i Just Saw The New Doff Ui For The First Time And My First Impression Was Literally "wtf".
First Off It's Insanely Large, And It's Not User Friendly At All.
Second, They Added More "middle-men", Where It's A Longer Process To Actually Start A Doff Mission. On Holodeck, I Click Twice To Choose The Mission And Then Click A Few More Times In Choosing Doffs And Off They Go. But Not With The New System.
Third, The Doff Selection Is Incredibly Horrible! That "select Button" Is Misleading In That It Looks Like You Are Selecting A Doff When In Fact You Are Choosing The Doff Pre-chosen. And It Goes Into An Annoying Pop-up Window That Doesn't Show Any Information, So You Have No Idea If A Doff Is Better Or Worse Than The Pre-chosen.
Fourth, The Current Ui, Everything Was Right There. This New One Doesn't.
Imho Cryptic - leave Well Enough Alone! It's Not Broke, Do Not Go Messing With Things That Isn't Broke. Nobodys Been Complaining About Needing Improvements To The Doff Ui. Please, Just Leave It Alone!
if You Wanted To Improve The Ui, Then Add A Button That Let Us Buy Commodities For Missions Right There And Then, Than Us Floundering In The Replicator Or Running To A Vendor.
R&d Ui: Omg! Send It To The Pits Of Hades Where It Belongs! It's Atrocious!
Come On Guys, This Isn't Crafting At All. It's Doffing. When People Said They Want To Craft, They Want To Craft! Everquest, Age Of Camelot, Swg!
Season 9.5 has introduced substantial changes to the doff system. Here is my initial feedback.
1. You've drastically reduced the number of assignments available from exploration clusters. In each exploration cluster, assignments used to be available under "Current Map", "Personal", and "Department Heads". Now, each cluster offers only one tab with fewer assignments than available under "Current Map".
2. I can no longer filter by quality and traits when planning assignments.
3. Why do I need to see crafting skill when I'm planning a normal doff assignment?
4. Assignments under "Current Map" and "Personal" are no longer organized by commendation category. This makes it hard to look for assignments belonging to a specific category. The same applies to department heads who offer more than one category of assignment. The same also applies to the new exploration cluster tab.
5. Please color-code the chances of critical success, success, failure, and disaster.
6. The rewards and requirements often don't fit in their boxes.
What this guy said and I'll add these. I do not want doffs preselected. I am the captain, the bucks stops here, and I will choose who to send out. The current recommendations are fine, choosing for me isn't.
Also, I do not like the side scroll bar that comes up, even if you add in the doff traits instead of crafting level. I prefer the large window that comes up now.
Overall, how about instead of changing the new doff UI to match the crafting stuff, how about you change the crafting UI to match the old, existing doff UI. You have removed functions with this update, and I would like them back.
2. I can no longer filter by quality and traits when planning assignments.
I can also no longer filter by specialization when planning an assignment.
After looking at the new UI some more, I've come to the conclusion that it uses space very inefficiently, especially horizontal space. More important, it lacks many features of the old UI. For example, even before planning an assignment, I could see the specialization requirements as well as the traits which influence critical success, success, failure, and disaster. In the new UI, I have to hover my mouse over icons in the assignment list to read the specialization requirements, and the mouseover tooltips don't show the traits. Compare the screenshots below.
Your not being dramatic. It is the truth. A quick look at semi recent software releases will illustrate that quite well. In fact I would go so far as to say it should be considered 'common sense' among developers.
This is the first public release of 9.5. You guys are thinking doomed before anything is even finished. There are many bugs and misconceptions here. You cannot buy DOFFs on Tribble because you can't buy any in the C-Store. The UI is obviously bugged - it displays Crafting Skill instead of Success traits on the DOFF UI when Crafting Skill should only be restricted to the R&D UI.
You are being overdramatic - We have plenty of time before 9.5 releases. There are many bugs that need to be fixed. Be patient. I don't agree with some of these new changes, but only time will tell if this update is a disaster or if it's not. Patience, this is only one update.
At this point in the software development cycle the UI is almost entirely locked in. It wouldn't be on a public beta server if it wasn't. There's maybe a month left and they don't have a contingency plan because this was thought up weeks ago in a vacuum. At best we're going to get lipstick on a pig when this inevitably goes live. It's how everything on Tribble always works.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
At this point in the software development cycle the UI is almost entirely locked in. It wouldn't be on a public beta server if it wasn't. There's maybe a month left and they don't have a contingency plan because this was though up weeks ago in a vacuum. At best we're going to get lipstick on a pig when this inevitably goes live. It's how everything on Tribble always works.
I think most of the experianced STO players understand the concept of "if it's on tribble, it's coming to live". They never change anything once it hits tribble. Even if it causes CTD for everyone, nothing changes.
Haven't read all the posts so far, but it seems pretty much everyone agree to say the new UI is bad.
I honestly never saw anything wrong with the old one. And never read complain, at least on this forum. Why change something that's working fine ? And make it worse ? That's not like you have nothing else to do.
