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bluhman
Posts: 2,410 Arc User
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My characters
Yeah, though, for me, there does not seem like a real need to create a lot of tons in STO as it did in CO due to how the games are different with character creation.
STO is a lot more limited. You are basically stuck with a choice of three classes and not many races (unless you choose Federation). Because of the class limitation, I never really felt a real need to create a member of each race, instead, only a member of each class for each faction, except for the extra federation factions in STO. Those I just made like one character so I could have one of those for the "recruit" stuff.
So, I have a much smaller amount of toons in STO than CO.
In CO, I have the same problem as bluhman with finding toons I had not played in a while.
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My characters
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
18 toons in CO or STO? If in STO, yeah, that sounds like me. If in CO, well, nice, that makes it easy on you, I have 180 with 20 or so more empty slots.
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My characters
Nice.
Also, while you certainly can, there's a lot less incentive to make buttloads of alts in STO compared to CO.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Hence why I am hoping this was more of a test to see if they can implement options like this and are going to introduce new options that players can switch between with ease on the character select screen. Having this forced...is not cool in my opinion. I had a nice balanced Jenga stack, now my blocks are all over the place.
Mmm, not technically true. It did have people with lots of toons in mind who don't actively use pages upon pages of characters. If you only use 13 or less toons actively, then you benefit greatly from this even if you have 50 pages of toons since for the majority of your character selection usage you won't even have to flip pages anymore once toons have migrated to the first page. If you use 14-26 characters actively, then you'll only have to flip through two pages. 27-39, three pages. Flipping through 3 pages isn't really a big deal, and 39 toons is already quite a lot - not just to have, but to play actively.
The only group who they did not have in mind was "people with tons of toons who use a large percentage of them with an equal activity level" since that group gets no benefit from this, and actually sees a few negatives. No idea what % of the population that is, but probably not much. What sucks is that whatever the percentage is, it's guaranteed to be long-time players, so I can understand why those people might feel a bit rebuffed by this. Also "Don't worry, the majority of people weren't inconvenienced by this, just you" generally isn't very comforting o3o
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Also...
what was that??
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
That would be the best solution, like I'm sure there are some folks that love this update, but folks like me don't care for it and having choices would always be better than forcing changes on people.
Needed a toon I hadn’t used in some time but could find him without everything finally loading, it took me about 4 whole mins to find my toon.
Only because I had to wait for everything that load then then search full roster twice.
Rum times ten.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." - Yoda
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Assuming all my assumptions are correct, this may be a ploy to reduce the load on their servers. With the devs figuring if they force all your most used characters to the front page you won't be paging through several pages of characters each time you log in.
I could just be assuming completely in the wrong direction though.
Well, so, two good things happen from this disaster than. If they do manage to figure out caching profile images for the players, that is good, and, if it reduces stress on the server, that is also good. Always look for that silver lining.
Ah, so you are under the impression that the "people with tons of toons that use them all equally" group is a majority. Figures.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
But I'm pretty sure you're just trolling. Figures.
Sure, they're the only ones that benefit, but then everyone else ends up neutral. People with only a few characters weren't effected by this at all. So that just leaves the minority of "people with tons who use em all at the same time". Figures.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
But I know you just like to internet fight and troll, so. Figures.
You're assuming they do. Maybe it's because I'm older, but I don't think people who aren't really effected are generally so persnickety as to get upset about it for the sake of being upset. I think the folks who make a crusade out of every little change are a wolf-crying minority. Figures.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
All we have about this issue are assumptions, so naturally that's what the conversation is about. It's been happening for years on these forums. There's always someone claiming they're part of some outraged majority, and someone else pointing out that the forum crowd is a minority. Then someone starts talking about polls.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Confirmation bias is fun stuff.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Thing is, these are issues that could be worked around in the past.
A character's position in the roster is static, so once you learn where a character is located in your roster sorting, that's it, the problem's solved. From there you can set up a .txt file or excel sheet or whatever you want, and the problem of losing track of who you were farming tokens on or which character you needed for an event are on your character pages.
