascheriit Davion]

I'm seeing dejavu........ XP --> Vista .......but without the option to revert back or reformat back to XP.. I just hope the "windows 7" part comes out soon....

[Lupus Aurelius]

A year to develop the UI 2.0, and it is more cumbersome than stuff from back in the early 90's and late 80's. Given a year, a competent programming team should have been able to produce a viable product, and no, this is not viable, it's a scratch effort. IMHO, this was released only to prevent the excrement storm that would have occurred if the committed release was not met again.

For those who ever heard of it, there was a sandbox MMO called Perpetuum Online. The dev team were a dozen guys from Hungary. In the first year, they had a product with the functionality of EVE online. Game had huge potential, shame it became one of the most toxic environments out there. Point is, a dozen guys created a user interface, for a complex pvp/pve game, with mechs that have multiple fitting capabilities, and fairly complex, with a UI that blows this away. The only difference - game was always in 3rd person view.

Meeting the commitments that PGI has made is not just a matter of meeting the date, but having a fully viable product at that time as well. Which PGI has not, therefor I hold it as another failure of PGI to hold to their commitments.

[Kaishaku]

Pros: Looks pretty. Can set weapon groups in the hanger. Can rename mechs.

Cons: Cumbersome and hard to find things. Took forever to get here.

In some ways I preferred the old one (not that it was any good).

Recommendations: Please patch in the near future mech summaries so when browsing the hanger I can know what equipment I've equipped my mech with instead of going into config and looking at each hard point to find what I put where. This is really annoying when trying to find where I put that 250 XL and I have over 50 mechs!

[Ballimbo]

I would like to add the following (to the many things already mentioned in this thread):

Weapon range is missing in the Weapons-Detail popup.
There's this graph with the damage distribution on range, but the actual exact value for the range is nowhere to be found.

And for everybody who's wondering:
yes, there is a weapons-detail information-popup. You have to hover over the weapon for a moment and then it appears on the right hand side, just right of mech component, where your mech model is displayed. (at least on my resolution it is there).
Hm, yeah, would be nice if this popup-window would pop up next to the cursor while hovering on the weapon....

[Mawai]

I haven't read through the thread. Hopefully, someone at PGI is doing so and will find the common issues .. so I am adding my comments here.

1) Overall the look and feel of the interface is better.
2) Overall the usability is worse. I am not sure how this got past a UI designer given the issues with the workflows. I would almost think that the job was handed to a software engineer who was told to create something cool looking using a particular platform.

More detailed comments:

1) Store - the only thing visible when purchasing a mech is the name. This is useless. The store needs to display all the information about the mechs you are considering buying ... weapons, loadout, engine, tonnage, hardpoints, any bonus (cbills, XP, LP or any combination and the size of the bonus). All of the relevant information about the mech MUST be displayed so you can look at it before purchase. It is pretty useless otherwise.

2) When in the mechlab the loadout (weapons, modules, engine, armor distribution on a mech) needs to be displayed without having to hit confgure. How the mech is equipped needs to be visible when you are just clicking through the selections. At present it is ridiculous how hard it is to find a module or engine that you want to swap to another mech.

3) I can find no way to sell excess equipment - maybe I missed it but I could find no way to sell equipment in either the mechlab or the store. The only way to buy equipment is to fit something you don't already own to a mech.

4) The inventory only lists unequipped items but there is no list of what you actually own and where to find it. I have 35 mechs .. some players have hundreds. How can they find that XL255 engine that is hidden on one of these hundreds of mechs?

5) The game starts in full screen but alt-tabbing does not iconize it. Alt-tabbing out of the app should get rid of it - FIXED this by switching from full window mode to full screen mode.

6) The text is much too small and the icons are huge ... but the icons do NOT contain all the information you need ... they are essentially a somewhat confusing pretty picture.

7) There is no filter for "owned", "available for purchase", and "all" ... so that you can leave out modules that are INVALID because you have not trained the skill. The current implementation is just cluttered. In addition, the "INVALID" tag on the modules is just confusing ... how about "SKILL NOT TRAINED" or some message that actually reflects WHY the module can not be equipped?

8) Support of double click to add and remove items from the mech. UI1.5 did this ... why not 2.0? It is not as if double clicking actually does something else ...

9) All the buttons are too small. The logout button for example is this tiny spot to click at the lower left of the screen.

10) The play button should remember the last mode selected and start with that one chosen ... instead of having to click it every time I launch a match.


In conclusion, the new UI is a cool idea but the execution leaves a huge amount to be desired ... and the issues are both large and small ... how difficult would it have been to use "UNTRAINED" instead of "INVALID" ... much clearer ... explains why the module can't be used ... roughly the same number of characters ... seems obvious ... but for some reason the UI/design/development team missed so many elements of the work flow and common usage.

In additon, this version of UI2.0 looks virtually identical to the version that was tested in November ... what have your developers been working on for the last 3 months ... unless it really was only one or two people assigned to the UI re-write. In which case, I would have to ask PGI management if they have a clue about how to allocate resources and when to hire more people ...





To be honest, the whole situation has the feel of a bean counter saying ... "Well a new UI doesn't make us any money ... new mechs DO". "Community warfare doesn't make us any money ... new camo patterns and colours DO". "Proper launch modules and social tools don't make us any money ... new cockpit items DO." ... which is all correct ... but misses an important point ... "People will play and continue to play MWO with a better UI, Community warfare and good social tools ... new mechs, camo, and cockit items DON'T do this." ... In order to generate an income stream from art assets you NEED to have a set of features in the game that will attract and retain your player base. Without this the game will FAIL in the long run ... and providing these features needs to be a priority BEFORE you lose a substantial fraction of the player base (assuming that has not happened already). sigh ... /end rant

Edited by Mawai, 06 February 2014 - 08:33 PM.

[DrPhilGood]

The bottom bar feels empty you should keep the currency down there so it can be visible at all times.

Some fonts in the UI are just too small.

Add some way to disable the noise while scrolling across items and mechs

Add a cancel button incase you launch a search for game but forgot to apply skills points, etc.

I like the new interface for the skill tree except for one thing you can't view what efficiencies you've unlocked in mechs you've sold( I know no biggie but still would be nice to see)

And as mention before while in store make it possible for mechs loadouts and info to be viewable

You should add a different color on top of the stats of a mech (pitch, yaw, heat, etc.) bonuses that you've added by efficiencies

But overall I like it

Edited by DrPhilGood, 06 February 2014 - 07:32 AM.