Who destroyed my team window?

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.

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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?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Your UI problems might be addressable by checking your options, maybe. Stretching isn't an issue for me in widescreen, and the font size problem might be related.

There are other problems you will also discover, like having your UI scale set at 100% will restrict how far you can resize certain windows (team screen or otherwise).

Bug: If your new-UI team window is attached to the chat window (y'know, like how it is by default) the scaling goes completely out of whack and particularly the power icons get twice as big.

However, this problem doesn't exist if you unattach the team window, or switch the "classic" team UI (which is actually a mimic of the old one using the new UI code, rather than wholly the classic version...), which can be found under Options -> Miscellaneous.

Nope, for the moment it's directly tied to being docked. It doesn't unbug if you switch it out, I'm pretty sure.

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

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I wish the classic team option really worked for keeping the look of the old team window.

I expect I'll get used to it - like the UI on market house, but still feels bleh yuck to me atm.

Even the new "classic" team window is ugly. There's no way in hell I'm using the new one though. This very much falls into the "What the hell were you thinking?" department. Right click on a teammate and it's a completely different look for what pops up compared to what the new UI is. I can understand a new UI if the functionality of it changed, but it didn't. It changed for the sake of change.

I want to pitch in with the folks who both don't like the new team window and are annoyed that the "classic" is actually different from the original.

Quite honestly, the new team interface is possibly the ugliest interface I've seen in this game, and there have been some doozies.

I find it annoying that the alternative isn't actually the original, or at least isn't closer to the original design. I am not going to lose sleep over that complaint, I just consider it irritating. I would be spitting angry if I was stuck with the "new" interface, though.

Count me in with the people who find the "new Coke Classic" window fugly...

Another vote for "What the heck were they thinking?" here. It's change for change's sake and ugly to boot.

I've come to terms with the new team window... it's not that terribad, at least IMO, but...



WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO THE CHAT BOX!?!?!


I can understand stretching it to make room for "League" and "LFG", but on my screen there's more than a centimeter of blank space between tab "4" and the down arrow that collapses the window.

Thing is, I use that area. Before, the area between chat and power trays was filled with either my combat attributes, or my pets window. Where once, the chat box ended at the "o" in Tohit, it now slides into the numbers.

I'm afraid to log into my MM to see how much of their henchmen's health bars are covered by the chat box.


The ONLY reasons I can think of for why it's so much longer than before is either...

• Bad design

• Leaving room for more additions to the chat/team windows

Nothing to add to the topic, save that I dislike the new team/chat window since beta and my opinion hasn't changed one bit. Getting used to it, sure, just like you have to get used to losing your eyesight, having back pains or going to the washroom often as you get older, but that doesn't make any of it enjoyable.

So far, the hardest challenge in the iTrials on 1280x800 has been juggling with the windows (with a close second one being dealing with the awful graphic lag from the praetorian maps). I'm willing to bet not a single dev has ever tried playing on anything less than a 22 inch monitor and a rig that can run Crysis on max.

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The change is actually making this impossible to play for my wife. She's an albino and, as such, has absolutely horrible vision and very specific problems having to do with a lack of ability to truly focus. Bright lights give her migraines, flashy things on the side of screen screw with her head, and weird color contrasts are problematic. Up until I20, the game was good enough that it wasn't a problem.

Now, though...

The new minimum size for the chat box is ridiculous because she has to play at a resolution of 1024x768 and at this size, the chat window takes up at least a third of the screen. She can't reduce the scale of this window, or she can't read the text since font size is tied to window scale (as I said, she has horrible vision -- she's actually considered legally blind, even though she can still see).

Then there're the colors of the team UI, both old and new. They're bright, very bright, and the fonts are horrible to read (especially the green on green of the classic font). And the buff icons are gigantic now, and regularly stretch across the entire screen.

I understand the need to increase the minimum size to fit the League link, but they overshot it by a fairly significant bit of space. Furthermore, it's a poor UI decision to make their interface dependent on the number of items in it like this - this menu should be changed to a dropdown with checkbox circles, like the minimap has. Or something.

As it, she simply can't play, and that makes me sad.

Just as a point of reference, I dug these out of the I20 beta forum over here http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...8&postcount=39:





Did they, like, just ... misplace the color values for the old UI? Did they toss out the old one without keeping any screenshots or logging into then-Live?

And I'd like to note that at least for me, that second image is muted compared to what I see on Live currently.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

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.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.