The previous login screen also places you on the page of the character you last logged in with, so if you had previously been playing an alt on your 3rd page, next time you quit and go back in, that's the page you're positioned on.
I will cede that one drawback is that some characters you play, which might be related in some play contexts, might end up arbitrarily far apart if they were made at different times. For example my main DPS', tank, and healer characters for cosmics were on my first page of characters. Meanwhile my CC character for cosmics was on page 9, so that's at least 9 clicks I'd need to go through to switch to that character, usually in times where being fast with character-switching is needed.
For people like me, there is no way for me to work around this automatic sorting. This is breaking a golden rule of UI design, and that's to keep things in the UI consistent. Especially in video games, where this becomes even more pertinent because of just how strongly-based the activity is in muscle memory.
This is also a huge deal because there's very much unspoken rules about how some of this works. On paper, having a list that automatically sorts itself seems attractive, true. Ask yourself, though, how many interfaces with extended lists sort their items based on which one you used most recently? The argument of this being consistent with STO's sorted login list pops up a lot, but then consider that the login screen for NW, another cryptic game, doesn't auto-sort. It also isn't something I've run into at all in my experience with other games either. The order of characters I have in games like Dark Souls? That's consistent between sessions. In fact, it's squarely based on creation date. The character that's listed first is the one I created first, and the one that's highlighted by default is the one I played last. Why does that sound so familiar?
Another rule of UI and UX: design the interface by which the user can minimize the number of actions to accomplish what they want. That's the basis of hotkeys. Now consider this scenario: A user swears they had something such as a DUC on one of their old alts. How long does it take to search for this item? On the old model, the user can sequentially look through all characters in their roster linearly, starting from the first page and going to the last. In this model, the sorting system keeps everything in order, so you know exactly who you last logged in with - it starts you at the first page on the character you were just logged in with. In fact you could access every single character if you just consistently kept choosing the last character in your roster... But then, how many clicks does it take for the user to reach the last character? And if you want to create a new character, or design a costume in the login-screen tailor (which has fewer performance issues than the in-game tailor), you have to go all the way through your character list to reach an empty slot. Always, because the login screen always starts you from page 1.
The thing I find most funny about the change is that it's doing it by a metric that was already both readily visible and easily read by the player: last log-in time is displayed in days, so it's really easy to understand that a character who last logged in 200 days ago has been offline longer than someone who last logged in 120 days ago. Meanwhile, creation date of a character is shown as a specific date: year, month, day, etc. That's an entire sentence you have to read, you can't immediately look at creation date and figure out if October 21 2012 is before or after September 15 2013. Tying back to how it was done before: it was still easy at a glance to tell which character in that list was most recently used: combination of them being the most recently highlighted, and having the lowest last-logged-in time. Even with my knowledge of my own characters I'd be hard-pressed to tell you which one was the 16th alt I created with this new sorting method.
This change isn't a big deal for players who have a reasonable number of characters, yes. Heck, it probably isn't that big of a deal for those who even might have an unreasonable amount (With the max character limit of 100, players who haven't exceeded that number are guaranteed to only have a max of 8 pages). Let me ask this though, was the previous login screen that unworkable for these players? This is a solution for users that, at least to my understanding, didn't have a major blocking issue to begin with - is that worth the devastation of a marginal user group such as myself?
But I know there isn't much I can do to change people's minds about it. If they like it, they like it, so I'm happy you appreciate the change.
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
And the login system most certainly did not drop me back on the page of the character I'd used last; it started on page 1 every time. (Then again, even if it had, that would have been less than useful during events; I'd have wound up looking at page 3 because I usually play my newest characters, and would have to slide back to page 1 for June, or try to remember which page the others were on for other events - Vincit Omnia used to be on page 2, but wound up on page 1 after I deleted some toons I'd stopped playing, for example.)
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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