IMO the new site is a cluttered mess, with the old site you knew what the latest news was now its in a giant U shape, a scrolling news reel that gives you 8 seconds to read anything and we knew when the server was up or down why not make it simple like before
CVN-65 U.S.S. Enterprise - A ship so badass it survived John McCain.
IMO the new site is a cluttered mess, with the old site you knew what the latest news was now its in a giant U shape, a scrolling news reel that gives you 8 seconds to read anything and we knew when the server was up or down why not make it simple like before
Because oversized side scrolling pictures, giantic buttons and useless facebook-like features are what's in right now. I've been seeing this trend going on for a while now - each and every website I know changes its design to some unreadable and unintuitive mess of a layout. I guess that has something to do with mobile devices.
Well, at least with pointless DRM launcher clients game developers are starting to realise how useless and unwanted they are, unless it's Steam or some big company BS like the Origin. Pitty PWE has been living under a rock for years and are forcing Arc on their players. But that's a different story.
is anyone on and listening? i could really use an answer to what happened to character transfer to tribble and redshirt? I a a gold member and had several characters on each,now over half are gone,and i have tried several times to log into sto web to transfer my char only to be redirected to arc site.Where after several hrs of searching I can not find any thing at all related to char transfer.Has this option been taken from us? I would really love to get a response if there is anyone on.thanks guys :)
is anyone on and listening? i could really use an answer to what happened to character transfer to tribble and redshirt? I a a gold member and had several characters on each,now over half are gone,and i have tried several times to log into sto web to transfer my char only to be redirected to arc site.Where after several hrs of searching I can not find any thing at all related to char transfer.Has this option been taken from us? I would really love to get a response if there is anyone on.thanks guys :)
Okay it's probably a foregone conclusion that tiles are here to stay, even though a lot of us hate them.. So any feedback we give will probably have to fit within that since the STO site design has to be mirrored for all of PWE's games. (Well the layout at least.) Here is my constructive advice.
So with those criteria in mind here is something I have been doing. It took less than 1 work day and it would be trivially easy for the web guys to emulate (I ENCOURAGE IT!) for not just the STO site, but for all PWE Arc sites.
*Removed rotating banner
*Removed persistent videos
*Changed background
*Tweaked a few CSS properties (mostly transparency, color, border strokes)
This will reduce my blood pressure and make the site more usable for me personally, but why stop there?
The following is what I believe an even better (from a visual, branding, and smooth UX experience stance) layout would be like, again with changes that would be incredibly easy for the web guys to implement in a few hours or less. I could do all of this in my browser with a Greasemonkey script if I were any good at javascript, but I'm not, so these images were made by building on top of my CSS changes above and adding to them by editing the page HTML with Firebug. (To be clear, the only photoshop in the next 6 images is the server status and search box.)
There's a bit of a negative space issue when doing it as 1 or 2 columns but with some image rescaling and using larger snippets from the full articles (at Cryptic's discretion) they could solve that fairly easily. /edit -edit#2-
Okay I did it. I dove in and took a shot at a Greasemonkey script. My amateur code is really pooptacular but I got everything as seen in my concept images except for the Server Status indicator and the search box.
No photoshop trickery involved. Just the Stylish theme I wrote before, combined with a new Greasemonkey script. /edit#2
*Duplicating the nav bar to the Product page reduces user confusion and reduces a degree of navigation digging that they have to do to find links.
*Moving the Product Page button link over to the left of the nav bar unifies it with the rest of the visual style and places it in closer proximity to the rest of the controls.
*Search is search. Search is good. Search is friend. We likey search.
*Duplicating the div box that contains the Product List from the Product page to all of the other pages does 2 things:
***1. It ensures that when you change from the Product page to any of the other pages, the navigation bar buttons and the beginning of content stay in the exact same x,y location (no visual popping, no confusion)
***2. It's a handy dandy place for a game logo and banner! Lots of people were complaining that "Star Trek Online" was a puny line of text on the other pages which was A) Demeaning to the brand, and Potentially confusing to brand new users that might think the page was for 'some game called Arc'
*Transparencies in CSS optional but sexy and help to combat the complaints about the site being a homogenized dull slab of gray.
*Backgrounds! You have giant wallpaper art Cryptic/PWE, use it!
*Server status. I don't need to explain this one.
*Banner list and persistent video block: To be frank, I didn't complain about the rotating banners on the previous STO site because they didn't eat up such a large chunk of my screen and they were visually distinct in their own frame/window. In this Arc site they are both large and their div/cell containers are basically the same bland style as all of the other news boxes which makes it more difficult to distinguish what the latest news is because they all blend together. Their functions are also duplicated on other pages. They irk me. I removed them.
I believe that these changes would be well received for all PWE/Arc sub-sites (just swap out the content for game-specific content).
TL;DR: Look at my shiny pictures.
Would you share your custom style for the site?
I also use Stylish for firefox and ARC really needs an overhaul.
Thanks in advance for any answer.
I still dream from time to time about using the Gateway to doff off-game in spare minutes as we were told
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Well, at least with pointless DRM launcher clients game developers are starting to realise how useless and unwanted they are, unless it's Steam or some big company BS like the Origin. Pitty PWE has been living under a rock for years and are forcing Arc on their players. But that's a different story.
Thanks, you would not believe how frustrating it is trying to find the character copy function.
Would you share your custom style for the site?
I also use Stylish for firefox and ARC really needs an overhaul.
Thanks in advance for any answer.