I tell you what, you remove the new DOFF UI, rollback to the old one, and we'll pretend nothing happened. I swear, I won't told anyone about it, just please, remove this abomination. And burn it with fire. Then, make sure no offspring survived, and no copy exist anywhere.
The first change to the doffing system was a serious wound, this is the final blow. You might remove it for S10.
For example, even before planning an assignment, I could see the specialization requirements as well as the traits which influence critical success, success, failure, and disaster. In the new UI, I have to hover my mouse over icons in the assignment list to read the specialization requirements, and the mouseover tooltips don't show the traits.
I decided to edit some screenshots to make my points more explicit.
I have to basically echo all those who've posted in this thread so far, there's nothing I can find good about the new DOff UI except that it kind of looks prettier, it just has absolutely none of the functionality the old DOff UI had that makes it actually *work*.
It looks like typical huge-and-clunky-yet-pretty-and-mostly-non-functional tablet UI. I'd take the old DOff UI over this any day.
I have a hard time thinking of any specific feedback for this other than PLEASE...look at how the old DOff UI works...how it's laid out...the information it gives to players on first glance, the number of times we have to click through things, the details given, the overall ease of use. I want it to be organized, listed out under tactical, engineering, exporation, etc., to not have such huge, useless-looking buttons that takes forever to scroll through.
It shouldn't be MORE difficult and less informative just to make it look prettier.
....which is mostly working quite well. A few minor changes is all it needs, not a complete overhaul. This is akin to changing the engine on a car when all you need is to change the oil filter.
Well, what it sounds like to me, if you want to use a car analogy, is they've taken out the steering wheel, shifter, gas/brake pedals, seats, windshield and even the tires and replaced them with sparkly-rainbow-unicorn $#!+ molded to approximate the shape of the parts it is replacing.
Who needs an engine if you can't see where you are going, can't change the direction you are going, and have no traction to make it happen? You can't even sit down in the thing w/out smelling like unicorn scat.
"Logic is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell BAD." - Spock
ok.. looking it over and i see a few things that could use some adjustment.
hows this
when crafting a component the reward for said component gives 1xp for that school
when making a useable item you get 10.
seems like the doff has no way to modify this which is at its core a flaw.
dofs give a reward multiplier on normal doff missions.. this will be considered a normal doff mission, so the multiplier should cross over..
that being said i believe that the resulting item should modify the reward as well just like a normal mission. here is my math and thinking
any crafting mission gives 10 xp.. any one of them..
white doff x1 - already in game
green doff x5 - already in game
blue doff x15 - already in game
purple doff x30 - already in game
resulting item quality== ( would be added to game )
white +0
green +5
blue +15
purple +30
so when a reward is calculated yu have
[ ( base reward of 10xp) + ( resulting item level 'X' ) ] x ( Doff Quality )
making a blue beam array with a blue quality doff would get you 375XP
[( 10xp) + ( 15 for blue quality item ) ] x( 15 for blue quality doff )
making a purple beam array with a purple doff would net 1200 crafting xp
[( 10xp base reward ) + ( 30 for purple quality item )] x ( 30 for purple doff )
.. again.. rewarding the doffer here and making the doff system valuable
so my math would make the hard core doffer a great crafter.. well.. thats where the success chances come into play.. DEV math will prevail here and the rarity % will be against people in the most part.. probably gona see alot of green ab blue items
as it sits right now going from level 0 - to level 1 in a crafting school is 30xp
going from level 1 to level 2 is 260 xp
and going to level 3 is 10,000 XP from level 2..
and thats PER CRAFTING SCHOOL
this is not nice.
im suggesting that like the level requirements be the same from level to level, 1650 xp as a hat tip to the old crafting system. This way we do not forget where our crafting came from as it were..
Also ..
the materials exchange needs some love here..
the older mats are seperated into
artifacts - alien artifact, unknown allow, encoded data ( the sunflower icon )
technology - mineral sample, biological sample, plasma sample ( the triangle icon )
energy samples - radiation sample, antimatter sample, tetryon particle ( the atomic icon )
yet when you convert them you get a random item that could be a metal, crystal, or a gas
can we get that system seperated some..
if i convert artifacts then i want to KNOW that i will get metals
if i convert technology then i want to get back crystals
and energy samples should return gasses
Final Thought..
since this isn't a Doff Away mission then it should not be tied to the normal assignments for doff away missions.. the UI is ok afaik.. its gona change a few times anyway before its live.. there are only so many spaces available for crafting anyway.. then please please please do not time gate them directly into the doff away mission assignment slot amounts..
There are at the moment a total of 5 crafting slots available. give them to use as a bonus in the crafting system since the doffs that are doing the crafting are not availble for away mission anyway.. this change would go a long way towards fighting back the angry mobs of ui haters and bring peace and a zen like quality to crafting. While im at it.. can we also get 20 extra crating doff slots for officers that will be for crafting and not for normal away mission assignments..
so in total each player would recieve + 15 doff roster spaces total to accomodate crafting specific use as per the dev blog on what school needs which officer and 5 unique assignment slots that are unlocked as crafting levels increase starting with the original 1 slot and ending at 5 total.
