What the playerbase has been asking: A feature which allows you to manually arange and manage your character roster so it can be easily accessible and organized with plenty of options!
What the playerbase WASN'T asking: An automatic algorithm which forceful arrange your roster by last logged in, creating an vicious circle of slot swapping and chaos along with lag, destroying any organization progress, personal preference and aesthetics
This feature is outright disrespectful to Altitis enthusiasts
I strategically created characters who are linked with each other in order to get them them on the same page and slot row
DO NOT apply this feature
Either make it optional and give us MORE options or never let hit it live, Quality of life features are suppose to make the player's life easier not THIS mess
POWERFRAME REVAMPS, NEW POWERS and BUG FIXES > Recycled Content and Events and even costumes at this point Introvert guy who use CO to make his characters playable and get experimental with Viable FF Theme builds! Running out of Unique FF builds due to the lack of updates and synergies! Playing since 1 February 2011 128 + Characters (21 ATs, 107 FFs) ALTitis for Life!
This is one of those things that had a good intention but not the best execution. If it can't be sorted manually, I suggest not sorting anything at all.
This, If the personal magnifiers can stay forever on the pts then the last played/mess maker can stay on the pts until it can be implemented properly.
One of the strongest reactions i've seen to a change... I prefer by last played, but don't really care nearly as much as most posts here, so I hope the change gets reverted out.
Characters in the select screen will now be sorted by last logged in.
Account
Increased max character slots to 120 (from 100).
Performance
Players should no longer get a message stating their drivers are out of date. If you get these messages, please check to see if they are still present on PTS.
Auction
Increased result cap to 999 (from 400). Please try this out!
Costumes
Golden Age Star and Golden Age Lightning Bolt emblems can be set to glow.
All tail costumes were changed under the hood for memory optimization purposes. This shouldn't change anything on the player end, but please give them a look.
I like most of these and it's nice to have QoL upgrades. However, that first one is not at all what folks have been asking for.
It is exactly what I have been asking for. I mean, really I would like to be able to manually order them, but I realize that may not be possible. So this is nearly as good.
- - - - -
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Used to be coach on the forums. Still @coach in game.
I'm a fan of changing character order on login screen, and I'd take this over what we have now... However, it would be much better if we could manually sort it. Or maybe add a lock toggle so it won't change once you get it how you want?
Sitting and thinking it over, I get part of the fact that reordering would be done this way due to ease of coding. My main concern is that I don't think it actually accomplishes anything positive. If I want to play the last character I played previously, the cursor already stays on that character. Reordering doesn't actually seem useful. Of the idea of most commonly played characters, anyone with a Vigilance rotation will have that thrown off from their actual most commonly played characters.
"Interesting builds are born from limitations not by letting players put everything into one build."
I understand that sorting by last-played is an established precedent in Star Trek and Neverwinter, but I think it's important to note the difference between their character select screens and ours. Below are views of each game's character select screen. I don't play Star Trek or Neverwinter, so please correct me if the screenshots I found online are terribly out-of-date.
Star Trek and Neverwinter display characters in a single-column list. You can always see the characters' names in the list.
Champions arranges characters in a dystopian honeycomb. If an old character rises to the top, the other characters zig-zag down the grid between 3 different columns and vertically inconsistent rows. You cannot see the names of unselected characters. Your only visual cue is the character portrait, which changes depending on the costume the character is currently wearing.
The current static positioning is not ideal, but players can at least memorize the location of specific characters. If the character portrait changes, you remember where to find the same tile. This change will cause me to linger longer at the character select screen, visually scanning for the headshot of the most recent costume of the character I want, in multiple pages of offset 13-icon grids. My regularly-played characters will flow onto the first page, but the row/column shuffling will still inconvenience me compared to the status quo. Given how our character roster is displayed, I feel that Stogey's analogy is fitting.
While we're on QoL changes, any chance of fixing the images for costume transformations and emotes that broke a few patches ago......
Pretty sure that was stated to be an intentional change. My guess is they're trying to save some money/dev time by not having to create new thumbnails for every new emote and transformation. Which, sure, sounds like a really tiny thing, but look at how many emotes, including free ones, we just got with Foxbatcon, as well as all the transformations we've been getting.
