Do you use the new clients?

[Maija]

I've been playing UO since 1999, so of course I am well used to the old client and all of its quirks and, believe it or not, advantages. They're all something you take for granted as time goes on. After being away for a few years I just came back about a month ago, and every now and then I give KR - and now the SA client - another try, thinking, I must just be stubborn and set in my ways, all I ever hear are rave reviews from my friends about these things. But no matter the eye candy and the ability to use hot keys - which are really nice - I can't get past the clunkiness of some of the more important features. These are things which I feel I could never get used to, no matter how long I play with it, especially not knowing the old client had better solutions.

For example, I took my archer to kill some lizardmen for quick spined leather today. It should have been an easy thing. I can enter the dungeon, kill, skin, fill my pack with about 350 skins, and be out in under 3 minutes. On the old client. On the new client, the experience was closer to this:
Enter combat mode outside dungeon. Enter dungeon. Why am I not still in combat mode? Whatever, go back into combat mode. Kill a pile of lizardmen. Use hotkey to use butcher's war cleaver on corpses. Hmm, some are piled up. What? I can't hold my ctrl-shift and use the hot key at the same time? Okay, fine, I'll try to guess. Click. Click. CLICK. So is that one skinned, or not? I can't even tell which ones of these I've looted! Not close enough, what? The tag is right next to me! Forget it, I'll find another pile of lizardmen. Kill new pile of lizardmen. Getting full, the skins are on the corpse now, have to loot them by hand. Hmm, I must have missed skinning this one. Skin. Click corpse again. Click. Click. CLICK. Why is it not refreshing? About ten minutes later, I leave, my pack still not even yet full, in frustration, go to open the door of my house, and get dismounted from my ethereal unicorn. Again. For the fourth time today. Because you can't click through ethereal steeds on the new clients. And why is it so hard to drop things on the ground? It IS still a tile-based game, is it not?

Edit: Another really useful thing that was changed: being able to drop stuff from the corpse onto the tag over your head (the one that comes up when you hold ctrl-shift.) The only alternatives I can see are dragging it to the bag in the corner or the bag on your paperdoll (I wouldn't want to try to drag onto the physical person, as it usually fails and ends up back on the ground, slowing me down even further) and both of those are a much slower alternative.

The whole experience makes me want to pull my hair out every time I use it. I know it can't be 100% that I'm just used to the old client, because my husband, who started about a month ago, has these same issues with looting. When we play together, he's assigned to looting gold (which should be a simple job, wouldn't you think?) and I get the items, and many times (I'd say at least half, sometimes close to 2/3rds of the time) we'll have the next pile of baddies bearing down on us and he still hasn't taken the gold, and there I am staring at it in the corpse, before I finally grab it myself so we can turn our attention back to the battle. It only gets worse as the corpses pile up. This seems like a major drawback to me. Looting is very often a time-sensitive thing, needing to grab the loot and either get out or get on to the next fight without having to worry about whether the tags are lined up over the correct corpse (and being able to just click on the freshest corpse by the text that came up over it as it fell was really really handy!) or being close enough when it APPEARS to be right next to you, or not giving you any messages, fail or otherwise, as to whether you're doing it right. And closing each of the corpses by the small bar over the top of each? Am I the only one who, in a hurry, liked just being able to right-click anywhere on it and it's gone?

So in closing, do you use the new client? Do you experience these issues, or am I missing some sort of setting that would eliminate or improve them? Did you just get used to the quirks after a while? I'd love to use these nicer clients with what conveniences they do offer, but as of right now, I wouldn't use it for anything but crafting.

 

[Tina Small]

Maija, I didn't pick up on this while reading your narrative, but it sounds as if neither your or your husband are using the right-click to loot feature in the SA client. It works very well and is something that I wish was available in the classic client.

If you haven't been using that feature, perhaps give the SA client another try and see if that makes it a little bit less frustrating. Something else that I have to remind myself of when using the SA client is that not everything that you do by double-clicking in the classic client requires a double-click in SA. Often, a single click is sufficient and a double-click just closes stuff you were trying to open!