Oh my, how did you take something that was so simple and straight forward and break it so badly? It would be really interesting to know what the objective was in making these changes so we can let you know if you are meeting this objective?
Things that need improving/fixing (assuming this has to be changed so radically)
Not being able to filter doffs based on quality and/or specialisation is a huge step backwards and makes finding the right doff for the mission very difficult, especially when it can be any duty officer.
The planning screen only shows the traits that impact critical and disaster outcomes, the success and failure need adding back in
The recommended officers, as in the current version, frequently are not the ones that deliver the best results. For example if I run Engage in Riot control exercises I get 28% crit success and 72% success running it with 3 Uras Kalans, (2 crit success criteria and 1 success criteria) but with 2 uras kalan and the emergency security hologram (2 crit success no success criteria) I increase the cirt change to 30% and 70% success. Can the AI not work out the best combo instead of just picking those that have the success criteria first even if they deliver an inferior result? This is the same when it recommends common and uncommon doffs when VR offer much higher crit success change
The sizing of the missions on the missions select tab is way to big meaning a lot of scrolling up and down to find missions. Even with the size there is only room for 4 rewards and 3 requires icons in the boxes provided, many missions have a lot more rewards and a lot more requirements. Not sure why the icons now need to be so big. Plus the icons for doffs required are very vague, I need 3 science, ok what type? I either have to try hovering over the icon to see if it gives any additional details or go into the plan mission. Also I notice quiet often the symbol does not match the type required when I hover over it and it does give additional info.
Icons for rewards and descriptions don't match up, Scan data stream for exobiological data tells me I receive a special duty officer for completion. Would have expected to get some data samples in return.
Despite the size there is no risk rating on the mission select screen, and on the mission planning screen the rating is quiet small. Colour coding is nice and will help but I would make this bigger.
The bonus cxp and rewards awarded for a critical success no longer appears on the mission planning screen. I think these really should be there somewhere as they can influence the selection of a mission.
Things that are an improvement
I am so glad that if you need to replicate items this does not close down the doff mission if it is a department head mission, this was such a pain before.
And some possible additional changes
I would love the ability added to be able to save doff teams for specific missions, this would be a great addition as we all run the same missions day in day out and would save a lot of searching and sorting to fill them.
If the big boxes are going to stay can it be set up to double click on the box to open planning the mission instead of only being able to click on the plan button?
Negative feedback here. It's horrid, and you guys need to take whatever phone app designer or programmer off of the UI design.
However, if the intended goal is to have players up your concurrency by spending more time poking around an interface that seems to have taken a critical hit in usability...mission accomplished.
I thought the last DOff UI upgrade was unnecessary and added too much buffering/padding between tasks, but this is an order of magnitude worse. Not only is there a ridiculous amount of space wasted, but somehow Cryptic actually managed to bury/hide useful information.
I've had a play on Tribble, and I must echo the sentiments that all above have posted - and the fact that every post is critical should tell you something.
The new system removes information and hides it below mouseovers or does away with it entirely, which I believe is a drastic and fundamental mistake.
Have there been calls to simplify the Duty Officer interface? A campaign decrying a present difficulty or obfuscation? Even a swell of expressions of admiration for a simpler system utilised in other games? If not, then I am at a loss as to where these new design ideas have come from.
Streamlining a process means making it so that you achieve the desired results (in this case the display of information required to make a choice on what mission to take and who to send) faster. This new interface does the direct opposite of that.
Missions are sorted alphabetically for absolutely no reason, rather than logically sorted via category as they are at present. Requirements for missions are are obfuscated, and so scanning a list becomes an impossibility, replaced by a chore of mouseover and wait for each little icon. Sub-optimal officers are not only suggested but put in place, and the player is "punished" for deciding to make a different choice by the removal of filtering.
Every single step is a mis-step. I can not believe that this has even been given approval to make it to the test servers. It's a shocking design, inspired by smartphone design ethics but failing to take any of the consequences into account.
It genuinely feels as if the design process went like this.
And, while this will no doubt seem like angry rhetoric, last night I was poised with my credit card to buy a lifetime sub to STO. A friend showed me a video of the craft system and I put the card down. Today I've played with this new DOff system, and I am sad to say that I have put the card firmly away.
The only way you can simplify the current doff system is to have all missions in 1 window for scrolling and collapsible categories, the doff system currently is fine and very easy to manage and understand.
I got something for you cryptic, if you want to make this game better have filters for the exchange.
Bridge Officers - Sort by ability
Duty Officers - Sort by trait/s
I don't generally contribute to these discussions, but after my own testing run, I wanted to add my comments to the list, considering how much I like the doff system.
On the whole, I agree with most of the posters above that the new Doff Interface (and I'm disregarding the new R&D tab here) is, IMHO, in no way an improvement to the current one. I understand that we're looking at a WIP interface, but still... Some thoughts on current status:
Available assignments are not sorted into categories
Only a few available assignments visible
No option to filter doffs when selecting them for an assignment
Doff selection pop-out menu (Select from Plan menu) does not show traits, making proper selection problematic
Icons in reward and requirement boxes too big for box's size in available assignments menu (note: not using widescreen monitor)
Success rating bar chart is unneccesary, as percentages are also listed. I also prefer the old-style pie chart.
