Hating the new market interface so far...

I'm sure they're aware of this thread (and others) but we have no way of knowing just how much 'discord' there really is. As I noted in another thread, every major change will make someone quit. And every major system that doesn't get changed fast enough to suit someone, will make someone else quit.

I agree the new market UI has problems, but it has had zero effect on how much I use the market. I'm well into the process of IO'ing one toon and just starting another. The toons I use to marketeer are still marketeering.

The two main flavors of comments that I'm seeing are as follows:
1) The new system is horrible - just roll it back to the old one.
2) The new system fixed some things but broke others - we need a second round of fixes.

I agree with position 2. Regarding position 1, I say "HELL NO!" I never want to go back to the old interface. It stank.

I keep hearing this but I don't get it. In order to see all my slots, I had to scroll from side to side. I PREFER the tabbed interface because it lets me see a summary of all slots plus the category with which I'm currently working.


Yes, that's a bug. It has the option to permanently suppress the warnings, both on the pop-up and in the options menu, but it does not work.

Ok, hopefully I get the quoting and linking correct.

Here's what I mean:

Looking at the old market interface, I could see 7.5 slots at once.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/50458862@N02/4633474137/

New market interface if I don't accidentally click on an item in a slot, I can see 4 slots at once.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/50458862@N02/4633474449/

New market interface if I make the mistake of clicking on an item in a slot, I can see 1 slot.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/50458862@N02/4633474527/

Maybe I'm using it wrong, but I clicked around quite a bit, and couldn't get the expanded slot view to collapse again. so, I was stuck with this big view.

So, yeah, it's true, I couldn't actually see -all- of my slots at once, but I could see a good third or so of them at once. Even with the 4 slot view, it's still just over half of what I used to be able to see at once. I like getting the broad overall view of seeing what's happening in my slots.

In order to find what's going on in each category, I have to click on each tab, and then, depending on what's in each category, I may have to scroll down within that category. That's significantly slower than simply grabbing the scroll bar and panning the list left.

Also, when you picked a place to "work" in the horizontal list, it didn't move. Because you could view your entire slot list, including slots that were not in use, you could "buffer" the list against what the current vertical lists do. The current lists in each category stop showing slots after the ones in use, no matter how many more you have. That means that adding and removing items constantly shifts the bottom of the list, but the scroll bar doesn't keep the end slot in view. So as you work the list, you have to constantly keep scrolling down to keep the last slot in view, especially if you click on it (which you have to do to list it).

Far more interface manipulation all around for the same functional activities.

Nicely summarized.

The above,

But re reading the thread has amused the heck out of me. So many people that vehemently resented the idea that many people in the game might just not like the market, whining so loudly that they dislike it now

It amuses me that you're so scrapper-locked on this campaign of yours that you see it everywhere, even when it's wildly inapplicable.

Most of the complaints here are by people who do like the market. What we don't like is the loss of efficiency or functionality in the new interface to the market. Complaining about the things in the new interface that are inferior to the old one has nothing to do with "just not liking the market".

I'm quite used to the new market now. It takes more screwing around than the old one did to both enact multiple trades and to determine what's going on when a lot of slots are in play both buying and selling. It's also still buggy in new and sometimes expensive ways. The latter needs to be fixed and the former shouldn't be expected to make anyone happy.

I'd suggest actually reading the thread. When people start talking about leaving the game because they don't like how they have to interact with the market, that constitutes disliking the market system in the game.

People liked/disliked the old market as a package. People like dislike the new one as a package. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people that disliked the market before start trickling into this forum to brag about their market victories now.

What an incredibly self-serving argument. How convenient for you it is to lump people who don't like crafting or playing "City of Day Traders" with people who actually like doing those things but are unhappy because there's a new interface for doing so that has new issues.

People in the former category don't want to play because they somehow feel they have to use the market but often claim they can't (and don't want advice on how to). People in the latter category know how to use the market and consider doing so a big part of their play, and are depressed because it's been degraded.

I'm not sure if you need to wake up and smell the coffee, or if someone shouldn't just pour some on you.

He's never really demonstrated critical thinking which is how he ends up on so many ignore lists.

It hasn't been degraded, its been changed. There are things that are much easier to do with the new interface and other things that can be done that were completely impossible.

And once again neither of us has hard data on the breakdown on why people that didn't like the market in the game didn't. What I had said was their position was just as valid as the people who liked it.


From someone who refers to people that disagree with him as having a sense of entitlement, I'll take that for what its worth.

Very specific, quantitative descriptions have been given of how it now takes longer to perform the same activities. That is a degradation in performance. It unquestionably came with some benefits, but when those benefits did not apply to the users now degraded they are experienced as a pure degradation.

For example, I never had problems opening the old interface. There were people who did, and now they have a working interface. That's awesome, but it doesn't change the fact that the new interface is slower to use than the old one. Both I and the people who could never use the interface before would benefit (further) from the new interface being further improved to reduce the increased need for scrolling and clicking .

