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Suggestion: User Interface

Mendel

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
After 5 days of playing, I've made some assessments about the game as it stands now. These are my suggestions about what to do to make the game more assessable to new (and existing players). This version addresses specific improvements that I feel need to be made to the various user interfaces.
  • New in-game Chat tabs. Currently, there are 3 divisions of the chat function, World, Users and Group. The Users and Group are useful filters, allowing the user to select the tab pertaining to the interest they want to see. The world tab gets a bit too busy and needs at least two other tabs to help the player deal with the glut of information coming at them.
    • A skill tab. Put the skill increases (currently in popups) and existing skill experience messages into a new Skills tab. This consolidates the information currently displayed into a single data stream. Ensure all experience messages are displayed (The Animal Handling skill doesn't seem to generate a XP message in the Global chat currently).
    • A combat tab. This information is currently displayed only over the mob's head. It's difficult to correlate the action (combat skill used) with the results. This information allows the player to study results and form effective combat strategies. (The overhead display is essentially useless with multiple people fighting the same monster.) Associate the player, skill and result into the same message and tag it as 'Combat', and put this information into a Combat tab. Optionally, allow a filter to this tab to show 'My Combat' to filter out other players results.
  • Chat functions. It is very difficult to talk with a single person unless they are in your group. The /tell <player> <message> only works with a single space between the player and message. two spaces, and the message is eaten. A Reply function is vitally needed, it should open the chat interface and auto-fill the chat with "/tell <last player> ", so that communications between non-grouped players is faster. Ignore multiple spaces between elements in the command, so that the message isn't 'lost' entirely.
  • Group invitation. Devise a mechanism to invite a player to the group remotely. If I'm logging on with only an hour to play and a friend is on, it takes too long to meet up to form a group (even if only for communication convenience). Even a simple "/invite <player>" command would help cut down the unnecessary travel time (and hazards) just to 'get together' to make communications easier.
  • Group merges. Allow a group leader to simply merge two separate groups, not have to disband one group and manually invite to another. A command like "/merge <player>" would merge all players grouped with the targeted player into the initiator's group.
  • Group display enhancement. One important thing for any group is knowing what skills each player has available. I would like to see the group display expanded to include player, armor, health, power Skill 1, Skill 2 at the minimum, with (optionally) associated skill levels of the equipped skills. This would allow groups to adapt their team tactics in accordance with the situation. A simple 3 letter abbreviation of the skill names would suffice.
Keep up the good work. I'll offer more feedback as I explore a bit more.
 

Cramit

Adventurer
Stratics Veteran
I agree with you in almost all points. The differences I would put in would be:

1. Have some form of zone wide chat. Global goes across the entire server and to my knowledge the "Nearby" chat doesn't go to the entire zone. I realize this can be immersion breaking but especially when in dungeons I think it would help out a lot with making groups and finding things specific to that zone. I think the easier direct communication would be worth the immersion breaking aspects of this system.

2. Group Display Enhancement seems like a bit much. I don't think seeing the first or second skill someone has is that big of a deal IMHO. I think in this instance, you don't get enough value from seeing someones skills compared to how much immersion is breaking, but just my opinion.

However, in the same vein, I would love to see a grouping combat system, much like Final Fantasy 13. What I am talking about is their skill chain system. For instance, 1 group member uses a blade attack and then another group member uses a hammer attack and the skills being right after each other create a dmg bonus because they "mesh" for some reason. FF13 used elemental as the reason, so things were ice attacks others were fire or wind but I suppose you wouldn't need that, just need to figure out a way to explaing why the skills chain together. In this type of system it may be worthwhile to have something like the group display enhancement mentioned above, however I would just say that maybe when a group member does a skill, if you have a skill that would work in conjunction with it then it would blink on your bar or something along those lines.

However I haven't done much group content at all, so not sure a system like that would work, but from what "I have" seen thus far in my playing, I think it would be awesome, not to mention if implemented in any form of pvp it would make cohesive groups very powerful and zergs a lot less interesting.

Just some thoughts, I can imagine Eric is pretty busy which is why some of these quality of life improvements haven't been done, but I would suspect most of them are going to be instituted at some point because of how standard they are for MMO's.
 

awollsd

Adventurer
Stratics Veteran
  • Chat functions. It is very difficult to talk with a single person unless they are in your group. The /tell <player> <message> only works with a single space between the player and message. two spaces, and the message is eaten. A Reply function is vitally needed, it should open the chat interface and auto-fill the chat with "/tell <last player> ", so that communications between non-grouped players is faster. Ignore multiple spaces between elements in the command, so that the message isn't 'lost' entirely.
there is /r to auto reply to last person who sent you a /t
 

Gorgonzola

Adventurer
Stratics Veteran
I think he means a keyboard shortcut to reply. Many MMos have eg. r to automatically activate chat, enter the slash command so you press r followed by your text and that's done. Saves typing enter, / r space ... it's handy but i can live without it.

Actually right now a simple implementation would be to add just a / slash command shortcut so that if you press the keyboard shortcut it automatically enters chat with a slash . Depending what keyboard you have it can be slow eg. on mine slash requires shift, so my hands are jumping around pressing enter, then left shift then the small slash key on the enter key side, then back to the left side to type g or t or what not. With slash key shortcut you just go

<slash key shortcut> g <group message>

<slash key shortcut> r <reply message>
 

Mendel

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
there is /r to auto reply to last person who sent you a /t
If there is a /r function implemented, it isn't working for me and several other friends. It ignores the typing as surely as if you wrote "/te;; mendel Hi" (a typical fatfingered example).
 

awollsd

Adventurer
Stratics Veteran
hmm then that is something that should be looked into because /r works for me and is in the list of commands in /help perhaps post a bug report.
 

Mendel

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
Correction. (Sun) The /r is working for me now. There were a lot of 'X' in inventory (and skills) where images weren't loading correctly at the time. Maybe that's related, but I doubt it.
 
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