New UI Update: Gameboard

The_Boogie

@fight4thedream,

Wanted to see if I could get a response from you as I didn't receive one in this thread from @IceIX or @LakeStone.

Could you give the community any insight into the degree of quality assurance testing that is done before any game changes are rolled out to the general public? As I said before, happy to take this conversation to PMs or to a separate thread if it would be more productive; my intent is not to inflame the masses to direct more vitriol in D3's direction, but more to see if we the players of the game can help the devs put out a better product.

I'm willing to bet the line of players offering their services for QA testing would be a mile long if you incentivized it a little bit - I've worked in legal compliance and QA in the medical field for a long time and would be happy to lend a hand; whatever it takes to keep some of the friends I've made playing this game from quitting.

Cheers

BeetleGeorge

Has anyone ever tried to tell a chess player to look away from the board during the other player's move ?
I even tried to play MPQ always closing my eyes immediately after my move but it feels nearly as ridiculous as what I asked about the chess player. And is definitely not the solution for the eye strain caused by the dimming.
BTW, the extreme flashing of the tiles the enemy changes for me are nearly as bad as the dimming but that might be a issue only for steam users. We have the advantage that tiles are much bigger and therefore might be better to distinguish but the flashing too affects a much bigger area and therefore might be more disturbing.
So, in addition to turning off of the dimming which I think absolutely necessary to prevent headaches I would also like to be able to turn off the flashing.

pheregas

The_Boogie said:

@fight4thedream,


I'm willing to bet the line of players offering their services for QA testing would be a mile long if you incentivized it a little bit

I'd do it for free!  LOL.  A separate full sandboxed account for just QA testing.  Sounds like fun.  As someone who played Borderlands almost exclusively trying to fall out of the map, challenge accepted for being a tester.

DAZ0273

The_Boogie said:

@fight4thedream,

Wanted to see if I could get a response from you as I didn't receive one in this thread from @IceIX or @LakeStone.

Could you give the community any insight into the degree of quality assurance testing that is done before any game changes are rolled out to the general public? As I said before, happy to take this conversation to PMs or to a separate thread if it would be more productive; my intent is not to inflame the masses to direct more vitriol in D3's direction, but more to see if we the players of the game can help the devs put out a better product.

I'm willing to bet the line of players offering their services for QA testing would be a mile long if you incentivized it a little bit - I've worked in legal compliance and QA in the medical field for a long time and would be happy to lend a hand; whatever it takes to keep some of the friends I've made playing this game from quitting.

Cheers

Fight4thedream is a forum moderator, he is not an employee of D3/Demi and almost certainly has nothing to do with any game development stuff. Obviously he can confirm, deny or respond as applicable if I am incorrect.

MTP

Im not having issues with the dimming  but several people in my Alliance are getting headaches from the update.  These are people who typically roll with whatever changes occur.  They are unable to play.   I'd be the same way if the game was giving me a headache or worst, a migraine, I wouldn't want to play either.

The_Boogie

DAZ0273 said:

Fight4thedream is a forum moderator, he is not an employee of D3/Demi and almost certainly has nothing to do with any game development stuff. Obviously he can confirm, deny or respond as applicable if I am incorrect.

I understand that completely. But he was chosen to be a forum moderator by D3 employees, which means the likelihood of him having access to more information than the general public is high. 

ThaRoadWarrior

Generally Functional QA testing takes the form of of someone following a testing plan and reporting the results. It is not a qualitative analysis of your feature, ie is this "good," or "better than before," it is just "does this work in the way you told me it is supposed to work." QA testers don't generally have design training. Assuming that because they are named "quality assurance" they are going to have any input at all as to the quality of your design is a mistake - they are simply there to ensure the quality of your function. Are the tiles these shapes and colors? pass. Does the screen dim out on opponent's turn then correctly return to normal on player turn? pass. Does the game run without crashing on XYZ device? pass. That's what QA looks like. Just so people know how to set expectations. The people performing this task are often not part of the development team directly. It's a very outsourceable role, and it is usually performed in places where costs are regionally low because it often requires just bodies in seats doing repetitive things. There is often a language barrier between the QA tester and the developer, so communicating in very clear, direct, cut and dry ways is important. This is just general industry intel, I have no insider knowledge of this game specifically.

