I hate the AH UI

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?

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

My only major complaint about the UI is that you have to scroll down the 'Bidding' tab every single time you wish to cancel the most recent bid. Makes for very tedious bid-creeping.

Still, with auto-complete, the tabs, and large bidding fee confirmation, it's miles better than what it used to be.

Personally I have hated the UI for this game since the begining and still do hate it. It is the worst of all the MMOs I have played. That being said, the game is still fun and they have made vast improvements in the game since the begining.

Here is the thread you're looking for.

And within that thread, someone even consolidated a list of everything folks were griping about. A few items were "fixed" recently, but there are still some outstanding issues.

Bottom line, the UI is still pretty sucky.

.

1. No. If only for your chat windows and interaction with other players.
2. meh
3. I actually enjoy the auto complete function most of the time when it works, and for the times when I don't I can just disable it. BUT the diferrence in names between recipes and crafted IOs drives me nuts. Makes searching a drag and sometimes it even makes some things not show up at all. I really, REALLY wish they would fix that. It looks sloppy if nothing else.

I've adapted to the new auction house UI, though I still dislike it compared to the old one. In my opinion the only new useful features are the ability to bid on stacks of enhancements (but not store or list stacks, wtf!?) and the "find salvage used in this recipe" button. My current gripes:

* Auction-related settings are not retained: I can turn off autocomplete or resize the bottom half of the market UI or disable the salvage warning or disable the listing fee warning and the next time I go to the market everything will be returned to default.

* Bids still autofill: I thought they were removing the autofill "feature" with I18. Just because I bid 2 million on a Platinum doesn't mean I want to bid the same amount on a Boresight.

* Color-coded "all" tab: bring back the color-coding of the old market UI so I can tell apart items easier. The tabs are nice, yes, but when I'm in the "all" tab I have to take extra time to look and see what a given item is doing (bidding/selling/sold/bought/sitting there).

* "Find enhancement" or "find recipe" button: this would be an invaluable tool because it would mean I wouldn't have to dig through a huge list of stuff just to see whether the enhancement sells for more or less than the recipe I've got.

* Cannot sort searches with the left-hand categories: the old market UI let me narrow my search down to only salvage, or recipes, or enhancements, depending on which item I'd clicked on the left-hand side of the UI. The new one doesn't do this, and instead just lists all of whatever I've clicked.

The autocomplete implementation is truly bizarre in that it's not backspace compatible and it is in an exclusive OR relationship with autosearch. The only way to turn off autosearch is to turn on autocomplete. The only way to turn off autocomplete is to turn on autosearch.

Autosearch is a huge resource hog, and I would like to turn it off, but to do so I have to use the autocomplete that interferes with retyping the name of the enhancement, which you have to do constantly because, as mentioned, the names are inconsistent.

A great example is what happens if you want to search for other levels of an item:

Put recipe in
Search for it
Press backspace and start to edit search text
Be stopped because if you attempt to backspace the autocomplete rewrites
Turn off autocomplete, which forces autosearch on
Be inundated by tons of repeated pointless searches as you backspace
Find the recipes at other levels
Not find enhancements due to their names being different
Delete most of it so you only have the set name
Be inundated by hundreds of items
Scroll randomly to find the name of the recipe is 'Rech/End'
Scroll randomly to find the name of the enhancement is 'Endurance/Recharge'

Oh, and the fact that you can't highlight text and then delete the text you have highlighted by pressing the delete key like any sensible system drives me up a frickin' wall. No, I do not want the cursor to move to the end of my entry when I press the delete key, I want to delete the text.

Along with all the points other people have mentioned about how the interface actually works, my single biggest complaint about the new UI v. the old is that I find it so ridiculously laggy. I understand that some people got horrible lag with the old system and the new one fixed it, and I'm very happy for them, but I find it incredibly frustrating to use, now.

The most annoying part it that most of the time it's clearly the UI, not the connection to the AH server. I can SEE the transactions happening just fine in the chat window, while the UI lags and flails helplessly around and pops illusory items in and out of the list and attaches sale prices to the wrong item. And I grit my teeth and try to do everything sloooooooooowly, and then I get careless and list an Apocalypse Damage for 226000 inf and ARGH RAAAAAAAAAGE SMAAAAAASH.

Ahem. I feel better, now, thanks.

Personally I'd also like to see all the AH/BM's inside, in power-dampening locations, though the only weakness I see with that is we don't even have inherent movement bonuses or Sprint allowed, which is a bit of a downer for me as I feel like I am practically walking (though not quite as slow as the Walk power).

But yeah, as far as the interface, I think it's better than it was, but it still has room for improvement. I'd like to see smaller icons if possible, and allow me to see more on-screen at a time. I run at 1920x1200 and I still feel like there's not enough room for the market UI plus my own salvage and recipe trays.