QoL Issues

I'd like to start this thread for people to post their top 5 I20 quality of life issue that they would like to see addressed.

Here are mine:

1. Reduce server-side lag.

Notable reliable examples include BAF escapees, canyon in ITF and mothership raids. This is particularly bad with people who have critical powers on medium to long recharge times. The UI says a power is ready to use far before the the server will allow it to be used. Sometimes powers take 2-15 extra seconds to activate after being pressed before they take effect making for very slow and annoying game play.

2. Have up to 4 powers be auto-fire instead of the current 1.

Consider making it so that at most only 1 damaging power can be set on auto to help minimize botting. For instance, my dominator would like domination, hasten, embrace of fire and destiny all on auto-fire.

3. Minimize/eliminate loading times.

I have a machine with 8 GB of memory, feel free to precache every adjacent zone and every mission that I have.

4. Reduce annoyance of cutscenes.

After watching the same cutscene 50 or so times, they get really old. Also, being able to chat with friends or do any non-combat functions would be very nice. I'd suggest an option that lets the cutscene to be played in a tiny window while allowing complete use of the regular UI except for not being able to use any power or move. Even better would be to have TFs and Trials have an option for whether to play cutscenes that the leader can select when starting.

5. Eliminate need to be in the same zone to start a trial.

Forming trial groups often takes much longer than actually running the trial and this is one of the major culprits. Being in a full zone while trying to get other members in is extremely painful.

1. Fix lag or stop designing encounters that invite it. If a map can't handle 24 people at a certain stage of a trial, change the trial. Period. The BAF becomes utterly un-fun at one point almost every time. Rikti raids are unbearable, etc.

2. Delete cut scenes or let us vote to skip them (like Guild Wars does.) I mean c'mon, these cut scenes are lame as it is. No voice acting, they use the same generic emotes. They pretty much look universally stupid.

3. Add a "backdoor" to maps so that escorting hostages isn't so painfully boring. You rescue them, show them the back dooor, mission over. Using my fingers, I can count the number of fun escort missions on a fist. Meanwhile, I don't have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times they've been painfully frustrating (hell, half of the captives don't know how to use elevators, STILL.)

4. EVERY mission objective should be audible. Hostages should scream for help. Destructible objects and "actionable" objects should make noise like typical glowies. Running around a map looking for random objectives isn't fun. At least if they make noise it's a little easier.

5. I don't know if it counts as QoL or not, but balance blast sets. I hate the fact that I can only really enjoy Fire because all of the other ones have such glaring holes. Obviously the devs are OK with the power of Fire, so in my mind the others should be worked on the bring them to its relative level of damage output so we can have a little more variety in what blast sets people play. Perhaps the only other blast set that doesn't need buffing is Sonic, as the power of its secondary effect may actually make up for it's lack of damage output, unlike any other of the sets.

Something simple that bugs me especially because I never hear anyone else complaining about it : have the "Memorized" recipes tab closed up by default like every other recipe, rather than opened up as it is now.

Rework the Powers Window.

Let us resize the window.

Separate the powers into tabs.

'Archetype' for Primary and Secondary pools.

'Pool' for Power Pools and Ancillary/Patron Pools

'Temporary' for (duh...) temp powers. And display temp powers in 3 columns, to reduce the massive amount of scrolling that'd be required otherwise.

Also, give it a 'Most Recent' Tab and let you activate powers from the window instead of having to drag them to a tray first, so that people can easily find the damn Molecular Acid and Pacification Grenades in Lambda and use them with minimum faffing about.

That'd be the biggest help with QoL that I can think of at the moment.

Oh, and I almost forgot.

Make the damn 'Friends' Window remember how you had it set up.

Having to Open Friends, Switch to Global Friends, then having to sort the names and click the little arrow in the lower right, every damn time gets tedious fast...

1. Allow Origin Temporary powers to be used in iTrials.

Want to touch on one or two here:

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Originally Posted by Dr_Dismemberment I'd like to start this thread for people to post their top 5 I20 quality of life issue that they would like to see addressed. Here are mine: 1. Reduce server-side lag. Notable reliable examples include BAF escapees, canyon in ITF and mothership raids. This is particularly bad with people who have critical powers on medium to long recharge times. The UI says a power is ready to use far before the the server will allow it to be used. Sometimes powers take 2-15 extra seconds to activate after being pressed before they take effect making for very slow and annoying game play.

/signed. I'm really surprised they didn't address this before (or while) adding the current two trials. It's been an issue for years, since people did Hami and costume contests. Not sure what *needs* to be done, but it really, really needs attention.

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2. Need up to 3 powers to be auto-fire instead of the current 1.

Likely won't happen, as an anti-botting measure.