Sputt

Just want to chime in and say that the UI update makes the game unplayable. It triggers headaches. So as long as it stays, I won't be playing. That's at 2200 days resupply, and I'm going to have to drop the game due to a bad UI change.. 

KickPuncher

I really don't like the changes, and I tried to give it a chance.

The board should be simple enough that your eyes quickly and easily see large matches (4s and 5s) and you intuitively know when powers are ready to fire.  Both of those things are harder now.

The new colors are unappealing.

The tile character icons are really distracting.  This is, at its core, a match-3 game.  If the design makes it hard to see matches, it ruins the game.  The colors need to be the star of the show, with the icons being secondary.

I can only play 3 or 4 rounds before I start getting a headache.  Right now I'm just doing the dailies.  Hurts my eyes to do much more than that

DAZ0273

Apologies @The_Boogie my quote function has gone a bit pear.

I have a bit of experience of being a former forum moderator and there should not be an assumption that there is a crossover into additional knowledge that is not relevant to moderating the board. I had regular conversations with a former EiC of Marvel Comics but that didn't translate into my being given outside information that the forum was not allowed about products, upcoming comic books, decisions etc. But boy did we talk about IP addresses! I was still considered a valuable enough member of the Marvel family that I got Christmas Presents but everything else was strictly board related.

As I said, I can't say definitely that is the situation here but I would not be in anyway surprised.

grenadier

People are talking doing QA testing, but really that is a separate issue.   What is really being discussed here is UAT - User Acceptance Testing.  Its not a question of whether it works as designed.  Its a question of whether the design is valid in the first place. 

In this case, running the planned changes by even a handful of users early on might have prevented this train wreck before it happened.   Barring that, doing some UAT before releasing such a major change would have possibly stopped the rollout until fixes could be made.

Akoni

Kwahder said:

Polares said:

This change MUST be reverted ASAP, today, tomorrow at the latest. This is a MUST FIX (the same as the sever going down).

This isn’t in the dev’s hands. Even if they just rolled everything straight back (and I don’t think they can do that), it’d still have go through Apple & Google’s approval process. ‘Early next week’ is my best guess for something happening.

I completely forgot about the Apple and Google approval process. This is going to be an interesting-slash-horrible week for a lot of players.

killahKlown said:

Well at first I agreed with everyone here, but after less than a day of playing I'm already used to the new movements, colors, and dimming.  It doesn't bother me at all.  I think it's just the usual human nature of resisting change.  Dont be too hasty in undoing your hard work devs.  Give people some time to get used to it and I think the complaining will go away.  The headaches and seizure nonsense is most likely overly dramatized to force change. 

I understand what you are saying, but I also believe that dismissing other people's claims is not a good idea. Generally, people are open and honest about their experiences. Sure, you will always have a few dishonest or overly dramatic individuals, but that is usually not the case in a volunteer situation such as this forum. There are more individuals with epilepsy and color-blindness than you may be aware of. In addition, one does not need to have epilepsy or color-blindness to be sensitive to stimuli in their environment. 

I am glad that you have adjusted to the changes and find the game pleasurable. You are also more than welcome to state your opinions on the update. Your liking of the update does not (and should not) make you a bad person. It is, however, considered to be in bad taste to trivialize another person's experiences.

manhammer777

I've been playing this game for over 5 years, and have shoveled hundreds of $$ into it. Very few games have kept me playing this long. I love the challenge of building a new and more powerful team, and the art style is about as perfect as it gets. While I appreciate the thought and energy behind the gameboard update, it has left the game nearly unplayable, as it gives me extreme eye strain after playing just a little bit, and that quickly translates into a headache. Finishing just the DDQs is very painful with this new update. The same things happen to my wife while playing, but she couldn't even finish one game before she had to set her phone down.

I beg you to please offer a "classic" option for the gameboard. It was very easy on the eyes. You all do a great job, and I want to keep playing. Thank you for your time.

sambrookjm

I posted way back in the early stages after one match, and said "Meh" to the light/dark/light/dark brightness switch.  After playing more, I've got to change that to "Way too much eye strain."  Especially for the inevitable Polaris/BRB/Kitty mirror match...  So many special tiles (which are harder to see, especially enemy specials on black tiles) going on the board makes things very difficult on the eyes.  Please change the UI back.

