11 replies to this topic

[Alistair Winter]

It's a million times better than the Mech selection screen we currently have, and the one PGI is currently working on.

Why didn't this occur to me before?

The smurfy mechbay basically shows all the builds you've saved for later use. But I'm talking about using the same layout for the MWO UI 2.1 Mech selection screen, where you pick a mech to either modify or play with.

The smurfy screen shows you

• An icon for every mech
  
• Weapons equipped
  
• Engine equipped
  
• All the vital stats, like cooling efficiency, speed and armour
  
• All upgrades

There's easily enough room to list all equipped modules as well. Basically, if we had this layout, you would never need to search for components or engines or modules again. On a single screen, you can easily fit 14-20 mechs, depending on how big you want the Mech icons to be. Ideally, this would be scaleable and the player could choose Small, Medium or Large thumbnails to display the mechs.


Here's a simply copy-paste of what Smurfy already has for mech selection



Here's what it would look like with pictures of the mechs.




Sorry if this has been suggested before, but I haven't seen it suggested.

[Spleenslitta]

Yup. You're right. But PGI wants to be all fancy about it.
Someday the UI the mousepointer in the mechbay will leave a trail of sparkles behind it and all the buttons will be all shiny.
Someday we will even be able to choose the color of the sparklytrail the mousepointer leaves behind it.

[-Vompo-]

It would be even better if you could see the modules with that screen. Hate searching for a certain module from all the mechs I've played recently.

[Deathlike]

PGI doesn't actually follow KISS principles. (I mean, did anyone want the "Play Now" button to give you a prompt when you hit it?)

So, something as simple and obvious suddenly becomes complicated.... needlessly.

[Alistair Winter]

VompoVompatti, on 23 May 2015 - 08:01 AM, said:

It would be even better if you could see the modules with that screen. Hate searching for a certain module from all the mechs I've played recently.

Yeah, I agree. I mentioned it in the OP, but I couldn't be bothered photoshopping some modules on there for the sake of the illustration.

Deathlike, on 23 May 2015 - 08:15 AM, said:

PGI doesn't actually follow KISS principles. (I mean, did anyone want the "Play Now" button to give you a prompt when you hit it?)
So, something as simple and obvious suddenly becomes complicated.... needlessly.

I know, it's weird. But sometimes a person or a collective's greatest strength is also their weakness. PGI has done a good job of going where few others dared to go. Nobody can say they didn't stray from the beaten path when they made this game. It was a pretty big gamble.

But their urge to do things their own way does bite them in their @ss a lot of the time. Like when they keep trying to invent new ways to make maps and game modes, instead of looking at what other games have been doing. Not to mention Community Warfare, or Achievements, or a bunch of other features.

I'm really hoping they'll listen to the fans more when they update the UI, because I remember when the originally implemented UI 2.0. Back then, the players immediately made thousands of suggestions as soon as they let us try the new UI in public testing. And everyone was really optimistic, untill they basically released UI 2.0 just as it had been in public testing. I don't know if any player-made suggestions actually made a difference, but it can't have been that many.

So here's hoping it'll be different this time around.

[stjobe]

Alistair Winter, on 23 May 2015 - 09:11 AM, said:

So here's hoping it'll be different this time around.

Hope springs eternal.

Forlorn, perhaps, but still.

[Surn]

They want you to buy modules, not move them as needed.

[EgoSlayer]

MechregSurn, on 23 May 2015 - 09:22 AM, said:

They want you to buy modules, not move them as needed.

QFT

Russ has said as much in one of the early town halls. Saved configs make it too easy for people to avoid the C-Bill sinks in the game, so it's very unlikely to happen.

[Mars2]

Hmmmm maybe if it brought a quick buy list saying something like you need x-amount of c-bills to complete this build. Then you just click one button that buys and installs all the components.

[Alistair Winter]

EgoSlayer, on 23 May 2015 - 12:00 PM, said:

QFT
Russ has said as much in one of the early town halls. Saved configs make it too easy for people to avoid the C-Bill sinks in the game, so it's very unlikely to happen.

For the sake of argument, let's pretend PGI has enough faith in their product to try motivating players to buy modules because they enjoy playing the game so much, instead of forcing them to buy more modules out of sheer annoyance with the Module Hunt mini-game.

I think PGI should be trying harder to make people buy more mechs with their C-bills instead of modules. I think the joy of MWO for most players is finding new builds for new mechs that suit your playstyle and then tinkering with these over time. Sometimes even updating old builds on old mechs to fit the current meta. I imagine there are very few MWO players whose greatest joy comes from equipping each and every one of their dozens or hundreds of mechs with Medium Laser Cooldown Modules.

[Soy]

Smurfy is better than the client if for no other reason than linking and embedding.

Sitting around with a few other people and working out builds with realtime feedback is very important in my opinion.

[EgoSlayer]

Alistair Winter, on 23 May 2015 - 02:33 PM, said:

For the sake of argument, let's pretend PGI has enough faith in their product to try motivating players to buy modules because they enjoy playing the game so much, instead of forcing them to buy more modules out of sheer annoyance with the Module Hunt mini-game.

I think PGI should be trying harder to make people buy more mechs with their C-bills instead of modules. I think the joy of MWO for most players is finding new builds for new mechs that suit your playstyle and then tinkering with these over time. Sometimes even updating old builds on old mechs to fit the current meta. I imagine there are very few MWO players whose greatest joy comes from equipping each and every one of their dozens or hundreds of mechs with Medium Laser Cooldown Modules.

It's more than just modules though, it's weapons and engines as well. I would love for them to enable saved configs, but they would probably need to monetize it somehow. Like buying save config slots costs MC, or items in the save slots are locked to that save slot so they can't be used multiple times, etc. Because PGI doesn't want us to have spare C-Bills for some reason. I think more C-Bills does mean more mech purchases, and more mech bay sales at a minimum.