It does appear that the suggested doffs for an assignment are more geared towards higher crit chance, if so, this is welcome.
I must admit that the whole revamp of this menu is lost on me. It was fine the way it was, and as the old addage goes: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Particularly the new available assignments listing is far less functional than the old version, as it takes much more scrolling to find assignments. On the whole, the new interface seems to be designed around the use of bigger icons, but in doing so the amount of information actually on the page has been severely reduced, as evidenced by the number of separate menus that you have to go through. This is very unfortunate.
As far as the R&D tab goes, I'm still figuring out how it works. More on that later.
windows 8 was designed to be a mobile operating system first of all, desktop support was added on later.
the fact that microsoft didn't replace the horrible design with the classic win7 one was probably caused by the same kind of backwards thinking that destroys franchises and companies by letting an amateur (executives and share holders) make decisions and do the work of a professional and failing spectacularly.
that or something like:
"customers may hate it, but they will still use it because we said so and it's their duty to do what we say. what else will they do, switch to linux or apple? ha ha ha, good joke steve."
also, one little hope i have is that the current doff list is as hated as it is because it was a last minute change. meaning, the system was designed for r&d, and then quickly ported over to doff without adding any of the unique things doffing has, that r&d doesn't because of crafting revamp being a much higher priority and no time to tinker with doff menus too much.
maybe in one of the next upgrades they'll take all the r&d placeholders out and code in some actual doff stuff.
then again, maybe not. who knows.
Now clowns, that's another story. They scare the crap out of me.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
windows 8 was designed to be a mobile operating system first of all, desktop support was added on later.
Just like this interface was designed NW crafting system first which is an extremely basic system only caring about the rarity of the duty officer being used. And it is being ported over to cover the STO doff system which has several more layers of complexity without added functionality.
I have covered this also with my feedback on the crafting but there one point thats not there.
"If it not broken, dont fix it"
What you have now works really well. When i got my friends into playing the game THIS was a selling point to them. They loved it (and once i helped them on a few things) they had a blast. Where they trekkers? No. but they loved the game play design.
Pie charts are awesome and are easy to understand.
Keep the Pie! Lose the Why! (Why as in are we even missing with this).
I feel that Rep would still be better as its already a kinda crafting system with the items you make there. I get you want to make it all new and awesome but its already REALLY GOOD. If you must put Duty officers with this new system can you at least make it work along the lines of whats there now?
This is...pretty terrible. I really hope there's a lot left to be done with this new interface before it goes live. It's providing much less information and organization than the old UI. I hate how my doffs are now sorted alphabetically rather than by specialization. I hate how the projects are filled in with my very rare doffs by default. The icons are all oversized and waste way too much space on screen, just like the new crafting UI. This UI is providing no additional information over the current one -- I was confused as to why I couldn't start a project, only to realize it was because I had 20 assignments going (queued them up right before copying my character), but the UI just grayed out the button to start the project... There's no improvement here, just change.
I really dislike this as it currently stands and would rather have the old UI back over this.
The new Doff UI is utterly terrible. Even if it's incomplete (which it likely is) what we can see now is the "core" or "foundation" of what is to come, and if you build a house on a shoddy foundation, you're going to have a shoddy house. I also have an analogy about any future improvements to the Tribble UI and lipstick on pigs.
Scrap it and go back to the current one on Holodeck. Cryptic should be asking us what improvements can be made to the Holodeck UI and start from there. The Holodeck UI is a sturdy foundation to build a good house upon. I can guarantee that improving the Holodeck UI will be a far more productive task than trying to run with what is on Tribble right now which was developed in a vacuum.
I would gladly come up with a list of small tweaks and improvements that can be made to improve the Holodeck UI (I'll even do paintovers and photoshop mockups like I did for your godawful Arc website [see signature]), but I just cannot do this with the Tribble UI. There is literally nothing better about it. It's unworkable. All of my feedback would be "Make it more like the Holodeck UI." I can't help with this. You shouldn't have broken was didn't need fixing.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
Season 9.5 has introduced substantial changes to the doff system. Here is my initial feedback.
1. You've drastically reduced the number of assignments available from exploration clusters. In each exploration cluster, assignments used to be available under "Current Map", "Personal", and "Department Heads". Now, each cluster offers only one tab with fewer assignments than available under "Current Map".
2. I can no longer filter by quality, traits, or specialization when an planning assignment.
3. Why do I need to see crafting skill when I'm planning a normal doff assignment?
4. Assignments under "Current Map" and "Personal" are no longer organized by commendation category. This makes it hard to look for assignments belonging to a specific category. The same applies to department heads who offer more than one category of assignment. The same also applies to the new exploration cluster tab.
5. Please color-code the chances of critical success, success, failure, and disaster.
6. The rewards and requirements often don't fit in their boxes.
8. In the old UI, even before planning an assignment, I could see the specialization requirements as well as the traits which influence critical success, success, failure, and disaster. In the new UI, I have to hover my mouse over icons in the assignment list to read the specialization requirements, and the mouseover tooltips don't show the traits.