The_Boogie

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Generally Functional QA testing takes the form of of someone following a testing plan and reporting the results. It is not a qualitative analysis of your feature, ie is this "good," or "better than before," it is just "does this work in the way you told me it is supposed to work." QA testers don't generally have design training. Assuming that because they are named "quality assurance" they are going to have any input at all as to the quality of your design is a mistake - they are simply there to ensure the quality of your function. Are the tiles these shapes and colors? pass. Does the screen dim out on opponent's turn then correctly return to normal on player turn? pass. Does the game run without crashing on XYZ device? pass. That's what QA looks like. Just so people know how to set expectations. The people performing this task are often not part of the development team directly. It's a very outsourceable role, and it is usually performed in places where costs are regionally low because it often requires just bodies in seats doing repetitive things. There is often a language barrier between the QA tester and the developer, so communicating in very clear, direct, cut and dry ways is important. This is just general industry intel, I have no insider knowledge of this game specifically.

Wow. You are making an entirely huge number of assumptions. This is not at ALL my experience in QA testing, and I'm not speaking in "general industry intel" terms - I am speaking from years of experience in the Healthcare IT realm.

You are mixing two things together - functional testing and quality assurance testing are two very different animals. What you describe is functional testing, and that makes sense. Quality assurance, with stress on the word quality, is trying to break something and reporting what you find back to the developers. Find a way to track how much somebody is testing, then give them a discount (or in MPQ world, in-game currency) and let them try to break it.

Giving away in-game currency is a very small opportunity cost for the potential benefit it could provide to the developers.

Please don't speak in generalities, I've done this for years. The best QA testers are the people using the product on a regular basis.

ThaRoadWarrior

I run a game studio that is not in any way affiliated with MPQ, I have first hand industry knowledge of how video game qa is done specifically, and what those roles are named and how they work.  In the game industry, Functional Quality Assurance is doing what I said - making sure the game functions as designed (which is not the same as giving feedback on those designs). There are other sub disciplines like Localization QA, Certification QA, and so on. But the catch-all for this is just QA. But I’m not going to argue with your experience, you can be right if you need to be.

Red_Rooster23

I tried to play late last night in a very dark bedroom and the blue and green tiles are virtually indistinguishable from one another when you have Apple's Night Shift on and the brightness turned down low. It felt as if I had developed sudden colorblindness. This was not an issue with the original tile colors and shapes.

My biggest issue with the new UI update is thematic: These new colors do not reflect the Marvel Universe at all. They are dark, dull, drab, and just plain unpleasant to look at. Marvel is all big, bold primary colors, but it feels like the team was trying to turn this into a DC tile-matching game.

On the basic usability front, the entire playing screen overall is far too dark--even at full brightness it feels like I'm looking at the game through a tinted window. Certain things like charged tiles or "ready" hero powers are also far too subtle to clearly read now.

I could get used to the new shape of the board and tiles, but these color scheme and brightness issues are game-breaking.

ArtoriosRex

Dislike. The only positive about it is the larger character art. I don't like the decreased contrast of the gems, nor graying out of the board when the enemy takes his turn. If there were an option to enable "classic UI", I would set it immediately and never think twice.

Nick_El_Braveheart

Siete dei coglioni incompetenti 
Il tabellone era una delle poche cose buone e siete riusciti a peggiorare pure quella all’estremo 
I colori si fanno fatica a distinguere perché sono spenti e il continuo cambio di luminosità mi fa bruciare gli occhi. È quasi da attacco epilettico.
Spero che il COVID-19 faccia giustizia 

Bubba3210

killahKlown said:

Well at first I agreed with everyone here, but after less than a day of playing I'm already used to the new movements, colors, and dimming.  It doesn't bother me at all.  I think it's just the usual human nature of resisting change.  Dont be too hasty in undoing your hard work devs.  Give people some time to get used to it and I think the complaining will go away.  The headaches and seizure nonsense is most likely overly dramatized to force change. 

It’s not nonsense as I am one of them. 

I have convergence demand and other unidentifiable eye problems that an ophthalmologist and neurologist are trying to solve. I get migraines easily and they have been triggered by fast light changes.