Samuel_Tow

Something isn't right here. Burn keeps fluctuating between respecting and disrespecting my enhancements. Here's Burn slotted with a white Accuracy SO against an even-level Rikti Infantry:

You know what would fix most of my complaints with the "classic" window? Make player names show up in white text. Or black text. Or, hell, blue text. anything that doesn't show up in the red-to-green spectrum, so they stand out from the background. white seems like the most comfortable variant, since it would contrast against green, yellow and red for a living character, as well as against the black background for off-zone and dead team-mates.

I'm not going to keep harping on the minuscule team-mate numbers, since I assume that's a straightforward bug that should be fixed soon. The UI's DESIGN, however, needs to be harped on because while it isn't "bugged" per say, it is nevertheless horrible and needs to be changed.

What IS that "League Mode" toggle on the team search screen, by the way? I saw no mention of that in the patch notes (I could have missed it) and toggling it on and off and running searches with it on and off reveals no difference and gleans no insight into how it works or what it does.

Does it... Change team flag colours... Somehow? Show or hide people who are on... Leagues? What?

This is something of a concern for me, as well. One of the perks of the LFT system was - as I interpreted it - that you could wait for a team without having to drop what you're doing. I haven't queued up for a raid yet (my character is level 28-ish), but if I did, I wouldn't want to sit on my hands waiting for it.

---

Also, is there any way to find out what Team Search colours mean IN-GAME?

Personally, I'd like to see either a new Mastermind set that was IDF-style soldiers from the future, or otherwise see customization for Mercs to use models similar to that. The only futuristic set we currently have is Bots, and those get really old, really fast once you've used them on a bunch of characters.

Speaking of the IDF, what I wouldn't give to have customization options for Assault Rifle that use those Heavy backpacks with the guns and the belts and them missiles instead of the omnigun and the other stock prop models. Tech issues, I know, but I'd still like to see it.

I agree. By far the biggest challenge I've had a lot of the time is seeing through my UI. It was hell and high water playing on 1280x1024, since so much of my screen real estate was interface. I will gladly take the performance hit from running at 1920x1080 if it means I can shunt most of my interface in the far right and far left and have plenty of room for the actual game in the middle of the screen without having to content with annoying windows in there.

Making still larger windows and still larger buttons is not the answer. I want less UI, not more. This is starting to resemble Masters of Orion 3 in some places, and that ain't good. Like that Admiral Stutter TF I did last night. I spent most of the TF with an essay in my objectives window, stretching it down half-way to mid-screen. Seriously, guys. You used to do such a great job when you HAD to squeeze objectives into a single line, and now you're just going overboard. Seven lines of objectives IS NOT GOOD!

Back to the team window - at least cure the green text on green background and the microscopic team-mate numbers. The rest of the squinting-bucktooth-hunchback fugliness I can deal with. This is the only thing that's bad for my physical health.

Feh! All the more reason to not team. Suits me just fine. My eyes hurt enough as it is.

The new "screans" are clearly better than the old ones, even if I feel like the game is listing and taking on water every time I zone. The screenshots are better and reflect the game as it is now, not as it was ten years ago.

That said, they're still low-res. Maybe it's just me having an unnecessarily large 1920x1080 monitor (not my choice, by the way), but the loading screens still show nasty jpg artefacts - that fuzz around colour boundaries and the weird rainbow artefacts - so in effect, it's still kind of... Ugly. Less ugly than before, though, which I can appreciate.

Now, I don't expect the developers to suddenly change their minds and swap to all 16x9 loading screens, but I'd still like to see them use larger pics, at least 1200 pixels vertically. These seem to have been locked on the same 1024x768 resolution as the old ones. Why? Higher-rez loading screens shouldn't have much of an opportunity cost or a performance hit. Did everyone submit low-res entries in the competition or something?

Why? I can understand wanting a newer interface to account for leagues and whatnot, but why completely and utterly destroy my team window with no option to go back?

First of all, the bad: The new team window is awful. I can just remember thinking to myself "You know, those buff icons my team-mates had that stretch out past the middle of my screen... I wish they were bigger! And that button to quit the team? I wish it didn't say Quit on it, so I could click it by accident." And the new AT icons in the team screen are not widescreen-compatible and distort, for no real reason. It just looks fugly.

"But that's OK!" I can hear you saying. "Just revert to the classic team window!" Would that I could, but classic the "classic" team window ain't. In fact, it's pretty much the complete opposite of classic. Not only is it not much like what we used to have, but it's far uglier AND hard to read, to boot. And the AT icons distort on that, too.

Allow me to pose the following question: If I asked you how easy green text on a green background is to read, what would you answer? If your answer is "not very," then you would be correct, and you don't even need to log into the game to know that. Then why the huggly bunny do the name backgrounds of active in-zone team-mates turn green when their actual names are written in green, too? If the background HAS to be gree, why aren't the names, say, white? I'm not colour-blind and this hurts my eyes to look at. Though I can't imagine colour-blindness would play much of a role in telling one shade of green from the exact same shade of green separated only by a vague dropshadow.

Look, I can deal with all the other gripes I might have had. At least the core game that I liked is still there, right? Only not quite, since my decent, completely functional team screen is gone, and now I have to pick between "ugly" and "eye strain." I'm not a social butterfly, I admit that. But having a HORRIBLE teaming interface will make me even LESS likely to want to bother. When I can't read the names of my team-mates, something's wrong here.

---

Oh, and before I forget - there appear to be numbers next to team-mates' names. You know, to tell you Shift+what to press to quick-select them. Only I estimate thse numbers to be about 5x2 pixels in size, and I run on 1920x1080. It took me a full 15 minutes before I realised they were there, and then another 15 minutes before I could read them. Why is "severe eye strain" the theme of this new team window?