Also, when you are closing a container (e.g., a corpse), you can right click anywhere in the top gray bar. You don't have to click the x in the top right corner.

Perhaps some other folks who have used KR and SA for a while can offer some other tips for making the hunting/looting/skinning experience smoother for you. I use both KR and SA but not exclusively yet, so I still have a lot to learn.

 

[Maija]

Oh! I'd totally forgotten you could right-click to loot. That does make it easier My husband did tell me that (his problem is more finding the corpse) and I'd forgotten it.

The bar thing is still distracting to me.. as precise a clicker as you have to get to be using the 2D client, I still have awful hand-eye coordination in a hurry, haha I think the single-click right-click thing will take getting used to, yes! Hopefully things will get easier once I do. It's funny trying to walk my husband through stuff, especially stuff that's just one step on the old client (like picking up a BOD, simply clicking once on the person) where I tell him "Okay click the person" and then it targets them and I never know what to call it so I go "Now click the person. No no, the person.. the person's THING! Up there!" and he'll inevitably double-click and I'm going "Just once! just once! No! Like this!" Thank goodness as far as I know none of that happens in combat. Mostly it's just "You dismounted again, you know."

 

[Tina Small]

Had to laugh at some of the stuff you posted. Sounds so like me.

Make sure you poke your head into the forum for discussing the SA client beta. Your feedback is important and asking questions helps give the UO team a good idea of what is confusing or not intuitive or what is just simply clunky about the SA client.

 

[kelmo]

Had to laugh at some of the stuff you posted. Sounds so like me.

Make sure you poke your head into the forum for discussing the SA client beta. Your feedback is important and asking questions helps give the UO team a good idea of what is confusing or not intuitive or what is just simply clunky about the SA client.

Please do. That is exactly the input we need. The devs are reading and posting there. *nods*

 

[Petra Fyde]

One pile of corpses.

ctrl shift to get the handles. Hold them down. 2x click first handle, open corpse, loot it, close corpse, right click the handle off, 2x click the next one.

that's how I do it. I get all the ctrl shift bars up, keep them up by holding the keys down and then just work my way through them, right clicking them closed as I finish with them.

 

[Old Man of UO]

I am willing to bet that once we are able to Mod, along with the Command macro, we will be able to single click a macro hot key and open all the corpses in range.

Now, wouldn't that be cool, Gildar?

 

[Maija]

One pile of corpses.

ctrl shift to get the handles. Hold them down. 2x click first handle, open corpse, loot it, close corpse, right click the handle off, 2x click the next one.

that's how I do it. I get all the ctrl shift bars up, keep them up by holding the keys down and then just work my way through them, right clicking them closed as I finish with them.

That is actually exactly how I do it on the legacy client. I kept getting confused by trying to hit my macro while holding the ctrl-shift, though (which doesn't work). I gave it another try this afternoon and I think I might be slowly getting the hang of it. Still love so much of the legacy client behavior that is missing now, though. -_- Feels like one step forward, two steps back in that way; the new macro bar is awesome and I would not even be tempted to use the new client if we had it in the old one, given how much easier everything else is in legacy.

 

[Basara]

Part of the problem is that nearly everying that uses CTRL, by default, uses the LEFT CTRL key only.

I'd REALLY like it if the SA game client didn't differentiate between left & right CTRL or ALT keys, because, after all, some of the 2d macros we are used to from UO Assist, like dressing, were set up to default to a set of 3 keys that can only be hit with one hand using the RIGHT side keys.

 

[Petra Fyde]

Don't give up too soon, the new client is really powerful when you find the right way to do things.
One thing to bear in mind, when using keys in combination, like ctrl + shift, you need to press them in order, not together. So ctrl first, then add shift.
Visit the beta board, tell use what you want to be able to do, but haven't found a way yet. Shared knowledge makes everyone wiser.