Patch Notes - R81 (08/10/15)

Stax the Foyer

I think when the UI elements are all updated to match the increased size, it'll look better.

The prominent alliance button is a really good idea for new players. However, there's no need for it to be where the old roster button was.

Roster and Train could be a single button, but I suppose that it puts the training concept front and center for new players. If you have to have them separate, Alliance/Train/Roster seems like the best arrangement for usability. (At least for me, Roster is by far the most pushed button, although an alliance that uses the in-game chat might click the alliance button more, which could explain the prominent placement if it gets clicked the most overall).

Shifting the arrow for the Train button and the cards for the Roster button a few pixels to the left might make it look better, given the cant of the buttons. The angle of the buttons is different in the event leaderboards and the main page, which is a little jarring. I prefer the sharper angle of the leaderboard screen, but the more vertical angle of the main page carries through to the tabs, so it might be easier to change the leaderboard screen.

The suggestion to make healthpacks visible is a great one. Roster button could change color when there are covers in your inventory, or a number bubble could be used. Having more of the often-checked information available without drilling down to additional screens would be good for usability, and might save some server pings.

GurlBYE

Haetron wrote:

Buret0 wrote:

Don't cater to the users who have ancient technology. These aren't the whales you are looking for. If they had the money to buy stark salaries, they would probably be playing on a newer phone. Obviously they don't feel the lure of the big shiny, so stop catering to them.

This is nonsense. You should always try to cast as big a net as possible, alienating existing users on "ancient" devices would be a bad move on their part, and even though I myself use a low end device, that hasn't stopped me from supporting the game itself through HP purchases.

So make everyone with new devices upset with the changes.

For the handful with low resolution devices, sacrificing new players who will abandon a clunky cheap looking game?

Sure.

DrStrange-616

mr_X wrote:

Definitely prefer the older interface to this but if they can sort out the pixelated look will probably get used to it.

Could have sworn there was another thread about this but it seems to have disappeared.

I think they were all merged into the pinned update thread.

GurlBYE

jojeda654 wrote:

Buret0 wrote:

if they aren't joining an alliance it isn't because of the size of the button, but rather because you do a poor job of explaining to n00bs the benefits of joining an alliance

What do you mean?

When you get the daily rewards and you are not in an alliance, it tells you you can join an alliance to earn more Iso.
There's a separate tab in the Event Rewards screen just to list the prizes you can win by being in an alliance.
There were also the Ultron events which encouraged you to find an alliance to play with.

If I'm not mistaken, that's not encouragement, you can't participate without being in one.

nwman

This design is bad, horrible bright colors, and you recycled low rez art and made it bigger, which is a huge design no no, I mean at work if someone did that (we do web design and app design) I would be very concerned at the lack of effort and laziness.

Now all this has me thinking that someone high up likes this new design and everyone below them is too scared to say anything.

How else does this design make it out of a professional game studio?

Oh but I like the separate prologue tab.

Marvelfamily

Thank you for updating from time to time.

... but... I suppose others said this too, the new interface is too big, it jumps me into my eyes like this *ouch*

The game is so good in its design, please, give it a more sharpened style, because it looks simply : ugly now.

Anything else I will handle, but big buttons, actually with a juggernaut just put in a graphic program, "let's make the old pic just more bigger... * - no, that's not a sign of quality, and the game is on high level quality.

Regards

Susie

Buret0

jojeda654 wrote:

What do you mean?

When you get the daily rewards and you are not in an alliance, it tells you you can join an alliance to earn more Iso.
There's a separate tab in the Event Rewards screen just to list the prizes you can win by being in an alliance.
There were also the Ultron events which encouraged you to find an alliance to play with.

I joined up pre-Ultron, so there was no need to be in an alliance before then.

I mean that it didn't ever actually explain what an alliance 'was'. I didn't join an alliance mostly because of how hard they were pushing me to join an alliance (as you said, every day there was another "hit this button to join an alliance"). It seemed to me that it wanted me to join an alliance without actually explaining what an alliance was. There was no information in game about what an alliance did. There were vague hints that you would be rewarded with extra ISO for joining one, but there was nothing that explained what being in an alliance actually meant. Did I suddenly have to join a bunch of PvP events that pit me and a bunch of strangers against another alliance? If not, what was an alliance? It seemed to me that every time I clicked a button to learn more about alliances, it just was just another trick to get me to join one.

When I finally met someone IRL who was in an alliance and explained what it was to me, I joined in a second. The daily ISO reward is small change, but it doesn't cost anything. The top 1,000 or so alliance rewards we got for just playing MPQ the way we normally played, with the added bonus of getting to share covers. When Ultron finally came along, we actually tried to push it (4-6 really active people), but we never beat the 6th round despite multiple 1 million+ scores.

If there was just a button on those daily "Join An Alliance" messages that said, "here's what an alliance actually is", I probably would have joined one.

Buret0

Haetron wrote:

This is nonsense. You should always try to cast as big a net as possible, alienating existing users on "ancient" devices would be a bad move on their part, and even though I myself use a low end device, that hasn't stopped me from supporting the game itself through HP purchases.

What I'm saying is don't change your UI to make it look good on older devices at the expense of making it look terrible on new devices. I'm quite certain we didn't have people complaining about the beautiful old UI with all those white spaces and rich colors, even on the old phones. You could see the names of the events and scroll through the events just fine before.