Edit: Updated with additional points from my later posts.
I just want to re-echo every sentiment here, inj fact i couldn't even see the specialization requirement part, just couldn't find it.
Also the inability to filter and the utterly broken recommendation system, (it uses quality and crit/success traits over specialization, even though specialization affects success far more, (well until you finish zero'ing the failure/disaster chance, then it becomes a negative)). The new tab layout of 4 main tabs is great overall IMHO, but that actually display of assignments, both listing and planning is 100% inferior in every way because the most basic functions are either non-existent or half hidden in the new layout.
This is proof the original team that made the duty officer system is nowhere to be found. The old system worked preaty good. It had its flaws but still. Why didn't cryptic just fix what was needed to incorperate crafting into the mix (TBH wasn't much). I tell you why, MONEY. Heres a perfect example. They again forfited gameplay in exchange to try and make a UI more dil friendly.
IF this game doesn't get some love soon its katy bare the doors on good old sto. The game needs a period of about 1 year of nothing but hardcore development that hasn't got the almighty dollor as top priority. The game I believe would do better. It makes enough money as it is. Now the game needs improve, the pocket has been deepened enough. The devs know this. You can see the evidence in thier work. I bet they don't get 2 hours of sleep a night, tossing and turning, seeing zen coins fly by their head and gravevards full of starships. Focus on perfecting the game first and the money will come. I bet you guys can already see the numbers getting near the red. IF there not they should be because you can't force feed garbage down peoples throats to long before its GAME OVER.
Typical Craptic decision-making. Of all the things you choose to improve, you pick the one single solitary thing in this game that absolutely does not need any improvements at all. The current Holodeck doffing interface is absolutely fine. Easy to use and understand, and I can pick whatever doffs for a mission I want.
Revert the changes back to their original state, please.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
I completely agree. The only thing I'd change about the current set up is putting an indicator on the main DOFF screen to let us know if a mission is part of a mission chain. Otherwise, it works fine the way it is.
You are aware that that is in the Holodeck version right? There is a (1/7) at the end of the names for the projects for the colonization chain.
I can't check how it is on my copied characters on tribble since they maxxed those chains. Guess I'll see what I can do to check it..
EDIT: Looks like that info is in the new interface. End of the name has the (1/4) format.
Found another annoyance though. Was going to fly over to the cluster in Beta Ursae and found that I had to do it manually. The removable of the cluster zone entrance means there is nothing for me to click on to autofly there.
Oh there it is.. its been changed into a little glowie spot like was done to the clusters when LoR was added. Flying over to Rolor and bringing it up gave me a list of 2 projects, one of which happened to be the start of the chain.
The new interface is very big and clunky, some things take up more than double the space. We've gone from being able to read the officer requirements in a list, to lots of icons, that are not very descriptive.
There's assignments with a longer list of icons for the requirements, but the icons are spaced in such as way as we can't see them.
Assignable officers on the left with their traits, with slots to fill and the requirements was more efficient. Adding the additional interacts made selecting officers inneficient. I now have to bring up a window and confirm from a list of bigger slots which means I see fewer officers at one time.
It also doesn't list their traits when selecting the officers for assignemnts, but it lists their crafting bonus. THat's helpful when crafting, but not when sending them on a diplomatic mission.
Mission in the Current Sector and Personal tabs used to be grouped by category, they're not harder to find. Would it be useful to have the option to sort by name or category?
The larger icons look cool, although looking cool doesn't mean much if it's hard to use.
Oh there it is.. its been changed into a little glowie spot like was done to the clusters when LoR was added. Flying over to Rolor and bringing it up gave me a list of 2 projects, one of which happened to be the start of the chain.
Is that ******* it, 2 missions.
PS
I cannot believe how broken the quoting system is in this forum, its beyond bad. Have to try a dozen times to get the post im trying to quote show up as it keeps linking different posts.
Comments
Qft.......
What this guy said and I'll add these. I do not want doffs preselected. I am the captain, the bucks stops here, and I will choose who to send out. The current recommendations are fine, choosing for me isn't.
Also, I do not like the side scroll bar that comes up, even if you add in the doff traits instead of crafting level. I prefer the large window that comes up now.
Overall, how about instead of changing the new doff UI to match the crafting stuff, how about you change the crafting UI to match the old, existing doff UI. You have removed functions with this update, and I would like them back.
Nouveau riche LTS member
I can also no longer filter by specialization when planning an assignment.
After looking at the new UI some more, I've come to the conclusion that it uses space very inefficiently, especially horizontal space. More important, it lacks many features of the old UI. For example, even before planning an assignment, I could see the specialization requirements as well as the traits which influence critical success, success, failure, and disaster. In the new UI, I have to hover my mouse over icons in the assignment list to read the specialization requirements, and the mouseover tooltips don't show the traits. Compare the screenshots below.
Old UI
http://i.imgur.com/IxrRUiw.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/WWvAUjn.jpg
New UI
http://i.imgur.com/kIfm0ZQ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/axO3MJU.jpg
By the way, I can assign the same doff to two different slots. This must be a bug. And the "Clear Slot" button is always grayed out.