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4. Reduce annoyance of cutscenes. After watching the same cutscene 50 or so times, they get really old. Also, being able to chat with friends or do any non-combat functions would be very nice. I'd suggest an option that lets the cutscene to be played in a tiny window while allowing complete use of the regular UI except for not being able to use any power or move. Even better would be to have TFs and Trial have an option for whether to play cutscenes that the leader can select when starting.

I *believe* we've been told part of the reason we can't is that these aren't pre-rendered cutscenes (such as in Guild Wars or Aion.) The models are there and running through a script. When (for instance) Breakneck jumps down and rushes whatsisface, the NPC model is actually doing that.

The solution for this would have to start with creating pre-rendered videos as opposed to the scripting they use now.

Tiny bit of work...

As for my five, QOL specific:
1. Lag, as mentioned above.
2. Let me manually move contacts (like the architect studio manager) I'm not actually interested in to "inactive." Seriously. I've done the tutorial. Leave me alone.
3. Recipes - keep "Memorized" closed unless I open it, thanks.
4. Let me hide and reorganize salvage tabs. I have 280 characters or so. I'm reasonably sure at least 200 of them have no base salvage at this point.
5. Labels/whiteboards in bases. The MOTD is nice. Labels and such would be more useful.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Fix the damn prompt windows for "Hide Useful Salvage Warning" and "Hide Large Auction House Fee Warning".
SERIOUSLY! We have similar prompts for like 10 other options and the rest of them work perfectly. You can turn the damn things off and they STAY OFF. For these two to still be malfunctioning makes the programmers and managers look . . . let's be polite: less than competent.

Make power animations work all the time. Sometimes they simply don't play. The power activates and the effect goes off, but there is no animation. So I try to do it again, since I think it didn't work.

Have a secondary group of 'downgraded graphics settings'. I accept they can't simply make the lag in raids go away, but I'm not going to go into the menu and change a dozen settings. Give us two memorized groups of settings: Regular and Raid. Give us a /slash command to set them.

- Pop Up Message settings should stick to new characters after you change it the first time. I really dislike getting those on every single character I make. I believe the desired behavior happens with certain settings like seeing Enemy private messages.

- I'd like the default tab order to be set to something like All, Invention, Special, Incarnate, Event, Component, Base and then let us drag and rearrange if further order customization is desired by a player.

I agree that we need to be able to set more than one power on Auto fire. For example, my DM/SR scrapper needs to have both Hasten and Practiced Brawler on auto. My DM/Regen scrapper needs Hasten and Dull Pain on auto.

But having 3 like the OP said is good too.

Reading all these great responses, really made it obvious that I have another set of 5 QoL issues that I'd really like to see improved.

1. Eliminate time to redraw weapons.

Many class combinations are made inferior to completely unworkable because of weapon redraw issues.

2. Don't root during power activation animation or allow ability to cancel power activation.

Instead of rooting during a power activation animation, make it so that if you move, then the power is canceled instead. Maybe make this optional for people who are used to the old way. Clearly having some mechanism to cancel a power mid-flight is a good thing and movement is a pretty convenient way of doing it. An alternative would be to keep root, but make something like the jump key cancel the current power so that you can move immediately. This would probably make some long casting powers somewhat viable.

3. Another vote for improving the respec process.

The respec process is extremely linear, slow and frustrating. Making it behave much more like Mids would be a *huge* upgrade (really just have someone sit down and copy the interface or hire the current developer as a consultant). Taking Mids data chunks and trying to make a build as close to that as possible while allowing you to modify it would be wonderful. Having a respec option that just lets you loot the current build quickly would be great. Don't auto-fill the trays after a respec. Better yet, remember the placement of powers before the respec and for any common powers after the respec put the power in the exact same spot.

4. Another vote for having the ability to invite offline members to an SG to make it easier and safer to invite alts.

5. Another vote for fixing the "Hide Useful Salvage Warning" option.

Add "League window buff display" options.

Add a "show only buffs from self" option to the buff displays. This would help buffing characters, since everybody is running a million toggles and I can't tell at a glance if your Speed Boost has expired and I need to refresh it. The icons also take up half the screen.

Add various power effect suppression settings so low-end systems don't have to render every single power activating every single time. This becomes insane in a full league.

Stop resetting my League window to vertical every time I join a league. I like it horizontal. Keep it that way.

Another thousand votes for fixing the "Hide useful salvage warning" option. I polled some of my friends, and they polled their friends, and we all agreed it's annoying. Well, ok, I didn't, but I'm sure they would.

And #6 because I'm contrary: Add an "abandoned lab" near the market in Kings Row, and a lab near the market in Talos. Or add a Market in Founders' Falls.