While we're on QoL changes, any chance of fixing the images for costume transformations and emotes that broke a few patches ago......
Pretty sure that was stated to be an intentional change. My guess is they're trying to save some money/dev time by not having to create new thumbnails for every new emote and transformation. Which, sure, sounds like a really tiny thing, but look at how many emotes, including free ones, we just got with Foxbatcon, as well as all the transformations we've been getting.
I never saw a dev comment about it when it happened, if it's intentional then 'tis a silly change . Images on items like that are useful to very quickly discern what something is in your inventory without constantly having to hover over stuff to see what it is. The large amount of emotes+transformations (and all the ones to come) itself merits different images corresponding to what they are.
I never saw a dev comment about it when it happened, if it's intentional then 'tis a silly change . Images on items like that are useful to very quickly discern what something is in your inventory without constantly having to hover over stuff to see what it is. The large amount of emotes+transformations itself merits different images corresponding to what they are.
I also thought it was a bug when I first saw it ingame. The note was easy to miss in the long list, and I agree that the unified icons cause confusion.
It was part of the March 7th patch notes; last bullet point under Misc:
I also thought it was a bug when I first saw it ingame. The note was easy to miss in the long list, and I agree that the unified icons cause confusion.
I would like to say that i do not think the UI character selection needs to change. Because of the page setup i have each page organized by theme and the alts on each page are related to the same theme. I do not play all of them all the time but i want to maintain the theme page system. IF you must make this change to satisfy other players at least make it an optional change and or allow us to reorganize each page as we want.
Star Trek and Neverwinter display characters in a single-column list. You can always see the characters' names in the list.
Champions arranges characters in a dystopian honeycomb. If an old character rises to the top, the other characters zig-zag down the grid between 3 different columns and vertically inconsistent rows. You cannot see the names of unselected characters. Your only visual cue is the character portrait, which changes depending on the costume the character is currently wearing.
In other words, the issue is not “You are changing the sort order of a hexagonal grid of unlabeled portraits”, it’s “The Character Select screen is a hexagonal grid of unlabeled portraits” in the first place. It’s a sub-optimal user interface design regardless of default sort order, and I think this was understood when the Character Select screens were designed for STO and NW. Ideally, all Cryptic games would have a list-based Character Select UI with a dropdown to sort by name, last played timestamp, or create timestamp. If you’re stuck with the existing hex grid, though, you have to fully commit to the existing sort order, too.
Choose your enemies carefully, because they will define you / Make them interesting, because in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
I would also ask that the current sort by date created on the character select screen be retained. CO is a game where you hop among alts frequently, and, as has already been pointed out, the CO character select screen doesn't do a good job of showing you at a glance which character is where. I only have one page of characters, and it would be annoying to constantly search for where the one I need has shifted to. I can't imagine what it would be like for someone who has several pages.
I would like to add my voice to those against auto-sorting the character select screen by previous log-in. It would be a great OPTION, but not so great as a forced normality.
Posting this here since I wasn't exactly able to collect my thoughts to formulate this within the timeframe of one day to try and stop this from being implemented, seems fitting that I'd put this here in lieu of having my various rants about character sorting scattered all across the forums.
im going to get a little personal here.
I was diagnosed with High-Functioning Autism at the age of 3. I currently work as a UI software engineer.
Cryptic has no idea how much ineffable pain this update has caused me both on a habitual level as well as from a professional standpoint.
UI-designer side, what exactly is the intent of this change? Is it to encourage players to play one character more? How does this benefit this standpoint? Already, prior to the change, the login screen would start you on the same page as the last character you played, so this wasn't an issue. It doesn't benefit the creation of new characters, either, because each time you log in, you're put on the same page as the last character you played - and that's always page 1. You have to always go to the last page to create a new character.
Is it for consistency between games? Because if this is the case then the login screen would also necessitate listing of actual character names in a large scrolling list instead of individual-loading icons - which, by the way, is also a need to keep the order of each character's hex in a consistent, static order in the list. (editor's note: I later found out only STO does this sorting method, NW is also a static list, and a large number of other unrelated games also will generally default to sorting characters or other choices either in an arbitrary static order, or in order they were created.) This is beginning to get into the personal points.
