Superfluous animations

starfall

This post is a continuation of these two earlier threads.

Speed of gameplay is an issue I consider important, and here are a few conceptually simple improvements which I feel would improve things no end. I hope these suggestions are uncontroversial.

Like this post if you agree and would like to see these improvements punted a little higher up Oktagon's list of priorities.


1. Get rid of the streamers.

Watching fireworks streaming slowly around the screen takes a lot of time, and while feedback from newbies might conceivably indicate that they find them useful, all they do is cause frustration for intermediate and veteran players. There's already an option in the settings menu which allows more advanced players to speed up the game while leaving gameplay for beginners slower and easier to understand (the 'card visual aid').


2. Make all tokens spawn at the fastest speed

Frankly, I thought they were all spawning as fast as possible, until madwren informed me otherwise!

madwren said:

Agreed, it's ridiculous that we still go through the tedious animation of tokens at this point, considering that Hibernum had previously fixed it. 

starfall said:

I was wondering what you meant here, because the current token animation is certainly faster than what we used to have in the game, in which every individual reinforcement was accompanied by a full screen card.

However, I've just been playing Nahiri, and you're right! Nahiri's Ult sprogs reinforcements much faster than most other token animations in the game. 

3. Remove Vanguard lag

Vanguards were a great innovation in gameplay but the lag caused by having them in play causes infuriation and makes many players to simply avoid playing with them whenever possible.

Gunmix25

Hibernium created a simple fix for token by showing through animation the first 2 or 3 tokens being created. Then the rest of the stack was immediately applied, so it didn't matter if there was 20 tokens coming out. It still only showed about 3 animation's worth of action to put it on the battlefield. The only exception was if you popped a bunch of activation gems. I.E. Embalm... then it resolved them one by one even if you popped ten of them. Had to be sourced from one thing for the short fix to trigger. Still though it was a nice fix. Anyways, saw this was a good thing to add to your discussion. 

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Julie71

Turning  your animations off will greatly improve the speed.

Julie71

Turning  your animations off will greatly improve the speed.

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thesmallesthuman

Heh so I actually always have the visual aid on. Depending on what’s being played, you do have to click through a couple (March of multitudes) or, ew yes, every (tinykitty you, Hangarback) token card animations. 

I haven’t tried turning it off in forever, so perhaps I’ll eat my words but last I checked, it didn’t do nearly enough to help with animations to make up for the amount of time I spent flipping through the battle log or clicking on supports trying to figure out what the heck Greg just played. I was able to barrel through most matches anyway, but it always felt less strategic and more brute strength/fingers crossed when I had no idea half the time what was happening. 

madwren

thesmallesthuman said:

I haven’t tried turning it off in forever, so perhaps I’ll eat my words but last I checked, it didn’t do nearly enough to help with animations to make up for the amount of time I spent flipping through the battle log or clicking on supports trying to figure out what the heck Greg just played. I was able to barrel through most matches anyway, but it always felt less strategic and more brute strength/fingers crossed when I had no idea half the time what was happening. 

My experience as well.   I find the "animations off" to be completely unplayable. I'm glad the option exists for people who can do it, but surely there is a happy medium with an optimized mode in which things happen quickly, but we can still see what cards are being cast.

Regardless, I don't think they'll fix tokens because we've been asking for this for quite awhile.  The original "spawn 2, then fast-spawn the rest" took place in update 1.7.1.  In 2016. 

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/comment/588179/#Comment_588179

From Hibernum_JC, "We wanted to make sure that token animations were a bit faster, and so we skip anything over 2 tokens (as you've mentioned, over 2 tokens and we skip the card animation). This was a design decision that was made because we wanted to keep the clarity of summoning tokens (and making sure they're readable a bit) while significantly speeding up the 4+ tokens summon speeds."

It was great. Didn't make everyone happy--some wanted it faster--but it did the job. Then Hibernum left, and Oktagon came back, and for some reason, they inexplicably reverted the change and have ignored multiple pleas to return it to that method. I think the first reported problem with it was February 2018:

https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/70640/reinforcing-animation-slow

Oktagon, however, couldn't stand the simplicity of simply reverting it to that method, and instead let it languish forever until they overshot the target with the "card visual aid" nonsense. 

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TomB

I'm with madwren. I found that with the animations off option I usually spent just as much time trying to figure out what happened during the last turn by scanning through the Battle log as I saved by skipping the animations in the first place. I found it's just easier leaving things the way they are, and when I run into an opponent that plays MoM x2 I take a bio break or whatever and pick the game back up later.

Occasional inconvenience beats constant inconvenience in my book...

ambrosio191

I've had card visualization turned off from the moment they introduced it. There are very few occasions where I have to look at the Battlelog to see what happened. There just aren't that many unique enough card interactions where I can't figure out what happened with the information already provided.   Yeah, the occasional insidious will has slowed me down or cost me a game, but that's my fault for not checking supports. I can very easily tell when Greg kills my creatures, does it really matter which one of the dozens he used? Same with bounce, disable, gem converting, board wipe, etc. I'd imagine I've avoided far more freeze related losses having card visualization off than losses due to not seeing what was played.

Gunmix25

starfall said:

Gunmix25 said:

Hibernium created a simple fix for token by showing through animation the first 2 or 3 tokens being created. Then the rest of the stack was immediately applied, so it didn't matter if there was 20 tokens coming out. It still only showed about 3 animation's worth of action to put it on the battlefield. The only exception was if you popped a bunch of activation gems. I.E. Embalm... then it resolved them one by one even if you popped ten of them. Had to be sourced from one thing for the short fix to trigger. Still though it was a nice fix. Anyways, saw this was a good thing to add to your discussion. 