DrStrange-616

I wish they'd replace the train button and give us a supplies tab that would show health packs, team-ups, boosts, and deadpool points.

GurlBYE

What I feel like I want a concrete answer to, is if there is any intention of creating an actual 'pve' realm for players beyond the prologue, and DDQ

I know story at this rate is meant to be PVP as well because the devs don't call it pve, and neither is the reward structure.

Unknown

I highly suspect part of this will be the addition of more Growth Industry type PVEs, or other story content.

The prologue ate -a lot- of screen space, and was useless to most people after the first 2 months. it being shifted to it's own tab accommodates more content being added to the Story Tab itself.

I think the redesign is just a product of that change, and I think people are overreacting, but it definitely needed more polish before going live, and most of the issues are correctable.

The Alliance button placement though? That's just on the players to adapt and get used to. it's bothering me too, but it makes things better over all as now I can still chat with alliance mates even while in a sub.

jojeda654

GurlBYE wrote:

jojeda654 wrote:

There were also the Ultron events which encouraged you to find an alliance to play with.

If I'm not mistaken, that's not encouragement, you can't participate without being in one.

That's true! Although you could still solo the event.

Buret0 wrote:

If there was just a button on those daily "Join An Alliance" messages that said, "here's what an alliance actually is", I probably would have joined one.

Fair enough. The game does not explain anything beyond the match-3/skills/level up mechanics. I remember avoiding PvP forever because I assumed it was in real time.

Buret0 wrote:

I'm quite certain we didn't have people complaining about the beautiful old UI with all those white spaces and rich colors, even on the old phones. You could see the names of the events and scroll through the events just fine before.

That's mostly cause I got used to it. The event title cards were always fuzzy to me, and it would always annoy me. It was especially bad on newer events with longer names. Now that that those cards are much larger, people are paying more attention to them.




I don't really have an issue with the new UI as it is, but that's probably because it reminds me of Royale, which was my favorite theme when I was into making stuff purdy.

JVReal

Even on my little iphone 5s, I opened it up after the update and Juggs feels like he's invading my personal space.

Very disproportionate in size to the actual battle scaling... I hold the phone away on the main screen because of the giant images, then have to bring it back for everything else.

I just turned 41, but I really don't need that big of images jumping out at me when I open the app.

GurlBYE

Haetron wrote:

I highly suspect part of this will be the addition of more Growth Industry type PVEs, or other story content.

The prologue ate -a lot- of screen space, and was useless to most people after the first 2 months. it being shifted to it's own tab accommodates more content being added to the Story Tab itself.

I think the redesign is just a product of that change, and I think people are overreacting, but it definitely needed more polish before going live, and most of the issues are correctable.

The Alliance button placement though? That's just on the players to adapt and get used to. it's bothering me too, but it makes things better over all as now I can still chat with alliance mates even while in a sub.

The issue is the design aesthetic moved backwards.

When I saw it initially I thought of web forums from 2004-ish

like web 2.0 stuff, like



I haven't been in the game long enough to hold any memories of the designs.
It was unremarkable before. But its remarkable now in that the assets don't meet the needs of the average user. It's clunky and take more interaction to get what I want.

Why should I scroll to reach the 3rd in line in PVP, when before there was no scrolling. It takes longer to do the same things.
Thats why its not good.

Unknown

Just came here to say that the new design isn't just bad, it's horrible. I suppose If I were playing on a phone those big panels might've been handy, but what's with those crazy colors? This might seem like overreacting, but this might just be the thing to make me quit. Because every time I see the game the new UI doesn't just hurt my eyes, it hurts my soul!.. I really, really hope it can be changed.

Unknown

I like the new UI, the old one seemed small and everything appeared to be squished together, having an extra tab for prologue is also nice, I always have to scroll to the right to look at my event/season score and when there are multiple events, there was more scrolling (not that it bothered me but definitely an improvement).

Since everything is zoomed in, it can appear pixelated, but this could be fixed.

It would be nice to see deadpool's points somewhere, probably on his roster rather than needing to take him into a battle to view his ability.

Not really any complaints on the UI.

Unknown

On the ipad, it is really, really bad.
Come on, the design should be better than this. A multi-million dollar company producing graphics I could make on Microsoft Office. Really?

TLCstormz

Merrick wrote:

With all the real problems this game has, some of which have been addressed, but most of which have not, I find it insulting that the developers wasted their time putting out this mess.

THIS. Exactly.

shatland

all in all there are a few positives that came from this, a little rearranging is nice. there are admittedly a few negatives as well. i'm just a little disturbed by all the vitriol from the community. i mean, no one has to agree with the changes or like them, and, please, by all means let your opinions fly, but there's a FAT line between constructive criticism and just criticism. no need to be mean about it.

that said, yeah i wish they'd spent whatever time/money they put into this - into something else (there's another UI thread floating around i would have loved to see realized )

this would have been a perfect time for one of those oft-talked about, never implemented CONTESTS. you could have given us a set of assets/artwork to work with and told us to go nuts and then had the community vote on which entry they liked best. you could have conceded a tiny bit of control over essentially nothing to the community and we probably would have sang high praise from all of the mountains.

also would have let all these professional designers bashing your efforts to put their hero points where their mouths are.

Deilinvega

You know what would come in handy? Possibility to save match record. Then you could share a proof how absurdly AI is cheating