Prior to the update, whenever Smash day would roll around, my usual gameplay routine would be to go through an entire page of alts, update their builds, track which ones would need respecs accordingly, all based on whichever page had the largest last-log-in periods (something that was shown prior to the update).
This picture above? That's my roster, prior to the update (it's even larger now by the way, that last page got filled). Notice how it was consistently sorted by page. Chisoku, Lady Anubis, Inspector Steel, they're always on page 1, and then characters like General Grief, Meltdown, and Apostate are always on page 8. When Smash day rolled around, I'd go through an entirety of 13 characters based on page position to do Smashes. There was an order to this.
This update has thrown my ability to do this in a time-effective way out the window. That is now about half my playtime I usually devote to the game removed, because I now cannot follow this procedure, and I also can't keep track of which characters I still have to respec because I wasn't slavishly keeping track of all of my alts and their status in a fully-filled out Excel sheet. No, I was just doing it casually in a crappy text file because I didn't have Excel back when I started playing and also despite the above I'm not really great at organizing myself. This is literally what it looks like:
Also, if I just want to mess around in the tailor, this update means that each time I log in or swap characters to do it from the login screen, that's 13+ pages I need to go through to reach an empty slot. That's just inconvenient from a number-of-clicks/efficiency standpoint, even outside of my weirdo non-neurotypical habits. True, it's not even possible for people to get 13 pages anymore, but for some players (especially those with lower-end systems) there's actually a massive performance drop between the login screen Tailor and the ingame Tailor. I've heard some other players complain that CO outright crashes sometimes if they attempt to use the tailor in rencen for example.
So okay, laugh at me for having a developmental disability, or how I keep yelling about how I hate this change and am being a huge inadaptable baby retard, fine, that makes me want to play with this community less each time you say I just need to roll with the punches. And I do wish that Cryptic or kaizerin would actually listen to me about this issue but due to me being slightly too rough with how I've voiced my criticism on the game in the past, they've more or less put me on ignore for every method of contact I've attempted. Part of that is how I've recently been employed with this UI work, realizing how simple it seems to do, and questioning myself: 'how is cryptic so slow at what they do?' Part of it is gaining more disposable income to put into the game, trading off less time to farm for events, and perhaps expecting more from them as I put just a fraction of my paycheck - to a game that I truly want to see succeed in every sense of the word, and with the only way I can do it right now.
People who have followed my guides on steam might notice the notice about them being removed on May 22nd, and for that I'm truly sorry, because I need to make my presence known to the developers somehow to tell them that they I feel they've made a costly mistake by doing this. I chose this timeframe, as that's roughly a full 2-week sprint in which to try and formulate some solution to the issue. My guide on costume creation, still sticked at the top of the costumes and concepts section, has already been removed on May 5.
I probably would've put my thoughts into words like this earlier if I had made the connection as to exactly why this change was affecting me so deeply, but it was only after a comment made about how this must affect users that have different cognitive ability or OCD might be affected, that allowed me to put two and two together to make this post.
Anyways, I might still drop in on the game, again because I do like bits of it, but with what is essentially a core method of how I've played the game for about 7+ years now entirely uprooted and dismembered I simply can't find it in myself to do it as much as before. If you made it here through my E/N TLDR nerd rant about a game online and read the whole thing, I commend you and thank you for your consideration.
Yeah. I still don't see how this was any real kind of QoL boost for me. Sometimes I feel like the devs have a check list of things they are supposed to do for the game in order to justify a pay check or get a raise and one of those is QOL improvements. So, they need to do something every now and then to check off that box whether it really helps players or not. I am also still curious what metric they are using to judge player satisfaction with this change (or does QoL improvement mean improving the life of a dev in some way ?) And, it still seems to me that sorting characters alphabetically by name makes much more sense than what we have now.
