Thirteen.
It takes thirteen clicks to collect the rewards of a completed project and contribute all three material types to get it going again. This must be repeated for each reputation for which a given character has enough materials, for each of a player's characters.
R&D and doff missions are the same way: accept the old, select the new, manually craft/purchase every required material, and get it going again.
Why do we have to do this?
I'll tell you why: because it is technically functional, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right?
Nope!
Adhering to a single interface paradigm (using the mouse to manipulate button, scale, and entry widgets, with occasional use of the keyboard if you want to replicate a precise number of items) means you have fewer things to create, maintain, and document, but holy bejeebus is it a pain to use sometimes.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/02
Did you read the linked comic? Go on - it's funny, it's relevant, and it'll only take about 30 seconds of your time.
STO's interface is quite reasonable most of the time, but it falls down hard for these repetitive, largely mechanical tasks. This sort of thing is why mankind
invented the computer. Humans are bad at repetitive, mechanical tasks, but computers are good at them. There's no reason - other than developer convenience - to make players handle this stuff. People can't complete real content while doing these chores, so they're not only wasting their own time, they're wasting server resources on something they don't even want to think about. Metrics? Players log in to play content - I doubt there are many people who log in only for rep projects and other housekeeping tasks. If you streamline these tasks with a more suitable UI, there will be no downside and you will make everyone's lives just that little bit better.
Completing the same rep projects every day? Set up a scheduled task and stop worrying about it. Do the same R&D research projects every day? Set up a scheduled task and stop worrying about it. Need five Industrial Energy Cells for that doff assignment? Just start the assignment and the EC will be automatically deducted from your available pool.
If the idea of scheduled tasks worries you and you want to retain some degree of "interactivity," create a single button that you can click to complete any available tasks that you've set up (rep project complete? Button lights up! Log in to several completed rep and R&D research projects? Button lights up! Click the button, monkey!). It would still be a very significant improvement.
As a programmer and regular CLI (command line interface) user, I have been thoroughly spoiled by the power to, say, bust out a quick
dir | findstr *.txt > text_files.txt
or
d = datetime.datetime.now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
for f in os.listdir('data/logs'):
os.rename(f, f[:-4] + d + '.txt')
and avoid some tedious typing or mouse movement.
There's no benefit to having a human manually do all this clicking.
I strongly urge you to consider a more humane interface.
Comments
That's where the interface really brings the hate.
No...
except it's cryptic
I hope when they do it, they will add macroing and modifying the UI freely. This would be huge thing.
So huge I would buy an LTS for Champions online...
The rhetorical slider manipulation. Just give me a freaking fill all button at the very least.
The fact that I have to do it day after day the same stupid thing is also unforgivable. It is more than a little annoying to have to check and recheck because of how repetitive it is. Did I fill the rep project today or was that yesterday? Well, apparently I didn't fill it yesterday afterall.
Lets not forget when I want to do say, projectile research, so I click the projectile category. Not beams. NOT BEAMS.
There are a litany of UI issues I can list that really should be changed because of how frustrating and badly designed they are.
That's actually pretty good!
Heck, that's bad enough but, purchasing some 240-300 freakin photon torpedo mki's that do not stack in inventory, for SB projects is another nightmare!
At least now, they added the contribute all to doffs, for fleet projects!!!
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!
It's a reporting bug!
The doff purchasing issue you describe is identical to the rep, doff assignment, and R&D project issues in everything but scale. Read this description of the process to refill a rep project and tell me it's okay:
This is for every single rep project you want to refill, for each character.
The process does not change in the slightest between characters or rep categories, or over time.
A few seconds? Sure, just 10-20 seconds... per project. On any given day, I may be refilling a dozen or more of these per day. Now it's a few minutes. Then add accepting and restarting doff assignments, cycling R&D projects, and replicating materials for doff assignments.
Tell me this is not a problem.
Tell me this is a positive contribution to your gameplay experience.
Tell me you don't feel silly putting money into buckets in a game involving holodecks and transporters and voice-activated interfaces, on a computer capable of billions of operations per second.
Do you think that, if the devs overhauled the UI to embrace a new hybrid paradigm of mouse clicks where necessary and automated commands where possible, you and your doff purchasing habits wouldn't benefit?
Everyone would win.
You mean an "intended feature"?
A fill all button for projects that just require numbers and not individual selections would be nice too.
3+ sliders I just slide to max without thinking before hitting finish are an annoyance and not fun game play.
yeah coulndn't help it...
I'll go now
The owl is an exploiter.
Don't forget food and drinks for the commissary that does stack but you have to buy individually.
And the fact that you need 150 * 3 projects to get from Tier IV to V, come on, more experience Projects would be nice. 69K Doffs for all that as well.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Just happened to me a few seconds ago.
*deep breath*
*suppressed scream*
Ow.
If there were a way to cancel a project (spending a huge pile of dilithium to finish it early doesn't count), it wouldn't be so egregious.
Original STO beta tester.
This happens to me very often. I must say at the beginning it was not so bad, but right now is annoying as hell.
So, problems that other people care about are just a joke and we're like spoiled little crybabies who should just shut up, but the problems that you care about are "critical" and deserve 100% of developer attention?
If I had a dollar for every time a sociopath outed itself on the Internet, I could quit my job.
Exactly, case in point!
I just used the torpedoes as an example, and your example also shows how inefficient the system is!
Praetor of the -RTS- Romulan Tal Shiar fleet!