The UI needs a
lot of QoL love. My biggest irritant with STO (bugs aside, although several are listed below) has always been with the UI and with general QoL issues caused by unnecessary clicking and arbitrary design choices.
- The Exchange could really benefit from a copy/paste of the Doff window's filtering scheme for searching for Doffs by traits/species/etc and Boffs could use that kind of search filtering as well.
- While we're at it, the quality search filter should be converted into checkboxes so that we can search for multiple qualities at once such as a search that includes Very Rare, Ultra Rare, and Epic only, while ignoring Common, Uncommon, and Rare.
- And some of the categories need to be re-ordered, e.g. Kit Modules is way down at the bottom but really belongs inside of the Personal Equipment section, and the 4 R&D/Upgrade categories should probably get a parent category called R&D or Crafting, mine launchers should go in ship weapons, and there are countless individual items that don't have a category and must be searched for in the notoriously-broken "All" category
- The Mail window is really lacking in a lot of basic features; even really basic stuff that we've had in mail clients for years like a tab for sent mail, a checkbox to select all messages for mass deletion, visible counters that show your current # of messages and the max # of allowed messages and attachments in your inbox, or filtering by typed key words (e.g. filter to only view exchange sales, exchange returns, messages that contain the word "taco" etcetera.
- Purchase/transaction windows (e.g. commodities, bartenders) that have a text input field should automatically have a text cursor placed in that field rather than requiring a mouse click, and these windows should respond to keyboard input for Tab, Enter, F, Escape keys.
- In fact all on-screen prompts should be interactable with the keyboard, be it the Y, N, Enter, Tab, or Escape key, but many of them are not.
- The limit of 100 commodities is also too low. You should be able to buy a full stack of 250 as a bare minimum and I would prefer if you could buy 500 or 1000 at a time to reduce the number of times you have to re-open the buy window.
- Doff contributions to fleet projects are painfully slow due to the checkbox system. A Select All/None toggle button (like the new Doff window filter toggle) would be useful, and then the player could deselect any they don't want contributed.
- Further, it would be nice--but harder to code from what I understand of how fleet projects work--if we could contribute higher quality doffs to projects to count as multiple Commons, e.g. say a project requires 9 common doffs; you could donate 9 commons, or 3 Uncommons, or 1 Rare, or any combination of qualities that results in filling up the project without overflowing it.
- Mark and 'special Mark**' conversion into dilithium is painful (figuratively and literally) because it is both 1. time gated, and 2. limited to a paltry 50 marks at a time. It would be better if we had a second project for 1000 marks or a slider that allowed us to specify the number of marks to convert, and then did some simple multiplication to calculate the amount of time it would take for the project to complete. I wouldn't mind having to wait a long time for my conversion to complete if I could just fire and forget once or a small handful of times instead of having to babysit the game for days upon days, manually filling the slider over and over and waiting on the 15-second time gate. In fact I would even accept an inferior conversion rate (like 75%) for bulk conversion.
- **BNP, Injections, Power Cells, etc.
- Something really needs to be done about the state of the Traits window, trait filtering, and splitting space/ground into their own sections
- On the Recycle tab of the Replicator and the Sell tab of a vendor it would be nice if we could have a couple simple sticky filters like:
- High-stakes Dabo. Betting 300 EC at a time is not high stakes. :P
- The C-Store needs Faction filters for the Ships tabs. It's nice that we have tabs for individual ship tiers now, but as a consequence we no longer have Faction tabs which means the Tier 5 tab for example requires a LOT of scrolling.
- It would be nice if Fleet, and Doff projects/assignments could draw directly from the Replicator for commodities (with an explicit confirmation prompt) to save a few steps when filling up sliders and you don't have items in your inventory/bank.
- There should be a Super-Loot setting that automatically picks up loot containers (unless the Inventory is full).
- This isn't necessarily a UI issue, but being able to subscribe to more than 20 global chat channels would really be appreciated, even if it was only an increase to 30.
- In the Fleet window, on the Roster tab, fleet leadership/officers need to be able to sort members by @handle and join date in the same dropdown as Status, Member Comments, etc.
- Or a search box in the Roster tab would also work
- And while we're at it, a lengthier transaction history for the Fleet Bank is really something we need
- Aannd the Fleet Bank Storage Log needs dates and times when looking at it from a Bank terminal; dates are only available when looking at it from the Fleet overview/news window
- The Ignore window really needs a Comments column so we can remember why we have people on ignore, be they gold spammers, trolls, or just idiots
- Quick Equip needs an on/off toggle in the game settings
- A Delete Outfit button in the tailor
- Color-coding minimap enemies
- Blinking chat tabs as an option
- Fine-grain fleet contribution tracking
- The loading of other player character Bios on the info screen has been unreliable for several years now
- A special storage space for noncombat pets would be welcome.