Comments
What the playerbase WASN'T asking: An automatic algorithm which forceful arrange your roster by last logged in, creating an vicious circle of slot swapping and chaos along with lag, destroying any organization progress, personal preference and aesthetics
This feature is outright disrespectful to Altitis enthusiasts
I strategically created characters who are linked with each other in order to get them them on the same page and slot row
DO NOT apply this feature
Either make it optional and give us MORE options or never let hit it live, Quality of life features are suppose to make the player's life easier not THIS mess
This, If the personal magnifiers can stay forever on the pts then the last played/mess maker can stay on the pts until it can be implemented properly.
/angryface /angryface /angryface /angryface
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
Omicron - Lvl 4x - Mind
Emerald Myst - Lvl 2x - Claws/Fighting Hybrid
Epsilon - Lvl 2x - Blade
Asterius - Lvl 1x - Electric/Void Hybrid
SIGNATURE:
Used to be coach on the forums. Still @coach in game.
SIGNATURE:
Used to be coach on the forums. Still @coach in game.
To Quote Gomer Pyle from the Andy Griffith show: "Shazam, shazam, shazam!"
-Sterga
I understand that sorting by last-played is an established precedent in Star Trek and Neverwinter, but I think it's important to note the difference between their character select screens and ours. Below are views of each game's character select screen. I don't play Star Trek or Neverwinter, so please correct me if the screenshots I found online are terribly out-of-date.
Star Trek
Neverwinter
Champions
Star Trek and Neverwinter display characters in a single-column list. You can always see the characters' names in the list.
Champions arranges characters in a dystopian honeycomb. If an old character rises to the top, the other characters zig-zag down the grid between 3 different columns and vertically inconsistent rows. You cannot see the names of unselected characters. Your only visual cue is the character portrait, which changes depending on the costume the character is currently wearing.
The current static positioning is not ideal, but players can at least memorize the location of specific characters. If the character portrait changes, you remember where to find the same tile. This change will cause me to linger longer at the character select screen, visually scanning for the headshot of the most recent costume of the character I want, in multiple pages of offset 13-icon grids. My regularly-played characters will flow onto the first page, but the row/column shuffling will still inconvenience me compared to the status quo. Given how our character roster is displayed, I feel that Stogey's analogy is fitting.
y tho
that is UI developer time that could've been devoted to things we actually want
why would you do this
Pretty sure that was stated to be an intentional change. My guess is they're trying to save some money/dev time by not having to create new thumbnails for every new emote and transformation. Which, sure, sounds like a really tiny thing, but look at how many emotes, including free ones, we just got with Foxbatcon, as well as all the transformations we've been getting.
I never saw a dev comment about it when it happened, if it's intentional then 'tis a silly change . Images on items like that are useful to very quickly discern what something is in your inventory without constantly having to hover over stuff to see what it is. The large amount of emotes+transformations (and all the ones to come) itself merits different images corresponding to what they are.
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
https://arcgames.com/en/forums/championsonline#/discussion/1212890/release-notes-3-7-2019/p1
I also thought it was a bug when I first saw it ingame. The note was easy to miss in the long list, and I agree that the unified icons cause confusion.
Much appreciated, TY.
Silly move.
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
Don't come crying when it goes Live and it ends up eating your items or something
o3o
However, as for the change of character roster UI I can only ask this: "Why try to fix that which is not broken?"
As said earlier, it is vehemently unwanted.
In other words, the issue is not “You are changing the sort order of a hexagonal grid of unlabeled portraits”, it’s “The Character Select screen is a hexagonal grid of unlabeled portraits” in the first place. It’s a sub-optimal user interface design regardless of default sort order, and I think this was understood when the Character Select screens were designed for STO and NW. Ideally, all Cryptic games would have a list-based Character Select UI with a dropdown to sort by name, last played timestamp, or create timestamp. If you’re stuck with the existing hex grid, though, you have to fully commit to the existing sort order, too.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
O_o; that sounds dire...
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
im going to get a little personal here.
I was diagnosed with High-Functioning Autism at the age of 3. I currently work as a UI software engineer.
Cryptic has no idea how much ineffable pain this update has caused me both on a habitual level as well as from a professional standpoint.