Perhaps Oktagon stopped doing this because sometimes effects trigger every time a token comes into play (the interminable Path of Discovery springs to mind)



So far in this thread we've identified 4 token spawning speeds which have already been implemented:

1) Slow Hibernum: a full screen card is shown for each reinforcement appearing

2) Slow Oktagon: the speed most tokens spawn in the game now

3) Fast Oktagon: the speed Nahiri's ult reinforcements appear at

4) Fast Hibernum: multiple tokens appear with a single animation.



Ideally I'd like to see #4 applied to every time tokens spawn in the game, but if Oktagon cannot do this because of Path of Discovery-style effects, then I'd like to see #3 applied to every time tokens spawn in the game.

I can easily see how Path to Discovery would be buggy if #4 was implemented. Nice catch. #3 would be a nice change if able.  Curious though, wasn't the trigger for #4 disabled if one had Anointed Procession out? I can't recall.

Abracadavers

Another thing I would like to add is that the animation for buffing creatures takes too long.  It becomes very tedious when doing lots of buffing.

madwren

Perhaps one of the most annoying design traits of recent sets has been the insistence upon a litany of +1/+1 effects that rarely matter except to test our patience.

starfall said:

The 'Card Visual Aid' is yet another example of Oktagon coding a feature nobody asked for. Sure, it was a 'step in the right direction' on the road to speeding up the game, and we all love 'steps in the right direction', but, as is so often the case, they took that one single step on that road of a thousand miles and then got bored and gave up. And, as usual, that 'step in the right direction' was as much of a step backwards as it was forwards; Oktagon sped the game up by *hiding information from us* about cards that were entering play, instead of removing entirely superfluous animations we didn't need.

I know you don't feel welcome on the forums to complain much, madwren, even though, as your team-mate, I know how much you hate so many aspects of the game, but don't be so defeatist... people like me are happy to do your complaining for you

Yeah, that's what I was referring to. It was the "we complain about X, so instead of fixing X, they give us Y instead, which sort of helps with X but doesn't solve it, and introduces problems A, B, and C instead." Overcomplication is their forte. 

It's not about being welcome. Everyone here since inception knows me. It's mostly that eventually I tire of building bridges where there isn't any water, and my busy life meant that forum time was one of the first sacrifices on the altar of time management.

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Mburn7

There are a lot of weird streamer effects.  Node 4 of Black CoC is definitely bugged, if the returned creature reinforces one already out it will not get a -1/-1 all the time, despite showing the streamer (probably a continuation of Oktagon's continuous struggle with having the same buff trigger multiple times on one creature).

In general I find buff animations to be significantly more annoying than reinforcement animations.  I used to just fast tap through all the draw/reinforce animations anyway before the option to turn them off was implemented.
Buff animations also trigger the LPS really quickly for no reason whatsoever, so I would really like those turned off for that reason too (nothing like casting 2 cards and getting an LPS trigger because you have Jace 2 or Sorin's ult out)

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Mburn7

starfall said:

Mburn7 said:

There are a lot of weird streamer effects.  Node 4 of Black CoC is definitely bugged, if the returned creature reinforces one already out it will not get a -1/-1 all the time, despite showing the streamer (probably a continuation of Oktagon's continuous struggle with having the same buff trigger multiple times on one creature).

In general I find buff animations to be significantly more annoying than reinforcement animations.  I used to just fast tap through all the draw/reinforce animations anyway before the option to turn them off was implemented.
Buff animations also trigger the LPS really quickly for no reason whatsoever, so I would really like those turned off for that reason too (nothing like casting 2 cards and getting an LPS trigger because you have Jace 2 or Sorin's ult out)

When you say 'buff animations' you're talking about the streamers, right?

I just want to make sure we're on the same page.

Well, the specific kind of streamers involving buffs/debuffs.  There also streamers for mana gains, but now that they fixed Huatli Green's ability those are pretty fine as is.  Also not all buffs are animated with streamers, but they all take a long time to animate.

Entropy42

starfall said:

This post is a continuation of these two earlier threads.

Speed of gameplay is an issue I consider important, and here are a few conceptually simple improvements which I feel would improve things no end. I hope these suggestions are uncontroversial.

Like this post if you agree and would like to see these improvements punted a little higher up Oktagon's list of priorities.


1. Get rid of the streamers.

Watching fireworks streaming slowly around the screen takes a lot of time, and while feedback from newbies might conceivably indicate that they find them useful, all they do is cause frustration for intermediate and veteran players. There's already an option in the settings menu which allows more advanced players to speed up the game while leaving gameplay for beginners slower and easier to understand (the 'card visual aid').

This thread is kind of old, but I was going to post the exact same thing, so I think it makes more sense to just note people have been asking for this for a while.  My most common deck is Jace Unraveler, and its just really annoying to wait for the streamers to go off when I draw a card.  I also have Sphinx's tutelage, so I get 4 streamers per card draw.  It adds minutes to each fight.

JinQuiet

Tainted Adversary is uses abnormal amount of time to generate all tokens.

Every time I cast it and drain 30-40 mana from my hand I have to wait so long that Loop Reset Counter kicks in.

The culprit here is, as always, token summoning animation.

The card is slow to play. I don't want to look at tokens generating for 2-3 minutes for no reason.

Seriously something should be done with long in game animations that last for literally minutes.