- A UI with a list of global chat channels would be really helpful
- Here's a big one: The Foundry search UI is in dire need of an overhaul
- An increase to the maximum number of purchasable Fleet Bank tabs would be appreciated
- Doff Reward/Requirement tooltips appear on top of other windows
- Doff UI doesn't show Boff reward info
- Talk to Loot Critter
- Consumables do not equip properly in power tray [video] (and haven't ever since Season 7)
- Consumables do not get added to existing stacks [video]
- And of course, the ever-persistent loadouts and power tray bugs.
- There's wayyy to much clicking involved in the R&D window to craft components in bulk and in the Upgrade window to apply upgrades one at a time.
- perhaps we could get a Contribute All button on Reputation projects to automatically add the required items/xp with a single click. Either that or default each slider to max available rather than 0.
This list could proooooobably use some formatting but after writing the whole thing down I'm too tired to do so. I'll get back to formatting later. :P
I also probably missed some things I'll edit in later.
Joined January 2009
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.
Comments
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1345621
About seperating mats from items in the sell windows
Sorting by rarity still does not work. For instance, selecting VR only will show only VR items, but not ALL matching VR items. Tested with multiple items.
Second, Price per unit Ascending and Descending sort options have their effects reversed.
As to the other UI elements, all the suggestions look good. I would only add that it would be nice for certain windows not to drop framerates into the single digits.
perhaps we could get a Contribute All button on Reputation projects to automatically add the required items/xp with a single click. Either that or default each slider to max available rather than 0.
Joined January 2009
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
An example of what I'm talking about: I'm in a i5 notebook, with 8GB RAM, Win 8 and Geforce 660M with 2GB of vRAM. Set the two sliders at graphics configurations to minimum and go to Starfleet Academy. With /showfps 1, I register ~20fps (this is in the limiar of when the humans start to be able to discern individual frames, so the game is visibly laggy). Now, I turn off the UI with Alt+F12 or simplying by bringing the main menu with ESC. The fps jumps to ~55-60 :eek:. The same procedure with settings near max makes fps go from ~17fps to ~30fps. Bringing more UI elements, as the inventory, rep screen or doff makes the problem worst. This is also measurable using /fpsgraph 1
Join Date: March 2009
Thanks Cryptic for introducing the Kelvin Timeline. It remembered why I decided to never more put any money on this game.
I have an idea for what Season 11 should be; Season 11: The Big Bug Fix.
I have not been able to read my bug tickets in over a year, not even the tickets about not being able to see my tickets.
I find the drama of your signature proof of your immaturity, this means you, DR whiners.
Here are some old ones:
Camera zoom keeps resetting every map change.
Camera distance resets on map changes
EPTX (ept-s, ept-w mostly) have longer Cooldown than it should be *see post #5*
There are many other UI bugs that are quite old. Did you know that many text boxes don't update properly unless you click on a blank spot in the window? For example, try editing "Max physics debris objects" in the "Graphics" tab or the withdrawal limits in the fleet bank.
And for the life of me, I can't figure out what's up with the messages of the day in the fleet window. There are two tabs where you can edit the main MotD: the "Overview" tab and the "News" tab. I think one of them takes precedence over the other, but I don't remember which. One of them also seems to automatically capitalize certain words. Each fleet holding has its own MotD, and those also behave strangely. Editing one MotD sometimes makes it appear as though all the others have changed. I'm not sure whether this is a display bug, because sometimes changing maps fixes the problem.
Playing STO spamming FAW is like playing chess using always the computer's suggested moves
There is so much more! I am trying to remember all the annoyances.
Win 15,000 GPL in the Hodos Racing Challenge!
Win 15,000 GPL in the Hodos Racing Challenge!
In the Character window, the Traits and Specialization tabs should be flipped, making Traits the third tab. The Specialization tab is only used by the player character while the Traits tab is used by BOffs as well.
Yeah... it's so damn frustrating... and best right after joining an STF and then see the empty tray bar...gharrrr
Also unpacking stacks of boxed fleet doffs is one at a time. should be a right click option on doff box stack to "unpack all" (or as many as will fit into your roster)
In particular it is incredibly frustrating that the Replicator window shares modality with any Assignment windows that require interaction to open (e.g. Department Heads, Cluster Assignments). What this means in practice is that it is very common to, say, query a DH or Cluster for assignments, find that there's a particular commodity you need, open the Replicator dialog--and find that your assignment window has been dismissed. Which means that if you need a reminder of exactly how many of what you need to replicate as you're scrolling through, you can't just glance back at the other window--you have to completely close the Replicator window first, then re-open the assignment, then close that and go back to the Replicator. It's a huge amount of pointless wasted effort, and there's no good reason that these two windows need to share modality.
It's equally frustrating that opening a modal window immediately switches your throttle to all stop--it makes it impractical and annoying to check your DHs for assignments while you're on a long autopilot through sector space.
So can we please just kill off the stale dinosaur that is modal windows entirely? They're embarrassingly 90's and there is no good reason to use them unless it is essential to prevent a user from doing anything else before they close that window.
Eclipse Class Intel Cruiser U.S.S. Dioscuria NX-91121-A - Interactive Crew Roster