UI-designer side, what exactly is the intent of this change? Is it to encourage players to play one character more? How does this benefit this standpoint? Already, prior to the change, the login screen would start you on the same page as the last character you played, so this wasn't an issue. It doesn't benefit the creation of new characters, either, because each time you log in, you're put on the same page as the last character you played - and that's always page 1. You have to always go to the last page to create a new character.
Is it for consistency between games? Because if this is the case then the login screen would also necessitate listing of actual character names in a large scrolling list instead of individual-loading icons - which, by the way, is also a need to keep the order of each character's hex in a consistent, static order in the list. (editor's note: I later found out only STO does this sorting method, NW is also a static list, and a large number of other unrelated games also will generally default to sorting characters or other choices either in an arbitrary static order, or in order they were created.) This is beginning to get into the personal points.
Prior to the update, whenever Smash day would roll around, my usual gameplay routine would be to go through an entire page of alts, update their builds, track which ones would need respecs accordingly, all based on whichever page had the largest last-log-in periods (something that was shown prior to the update).
This picture above? That's my roster, prior to the update (it's even larger now by the way, that last page got filled). Notice how it was consistently sorted by page. Chisoku, Lady Anubis, Inspector Steel, they're always on page 1, and then characters like General Grief, Meltdown, and Apostate are always on page 8. When Smash day rolled around, I'd go through an entirety of 13 characters based on page position to do Smashes. There was an order to this.
This update has thrown my ability to do this in a time-effective way out the window. That is now about half my playtime I usually devote to the game removed, because I now cannot follow this procedure, and I also can't keep track of which characters I still have to respec because I wasn't slavishly keeping track of all of my alts and their status in a fully-filled out Excel sheet. No, I was just doing it casually in a crappy text file because I didn't have Excel back when I started playing and also despite the above I'm not really great at organizing myself. This is literally what it looks like:
Also, if I just want to mess around in the tailor, this update means that each time I log in or swap characters to do it from the login screen, that's 13+ pages I need to go through to reach an empty slot. That's just inconvenient from a number-of-clicks/efficiency standpoint, even outside of my weirdo non-neurotypical habits. True, it's not even possible for people to get 13 pages anymore, but for some players (especially those with lower-end systems) there's actually a massive performance drop between the login screen Tailor and the ingame Tailor. I've heard some other players complain that CO outright crashes sometimes if they attempt to use the tailor in rencen for example.
So okay, laugh at me for having a developmental disability, or how I keep yelling about how I hate this change and am being a huge inadaptable baby retard, fine, that makes me want to play with this community less each time you say I just need to roll with the punches. And I do wish that Cryptic or kaizerin would actually listen to me about this issue but due to me being slightly too rough with how I've voiced my criticism on the game in the past, they've more or less put me on ignore for every method of contact I've attempted. Part of that is how I've recently been employed with this UI work, realizing how simple it seems to do, and questioning myself: 'how is cryptic so slow at what they do?' Part of it is gaining more disposable income to put into the game, trading off less time to farm for events, and perhaps expecting more from them as I put just a fraction of my paycheck - to a game that I truly want to see succeed in every sense of the word, and with the only way I can do it right now.
People who have followed my guides on steam might notice the notice about them being removed on May 22nd, and for that I'm truly sorry, because I need to make my presence known to the developers somehow to tell them that they I feel they've made a costly mistake by doing this. I chose this timeframe, as that's roughly a full 2-week sprint in which to try and formulate some solution to the issue. My guide on costume creation, still sticked at the top of the costumes and concepts section, has already been removed on May 5.
I probably would've put my thoughts into words like this earlier if I had made the connection as to exactly why this change was affecting me so deeply, but it was only after a comment made about how this must affect users that have different cognitive ability or OCD might be affected, that allowed me to put two and two together to make this post.
Anyways, I might still drop in on the game, again because I do like bits of it, but with what is essentially a core method of how I've played the game for about 7+ years now entirely uprooted and dismembered I simply can't find it in myself to do it as much as before. If you made it here through my E/N TLDR nerd rant about a game online and read the whole thing, I commend you and thank you for your consideration.