Windows 8.
At this point in the software development cycle the UI is almost entirely locked in. It wouldn't be on a public beta server if it wasn't. There's maybe a month left and they don't have a contingency plan because this was thought up weeks ago in a vacuum. At best we're going to get lipstick on a pig when this inevitably goes live. It's how everything on Tribble always works.
Joined January 2009
I think most of the experianced STO players understand the concept of "if it's on tribble, it's coming to live". They never change anything once it hits tribble. Even if it causes CTD for everyone, nothing changes.
I honestly never saw anything wrong with the old one. And never read complain, at least on this forum. Why change something that's working fine ? And make it worse ? That's not like you have nothing else to do.
I tell you what, you remove the new DOFF UI, rollback to the old one, and we'll pretend nothing happened. I swear, I won't told anyone about it, just please, remove this abomination. And burn it with fire. Then, make sure no offspring survived, and no copy exist anywhere.
The first change to the doffing system was a serious wound, this is the final blow. You might remove it for S10.
I decided to edit some screenshots to make my points more explicit.
http://i.imgur.com/xPlPMrw.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/nOvoVwu.jpg
I don't know why the specialization requirement is hidden away in the slot's bottom right corner instead of being displayed prominently.
I have to basically echo all those who've posted in this thread so far, there's nothing I can find good about the new DOff UI except that it kind of looks prettier, it just has absolutely none of the functionality the old DOff UI had that makes it actually *work*.
It looks like typical huge-and-clunky-yet-pretty-and-mostly-non-functional tablet UI. I'd take the old DOff UI over this any day.
I have a hard time thinking of any specific feedback for this other than PLEASE...look at how the old DOff UI works...how it's laid out...the information it gives to players on first glance, the number of times we have to click through things, the details given, the overall ease of use. I want it to be organized, listed out under tactical, engineering, exporation, etc., to not have such huge, useless-looking buttons that takes forever to scroll through.
It shouldn't be MORE difficult and less informative just to make it look prettier.
Well, what it sounds like to me, if you want to use a car analogy, is they've taken out the steering wheel, shifter, gas/brake pedals, seats, windshield and even the tires and replaced them with sparkly-rainbow-unicorn $#!+ molded to approximate the shape of the parts it is replacing.
Who needs an engine if you can't see where you are going, can't change the direction you are going, and have no traction to make it happen? You can't even sit down in the thing w/out smelling like unicorn scat.
hows this
when crafting a component the reward for said component gives 1xp for that school
when making a useable item you get 10.
seems like the doff has no way to modify this which is at its core a flaw.
dofs give a reward multiplier on normal doff missions.. this will be considered a normal doff mission, so the multiplier should cross over..
that being said i believe that the resulting item should modify the reward as well just like a normal mission. here is my math and thinking
any crafting mission gives 10 xp.. any one of them..
white doff x1 - already in game
green doff x5 - already in game
blue doff x15 - already in game
purple doff x30 - already in game
resulting item quality== ( would be added to game )
white +0
green +5
blue +15
purple +30
so when a reward is calculated yu have
[ ( base reward of 10xp) + ( resulting item level 'X' ) ] x ( Doff Quality )
making a blue beam array with a blue quality doff would get you 375XP
[( 10xp) + ( 15 for blue quality item ) ] x( 15 for blue quality doff )
making a purple beam array with a purple doff would net 1200 crafting xp
[( 10xp base reward ) + ( 30 for purple quality item )] x ( 30 for purple doff )
.. again.. rewarding the doffer here and making the doff system valuable
so my math would make the hard core doffer a great crafter.. well.. thats where the success chances come into play.. DEV math will prevail here and the rarity % will be against people in the most part.. probably gona see alot of green ab blue items
as it sits right now going from level 0 - to level 1 in a crafting school is 30xp
going from level 1 to level 2 is 260 xp
and going to level 3 is 10,000 XP from level 2..
and thats PER CRAFTING SCHOOL
this is not nice.
im suggesting that like the level requirements be the same from level to level, 1650 xp as a hat tip to the old crafting system. This way we do not forget where our crafting came from as it were..
Also ..
the materials exchange needs some love here..
the older mats are seperated into
artifacts - alien artifact, unknown allow, encoded data ( the sunflower icon )
technology - mineral sample, biological sample, plasma sample ( the triangle icon )
energy samples - radiation sample, antimatter sample, tetryon particle ( the atomic icon )
yet when you convert them you get a random item that could be a metal, crystal, or a gas
can we get that system seperated some..
if i convert artifacts then i want to KNOW that i will get metals
if i convert technology then i want to get back crystals
and energy samples should return gasses
Final Thought..
since this isn't a Doff Away mission then it should not be tied to the normal assignments for doff away missions.. the UI is ok afaik.. its gona change a few times anyway before its live.. there are only so many spaces available for crafting anyway.. then please please please do not time gate them directly into the doff away mission assignment slot amounts..