Being able to bid on a 10 stack of enhancements or inspirations is nice, but of far less regular utility to me than being able to see what I'm doing as I bid on salvage and sell IOs without having to constantly twiddle my scroll bars. The old market didn't need a window divider, but the new one does, and it moves to the bottom of the window every 3rd time or so I revisit the market. That's not an improvement.

I didn't address the breakdown, so while this point is true, I don't see the relevance.

Which has nothing to do with the price of tea in china. Again, you're lumping together people who don't like either the idea of the market or the current status quo between the "haves" and "have nots" with people who either like the market or at least don't mind it as a means to an end, but who dislike the changes to the new interface.

Unfortunately AF thinks it is a mere flesh wound and will demand that it is a draw at the end as Uber rides off.

Well if I couldn't open the market without crashing my game, I might, just might nothing 100% certain but yes I think I just might be biased against it.

As to taking longer to do things ? Well some things yes, others no. Its now much easier for people to find how much the crafted version of their recipe is going for and just how much it will cost to craft it. Before the new market there was no easy way to compile the costs to craft. Nothing was alphabetized which made crafted enhancements a true pain to find. The ability to resize the window to make maximum use of the available screen area is a positive pleasure.

What I see on this thread are people complaining that their ox is being gored.


Once again you get the two together as a package. Some people may dislike the abstract idea of a market others may dislike the particular implementation that we had.

I really never cared why in particular. This is a game, if people didn't like using the market to get their shiny at a reasonable rate that was enough. Now your "Haves" are complaining that it is harder for them to have, seems they have something of a sense of entitlement going.

I hope the developers read these two posts and can figure out how to improve these particular aspects.
Then, I'd say we're flying with a nice new UI.


And, I agree that this summarizes the issues against nicely:

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

You can try to lump them together all you want. I'll happily point out that doing so is moronic.

We had a piece of software. It did certain things. It now does those things using more keystrokes, more mouse motions. It's very basic for people who have a working software interface to be dissatisfied with changes to that interface that reduce their operational efficiency. This happens with all sorts of software, from loan origination applications to word processing to incident management. Those are applications where people get a certain level of productivity per time, and reducing that productivity potentially reduces their reward. Now that's a real world scenario where you're talking money. But in this game, the market and playtime itself is also something that has a measurable return on time spent. The market changes reduce that. Of course the most prolific and productive users of the market don't like that.

You can try to dress that as some sort of entitlement to suit your own arguments all you want. It's painfully obvious that it's a twisting of the reality of the situation to pretty much everyone else.

You have a piece of software it appeals to a particular segment and not at all to other segments. You change it to try and broaden its appeal and the traditional userbase dislikes it ? Shocking I say.

As to twisting reality, Not long ago there was a delightful little thread about how easy the market and how if you couldn't deal with it you just weren't putting out effort and should be ashamed of yourself. Its funny how many people that pontificated in that thread are now whining that they can't handle it. Perhaps if you want the shiny, you should be able to make the effort. Me I find myself making a few hundred mil a day either way

Without getting in the way of whatever point you're trying to make, can you or someone else elaborate here?

I might buy this argument if there was any indication that most of the market changes were actually requested. During beta there was a lot of discussion about how most of the actual user interface changes (as opposed to the functional changes, like deferring search results until the search was entered) were not known to be asked for. As far as we can tell, the interface was redesigned with new widgets from the ground up, and no one doing the redesign actually looked into the use cases in play for existing users.

In short, there's no clear indication that the changes "broadened the appeal" except for the cases where the old interface actually made it impossible to use. The changes to the interface go well beyond that change, and most of the complaints revolve around those additional changes. (It should be noted that, in beta, the original version of the new market interface did not allow you to disable autocomplete, and this feature was added back in based on player feedback.)

That thread was talking about learning about prices, what to sell, when and so forth. It was about how easy it is to make money off of other people on the market, no small number of whom are in no way being fleeced - they pay high prices willingly to have what they want as fast as possible.

Interacting with the market is the process of finding a good price to buy or sell at, or a way to make money from other players. Interacting with the market interface is a sequence of keystrokes and mouse movements required to execute a given functional activity, like "sell 7 silver salvage" or "buy level 20 Miracle:+Recovery". You have to interact with the market interface to get at the market.

The people who were complaining in those threads did not want to or could not understand how to interact with the market. That is wholly separate and distinct from changes to the functional interface for using the market. Those of us who are annoyed are annoyed because we consider the interface has become less effective.

Anyone who didn't like the market before still will not like it now.

People who wanted to market before but could not will of course prefer the new interface, because no matter how less efficient it might be for the rest of us, it's infinitely more efficient for them. That doesn't mean it couldn't or shouldn't be better.

People who thought the market was fine before have every reason to complain about it, because there is nothing they are asking for that would come at a cost to people who like the new one with one possible exception. Folks who really want a horizontal market slot list back are probably out of luck. However, I think there are things that could be done to the vertical list to restore most of the functionality that the horizontal list used to provide.

I'm picturing A_F as more like Bob from Monsters vs Aliens here.