Scarlet Shocker

If a blue wisp vet pet is buffed by a sonic defender who's favourite colour is pink you can have your very own baby hamidon that follows you around

When the announcement for the Auction House UI upgrade initially broke I, like many others, was very happy. The old interface was clunky and difficult to search - so it was gonna be good, right?

I don't think so. The new UI is horrible, awful, clunky & counter-intuitive. The Old UI at least worked after a fashin but this one is about as much use as a rubber duck in the Sahara, and is arguably one of the worst things about the whole Invention Origin experience.

So I've taken a moment to sit down and think about why it's so horrible and why I hate it so and here are some conclusions:

1. The whole look and feel is wrong. The AH UI is too big and too important to be windowed the way it is currently. Making it into an autonomous page a la the Costume Interface and Enhancement window. A small space allocated to chat tabs would be invaluable there but when I'm buying and selling I want to see my inventory and what's available.
2. What's in the vault? I've got too many characters to remember what each one has in each vault. It strikes me as illogical that I can deposit something in Pocket D's vault and it's accessible from my base vault but not available whilst I'm in the Auction House itself. I can kind of see that pulling stuff out of Vault directly into the AH may not be ideal in game terms but at least knowing what I own in the vault would be a real benefit.
3. Search: Search is rubbish currently. In order to find something you pretty well have to know what it's called - and the very fact that often names differ between Recipes and Crafted IOs just makes like stupidly awkward. Why that's not ever been corrected I don't know but some items are even spelled differently. A quick example: I was looking for a Stealth IO or recipe for one of my toons. I typed in Stealth into the bar and I only found crafted IOs. To find the recipe I had to type in +stealth. Paradoxically if you unclick the Autocomplete function you can find both but then what's the point of autocomplete if it doesn't pick up what you're looking for?

There are other less pressing issues with it, but those are my main gripes and I've got to say that for me this is one of the worst "upgrades" in game. As an improvement it fails - and given that crafting and trading is now an integral part of the game (costume slots anyone?) even if you don't use IOs it seems odd that a so-called improvement lacks more than the original it was meant to replace

I've just rolled a speculative Fire/TA troller band it occurred to me that Smoke and Flash Arrow are doing the same job - so whcih is better to leave out? Do they stack and if so what's the effect?

Anyone have any experinece of this build and can offer any comment? Both sets are powers I've never really taken so I'd be interested in your comments.

Also I'd love to see additional skin options... I'm thinking like shiny metal skins and maybe skin that looks like rock and crystal, and more colour & Effect options.

ok this thread has understandably had massive hits but I want to throw a couple of points and questions here - though I may be at risk of repeating something I've missed not having read every single respone.

I've seen more votes for Option 1: this concerns me because that implies by default that all existing assets are broken. They are not and some items may work well... for example a blurry texture on a cossie item (head wings is a good example because comparative images are posted here): If I wanted to create an intangible creature maybe made of mist and air... I'd probably want something less well defined. That's an "off the cuff" example and adds flexibilty for very little cost.

Retaining the old items is only a database problem. They may well become unused over time, but if they aren't unused now, I'd suggest it's very bad policy to remove them unless there's a very pressing reason to do so.

Sure, I wholeheartedly support the concept of updating costume items to take better processing capability into account - but removing existing assets from the game should be avoided unless a clear case can be made for it.

I suspect that one of the main points for people voting for Option 1 is simply that as things stand there are too many options to search through easily. If we could get a better search function (PLEASE NOTHING LIKE THE AH GUI (just saying)) I suspect that would accommodate most peoples fears and not take up too much processing space.

Frankly I'm a bit surprised that some people would request the removal of costume assets - "new and shiny" doesn't always mean "better" so I'm a bit iffy about that and I wonder if some people have misunderstood the question.

If you ever read Mark Millar's "Wanted" (not that awful excuse for a movie based on the comics) there was a character in there who was composed of fecal matter from the worst people in history - Hitler, Ghengis Kahn etc... his name was kind of appropriate but his purpose of existence just seemed to be aimed at revolitng people

It's a good innovation and has helped me - however a great QoL feature would be to be able to put the badge tabs in some kind of customisable order.

Welcome back

Welcome back. Ignore Synergy's advice he's talking out of a very small dark hole. There's plenty of people on Defiant and you'll have no problem picking up a team. Kendai's right get on Defiant Events and have fun

I'm one of the first to decry how poorly the EU is treated in comparison to NA, but I think you might be jumping the gun a bit here old son. I think waiting and seeing what the plan is before we get up in arms about something.

Anger over speculative issues is wasted energy and frankly we've got more important battles to fight when it comes to NCSoft and the EU

Also an ability to have costume items that glow in a pulsating manner... maybe there's some kind of alien energy under them or something

I'd vote option 2 every time:

Nothing gets taken away and so that prevents complaints along the lines of "I really liked X cossie piece" - which is very valid.

Also I'm pretty well of the opinion that when a player creates a character that character is theirs and if their cossie looks silly because of mis-matched parts or clipping, it's their responsibility to resolve - and now with power customisation we have several animations we can use to examine how certain costume combos work with different animations.

Suggestions to add to the cossie creator while this is in your mind:

The background screens in the creator reflect the alignment of your character: Hero, Villain, Rogue - but they often interfere with the creative process. We can lighten or darken the background but we can't be certain how a costume will actually look until we're actually in the game in the "real" game lighting and contrasting with game assets. An ability to change backdrop to reflect the game world more accurately would be helpful here.

Give new costume assets the ability to hold 3 colors instead of 2. (I'm not sure how technically feasible this would be but it would give much greater versatility to players.)

Improve the Random Costume process: One way would be to enable a player to "Lock" certain cossie options so they are fixed and don't change while the random button is clicked. Even better would be that AND an ability to random only certain parts of the costume: boots, legs, arms, hats etc.

Sounds like Fun!!!

Maybe we could run an RPS game after

Very sad

I'd also hate to be Daredevil.

His supersenses power is bad enough but that's really his secondary power. His main power is the uncanny ability to bugger up everything in his life and the lives of those he holds nearest and dearest - everyone who ever gets close to him either dies or ends up in a mental institution (except for the long-suffering Foggy Nelson)