There are at the moment a total of 5 crafting slots available. give them to use as a bonus in the crafting system since the doffs that are doing the crafting are not availble for away mission anyway.. this change would go a long way towards fighting back the angry mobs of ui haters and bring peace and a zen like quality to crafting. While im at it.. can we also get 20 extra crating doff slots for officers that will be for crafting and not for normal away mission assignments..
so in total each player would recieve + 15 doff roster spaces total to accomodate crafting specific use as per the dev blog on what school needs which officer and 5 unique assignment slots that are unlocked as crafting levels increase starting with the original 1 slot and ending at 5 total.
Things that need improving/fixing (assuming this has to be changed so radically)
Not being able to filter doffs based on quality and/or specialisation is a huge step backwards and makes finding the right doff for the mission very difficult, especially when it can be any duty officer.
The planning screen only shows the traits that impact critical and disaster outcomes, the success and failure need adding back in
The recommended officers, as in the current version, frequently are not the ones that deliver the best results. For example if I run Engage in Riot control exercises I get 28% crit success and 72% success running it with 3 Uras Kalans, (2 crit success criteria and 1 success criteria) but with 2 uras kalan and the emergency security hologram (2 crit success no success criteria) I increase the cirt change to 30% and 70% success. Can the AI not work out the best combo instead of just picking those that have the success criteria first even if they deliver an inferior result? This is the same when it recommends common and uncommon doffs when VR offer much higher crit success change
The sizing of the missions on the missions select tab is way to big meaning a lot of scrolling up and down to find missions. Even with the size there is only room for 4 rewards and 3 requires icons in the boxes provided, many missions have a lot more rewards and a lot more requirements. Not sure why the icons now need to be so big. Plus the icons for doffs required are very vague, I need 3 science, ok what type? I either have to try hovering over the icon to see if it gives any additional details or go into the plan mission. Also I notice quiet often the symbol does not match the type required when I hover over it and it does give additional info.
Icons for rewards and descriptions don't match up, Scan data stream for exobiological data tells me I receive a special duty officer for completion. Would have expected to get some data samples in return.
Despite the size there is no risk rating on the mission select screen, and on the mission planning screen the rating is quiet small. Colour coding is nice and will help but I would make this bigger.
The bonus cxp and rewards awarded for a critical success no longer appears on the mission planning screen. I think these really should be there somewhere as they can influence the selection of a mission.
Things that are an improvement
I am so glad that if you need to replicate items this does not close down the doff mission if it is a department head mission, this was such a pain before.
And some possible additional changes
I would love the ability added to be able to save doff teams for specific missions, this would be a great addition as we all run the same missions day in day out and would save a lot of searching and sorting to fill them.
If the big boxes are going to stay can it be set up to double click on the box to open planning the mission instead of only being able to click on the plan button?
However, if the intended goal is to have players up your concurrency by spending more time poking around an interface that seems to have taken a critical hit in usability...mission accomplished.
I thought the last DOff UI upgrade was unnecessary and added too much buffering/padding between tasks, but this is an order of magnitude worse. Not only is there a ridiculous amount of space wasted, but somehow Cryptic actually managed to bury/hide useful information.
The new system removes information and hides it below mouseovers or does away with it entirely, which I believe is a drastic and fundamental mistake.
Have there been calls to simplify the Duty Officer interface? A campaign decrying a present difficulty or obfuscation? Even a swell of expressions of admiration for a simpler system utilised in other games? If not, then I am at a loss as to where these new design ideas have come from.
Streamlining a process means making it so that you achieve the desired results (in this case the display of information required to make a choice on what mission to take and who to send) faster. This new interface does the direct opposite of that.
Missions are sorted alphabetically for absolutely no reason, rather than logically sorted via category as they are at present. Requirements for missions are are obfuscated, and so scanning a list becomes an impossibility, replaced by a chore of mouseover and wait for each little icon. Sub-optimal officers are not only suggested but put in place, and the player is "punished" for deciding to make a different choice by the removal of filtering.
Every single step is a mis-step. I can not believe that this has even been given approval to make it to the test servers. It's a shocking design, inspired by smartphone design ethics but failing to take any of the consequences into account.
It genuinely feels as if the design process went like this.
And, while this will no doubt seem like angry rhetoric, last night I was poised with my credit card to buy a lifetime sub to STO. A friend showed me a video of the craft system and I put the card down. Today I've played with this new DOff system, and I am sad to say that I have put the card firmly away.
I got something for you cryptic, if you want to make this game better have filters for the exchange.
Bridge Officers - Sort by ability
Duty Officers - Sort by trait/s
On the whole, I agree with most of the posters above that the new Doff Interface (and I'm disregarding the new R&D tab here) is, IMHO, in no way an improvement to the current one. I understand that we're looking at a WIP interface, but still... Some thoughts on current status:
I must admit that the whole revamp of this menu is lost on me. It was fine the way it was, and as the old addage goes: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Particularly the new available assignments listing is far less functional than the old version, as it takes much more scrolling to find assignments. On the whole, the new interface seems to be designed around the use of bigger icons, but in doing so the amount of information actually on the page has been severely reduced, as evidenced by the number of separate menus that you have to go through. This is very unfortunate.
As far as the R&D tab goes, I'm still figuring out how it works. More on that later.
