Hating the new market interface so far...

Okay, I had another response up here and took it down because it was not constructive.

Let me try to reiterate the point I initially was trying (and apparently failed to an nth degree) to make.

My initial response was not to the later points that the devs "eventually" listen to people. My use of the fact that they were listening during the changes made in beta was merely a highlight that that the devs were listening all along. Whether you feel they were or not.

My original point was disagreement with the conceit that they put together the initial interface in a vacuum of player input.

Interface design is a a VERY involuted process. Initial iterations are pretty universally craptastic. Even with direct input from end users.

Why?

1: Implementing features isn't always straightforward. Even with well written dissertations on what is desired.

2: Some of the things desired aren't always spelled out or neatly and exactingly defined.

3: Sometimes people change their minds about certain things.

"I want feature A".
"Here ya go."
"God! That sucks AND is useless! Maybe what I REALLY wanted was A+Tweakage, or maybe B."

4: Coming up with an initial interface is a piece of cake. Tweaking it into something the users actually want to use is where all the screaming, and beating of heads against walls comes in.

5: Until you actually get it into the hands of end users to play with, you can't get real, cogent feedback, nor do they have the facilities available to them to provide it.

In the initial interface I saw in closed beta, I saw conscious attempts to rectify things that people had been griping about in the original market UI and deliver things that had been talked about.

Yeah, the initial results were horrific and needed serious work (and in some cases still do). But I'll be damned if you're going to tell me the devs just pulled it all out of their *** with no user input.

I apologize if you thought (or still think) I was saying something else. I'm not always as verbally precise in my rhetoric as I should be and shouldn't take it out on you when you misunderstand.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

A few people have already touched on this point, but I thought I'd echo it. I was frankenslotting some of my toons last night when the thought popped up momentarily that the market interface was a PitA to the point where it's almost not worth the effort. Think about that for a second.

It's always an effort to IO up your toon vs. just buying SOs or whatever, and I've always thought this was the biggest barrier to entry player base that simply ignores IOs in general (and let's face it, there are a LOT of 50s out there that don't have a single IO bonus in their power window). Those of us that know & care about the wonders of IOs (whether to frankenslot or go for bonuses) know full well it's worth the effort to craft recipes, buy & sell, earn through drops, etc and get our toons powered well beyond mere SO level.

Now, if crafting veterans look at the new interface as being (almost) not worth the effort, how the hell are new players going to approach it? Again, I do not think the current interface problems are lrn2play (lrn2use) in nature, but more of ergonomics and poor design. What about those "casual" players that barely used the old market? Are they going to want to learn a whole new system or are they going to just chuck it all?

As for marketeering, I'm just glad I'm well & retired w/my fat nest egg full of Fulms. There's no way I'd try to make money off of this system now. I realize this is a point of celebration to many who hate ebil. Your day may have finally arrived, but at what cost?

Good Points: It's really fast
...

Bad Points: Uhm....everything else?

Chalk me up for 'prefered the old UI, even if it was a three legged mule.' It worked. Why change the bit that worked great to fix the one thing (albeit the thing that was very crippling for people with slower connections, I know it used to be the same for me) that didn't work?

Devs, please...can we have this changed back?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I like the new features of this new market UI, however it is clunky, cluttered and ugly.

I'll point out a few things I'd like to see changed once I get home and am able to fool around with it but the above has been my experience so far.

Oh, yes and the new market ate 200mil of my infamy. It's an insiginifanct amount I know, but it was annoying and I'm still having market burps where I will accidently purchase more than one or have to click "get" repeatedly for it to appear in my recipes tray.

Wanted to throw in my two cents on disliking the new interface.

Having your last entered bid show up in your next item annoys me to no end. I may not want to bid 56,333,222 on a Temporal Analyzer, you know?

The vertical listing rakes at my soul like a million boy bands on infinite replay. I dearly miss the old interface with everything listed horizontally where I could see it all at a glance.

It seems clunky overall but I am getting used to it. Having the market down for a period and the new interface contribute to less playtime for me, oddly enough. I never realized how much marketing had supplanted my gameplay until now. I'll adapt and use the new interface, of course. A big plus is that it makes it easier on low-end systems, so some good has come out of this whole ordeal.

Issue 17 to Marketeers as Issue 13 to PvPers? Time will tell.

After using the new market UI for a bit, I'm thinking about giving up on the whole IO system. Not only the UI isn't fun, but it's frustrating to a point where I feel the negatives outweight the positives.

According to pohsyb in closed beta, much of the reason the new market interface is faster than the old one is because of the autocomplete search feature. As I understand it this feature simply checks your input against a list of items that exist in the game, rather than trying to load the history for every single item as you open it. You can turn off the autocomplete option (as I've done, because with it on I cannot do partial text searches for specific items) but it's still incredibly clunky.

I dislike the new market interface - not as much as the initial version during closed beta, but it's still pretty fugly. I'm just concerned that changes won't be made for quite a while simply because once things go live they tend to stay as-is for a good long time.

The "save last entered bid" feature (using that term loosely here) needs to go away. Unrelated but I've accidentally listed an item other than the one I was intending to sell so I ended up spending 65 million in listing fees because the items that got posted weren't the items I had selected. It'd be nice if the items in the "all" tab were color-coded like the old system so I could tell at a glance which ones where selling, bidding, bought, sold, or just sitting there, instead of having to stop and look at each item to check its status. The ability to use the left-hand lists (recipes, salvage, enhancements, etc.) as sort filters instead of search starters is a necessary change because their current function is completely different than how they used to work. After I've done a search (say, for Thunderstrike pieces) and want to narrow them down to just enhancements, I have to scroll through the list of results to find the enhancements - I can't click "enhancements" on the left side of the window, or it starts an entirely new and unrelated search.

Completely changing functionality, especially when your users are used to a certain way of doing things, is never a good design decision.

I'm hoping that the "clunkiness" I find in navigating the new interface goes away after I get better with it.

In the meantime, one thing that bugs me the most (other than the obvious bugs already gone over in this thread) is that if I hit "info" on a stored recipe, then go over and click "enhancement" along the lefthand side, i'd like the appropriate crafted enhancement to appear in the search window instead of putting the word "enhancement" up there in the search string box and searching on that word. ugh.

Oh, and the ability to minimize the expanded views. Grrrr

On a tangentially related note: now that I have a reason to send emails, I'm getting freshly acquainted with just how utterly terrible the multi-line text box widget is. It's shamefully bad. I have no idea how people manage to write mission architect arcs using this thing.

You know what's funny?

Waaaaay back in I9's closed beta, I remember thinking, "Wow, the market's interface is about 75 quadrillion times better than the Arena's."

When I first looked at the new interface in OB, I thought, "Sooooo busy."

My second thought was, "Sooooo busy, but ... ummm ... damn ... I really do miss having one bar at the bottom where I can: see what I have for sale; what I've sold; what I'm storing; visual reference for how many open slots I have; drag items from my inventory onto that bar; grab all my inf; make sure if I'm dumping big piles of salvage that I'm consistently pricing everything. All in one freakin' place."

I can see tabs being useful for organizing, say, hundreds of badges.

But not for dealing with 20 on-going transactions.

Interface is clunky, but I'll get used to it after a while. I can't do things fast anymore, big whoop.

Biggest problem I have with the new market is that it's causing ragequits left and right(combined with the other various things that came with I17). Not that it's unjustified to do so. Just hoping they do something and do it quick.