Vice Admiral Mathrias | U.S.S. Utrecht (Blockade Runner Retrofit)
Vide Admiral Kyurin | U.S.S. Cairhien (Fleet Dreadnought Cruiser)
Vice Admiral Kiarl Leftrin | U.S.S. Aegir (Fleet Recon Science Vessel)
--= Starfleet Strategic Command =--
the fact that microsoft didn't replace the horrible design with the classic win7 one was probably caused by the same kind of backwards thinking that destroys franchises and companies by letting an amateur (executives and share holders) make decisions and do the work of a professional and failing spectacularly.
that or something like:
"customers may hate it, but they will still use it because we said so and it's their duty to do what we say. what else will they do, switch to linux or apple? ha ha ha, good joke steve."
also, one little hope i have is that the current doff list is as hated as it is because it was a last minute change. meaning, the system was designed for r&d, and then quickly ported over to doff without adding any of the unique things doffing has, that r&d doesn't because of crafting revamp being a much higher priority and no time to tinker with doff menus too much.
maybe in one of the next upgrades they'll take all the r&d placeholders out and code in some actual doff stuff.
then again, maybe not. who knows.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
Just like this interface was designed NW crafting system first which is an extremely basic system only caring about the rarity of the duty officer being used. And it is being ported over to cover the STO doff system which has several more layers of complexity without added functionality.
"If it not broken, dont fix it"
What you have now works really well. When i got my friends into playing the game THIS was a selling point to them. They loved it (and once i helped them on a few things) they had a blast. Where they trekkers? No. but they loved the game play design.
Pie charts are awesome and are easy to understand.
Keep the Pie! Lose the Why! (Why as in are we even missing with this).
I feel that Rep would still be better as its already a kinda crafting system with the items you make there. I get you want to make it all new and awesome but its already REALLY GOOD. If you must put Duty officers with this new system can you at least make it work along the lines of whats there now?
I really dislike this as it currently stands and would rather have the old UI back over this.
I would gladly come up with a list of small tweaks and improvements that can be made to improve the Holodeck UI (I'll even do paintovers and photoshop mockups like I did for your godawful Arc website [see signature]), but I just cannot do this with the Tribble UI. There is literally nothing better about it. It's unworkable. All of my feedback would be "Make it more like the Holodeck UI." I can't help with this. You shouldn't have broken was didn't need fixing.
Joined January 2009
I just want to re-echo every sentiment here, inj fact i couldn't even see the specialization requirement part, just couldn't find it.
Also the inability to filter and the utterly broken recommendation system, (it uses quality and crit/success traits over specialization, even though specialization affects success far more, (well until you finish zero'ing the failure/disaster chance, then it becomes a negative)). The new tab layout of 4 main tabs is great overall IMHO, but that actually display of assignments, both listing and planning is 100% inferior in every way because the most basic functions are either non-existent or half hidden in the new layout.
IF this game doesn't get some love soon its katy bare the doors on good old sto. The game needs a period of about 1 year of nothing but hardcore development that hasn't got the almighty dollor as top priority. The game I believe would do better. It makes enough money as it is. Now the game needs improve, the pocket has been deepened enough. The devs know this. You can see the evidence in thier work. I bet they don't get 2 hours of sleep a night, tossing and turning, seeing zen coins fly by their head and gravevards full of starships. Focus on perfecting the game first and the money will come. I bet you guys can already see the numbers getting near the red. IF there not they should be because you can't force feed garbage down peoples throats to long before its GAME OVER.
Revert the changes back to their original state, please.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
You are aware that that is in the Holodeck version right? There is a (1/7) at the end of the names for the projects for the colonization chain.
I can't check how it is on my copied characters on tribble since they maxxed those chains. Guess I'll see what I can do to check it..
EDIT: Looks like that info is in the new interface. End of the name has the (1/4) format.
Found another annoyance though. Was going to fly over to the cluster in Beta Ursae and found that I had to do it manually. The removable of the cluster zone entrance means there is nothing for me to click on to autofly there.
Oh there it is.. its been changed into a little glowie spot like was done to the clusters when LoR was added. Flying over to Rolor and bringing it up gave me a list of 2 projects, one of which happened to be the start of the chain.
My god that UI is awful. Seriously, Cryptic, leave it alone.
There's assignments with a longer list of icons for the requirements, but the icons are spaced in such as way as we can't see them.
Assignable officers on the left with their traits, with slots to fill and the requirements was more efficient. Adding the additional interacts made selecting officers inneficient. I now have to bring up a window and confirm from a list of bigger slots which means I see fewer officers at one time.
It also doesn't list their traits when selecting the officers for assignemnts, but it lists their crafting bonus. THat's helpful when crafting, but not when sending them on a diplomatic mission.
Mission in the Current Sector and Personal tabs used to be grouped by category, they're not harder to find. Would it be useful to have the option to sort by name or category?
The larger icons look cool, although looking cool doesn't mean much if it's hard to use.
Is that ******* it, 2 missions.
PS
I cannot believe how broken the quoting system is in this forum, its beyond bad. Have to try a dozen times to get the post im trying to quote show up as it keeps linking different posts.
Give us back our empty cluster map.