An Unofficial Paragon Market UI Feedback Thread

Ghost Falcon has been very actively lately discussing the Paragon Market's UI, its shortcomings, and possible improvements in assorted threads on the forums. (Many thanks, GF!) For the sake of consolidation, here are a couple of his most recent posts to serve as a starting point for discussing what we players would like from it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ghost Falcon I am always open to suggestions to improve the Paragon Market {...}. When I've had time, I've gone back and fixed some things, re-arranged some areas, improved keyword searches, etc. Hit me up via PM or I'll start a thread over in the Beta Forums to get some actionable changes done. If it's just re-ordering or re-categorizing, those changes might be easy. If the feedback is about the visual layout, then changes may not be possible or feasible.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ghost Falcon Quote: Originally Posted by Arcanaville I would bet my salary against any devs' salary they lose a material amount of sales simply because players can't *find* the item they would have bought if they saw it with reasonable effort, or because the store is so unwieldy many players give up bothering to use it at all. We recognize that there are nesting / store category hierarchy issues (like trying to find a SBE appropriate for your character), which is one of the reasons why I've moved things around *slowly* so that players don't get lost with constant changes. The Wishlist feature definitely helps mitigate refinding an item. One challenge is that we can only display so many items on the main page, and that the menus have to be clicked through so many different ways to find an item. Another challenge is that we've been sensitive about adding too many categories to the left-hand nav of the main store. I'm not sure if many players remember, but when Freedom launched, we launched with a newer version of the store that was not used during Freedom Beta. The old store was terrible, and the current store was so much better..., but again, we definitely realize that there is room for improvement. I am *very* open to suggestions to make it friendlier. When someone mentions the store, I just mentally see a matrix of category numbers, back end skus, icon ids, tags and field cells.

Since an official red-name thread in the Beta Forums on this topic hasn't been started yet, one here in general discussion could serve as a sounding board in the meantime.

For instance, what would people like out of an improved "New" tab or a "Featured" tab? What would make searching for items easier in the UI? Should Paragon Studios go back to the original third-party developer, or should they bring the project in house? What's the provervial Most Wanted UI element in the current version of the Paragon Market?

Here are a few enhancements I would appreciate.

• "New Items" tab: list most recently added items (50? 100?) in reverse order of date added to market
• "Limited Time Offers" tab: show all items or bundles with an expiration date for availability (Valentine pack, Halloween costumes, snowball power, etc), ordered with nearest expiration first
• Visibly tag market entries as to attributes: Character bound, Account wide, Tradeable within account, Tradeable in Market, Consumable, Premium required, VIP required, etc.
• Unbundled items: if single costume pieces or emotes are also included in a bundle, indicate this in the item description
• "Already owned" tag: grey out or flag account-wide items already owned
• "Already owned" feedback: if the system can't determine that we already own an item prior to checkout, then at the very least the error message should be a little friendlier than "quantity exceeds maximum allowed."
• In-game checklists: provide a way (via the Collections interface?) to see all purchased items, grouped by type

When playing CoX in 800x600 (yes, my computer sucks) the market doesn´t fit on the screen.
In game I can´t buy stuff as the 'Place Order' button isn´t displayed and when accessing the market via the character select screen I get like two (maybe even three) pixels of the top bar.

@Redcap

Upgrading an item or a storage unit shouldn't be as complicated as, "Is this item upgrade seven, or item upgrade eight?" I get that this is rather a functionality/tech thing, but it would just be easy to say, "Increase CH Storage" or "Unlock Another Costume Slot." Plus, it would remove all the duplicates from the marketplace and clean things up quite a bit. I gave up on unlocking extra enhancement storage for a long time, until I realized I was trying to purchase "Extra Enhancement Storage" and not "Extra Enhancement Storage II." When you get into something like extra salvage slots, or extra market slots, it's a nightmare.

I hate the navigation menu. I don't understand why there are tabs at all, if everything vanishes and opens up new tabs when you touch anything. There is no point to organizing it with tabs, unless you can clearly see the submenus under each item. Clicking an item should open a submenu, instead of navigating you to a completely different page. I hate getting lost.

Similarly, both NEW and FEATURED items seem to be completely random. What's the difference? Sometimes something I want isn't in either one.

And the only thing worse than not being able to tell whether or not you've bought anything, is accidentally mixing that into a bunch of stuff you want to get. The times I have had five or six things up for sale, and haven't been able purchase them because I magically already have one of the items and just get a constant "quantity exceeds maximum allowed" just...makes me sad.

We shouldn't be allowed a shopping basket if we have to order everything individually to circumvent that issue.

More than anything- If devs can't make the system hide what I already have or am already entitled to (VIP status freebies), let me hide them. Sifting through the mess as it is just isn't user-friendly. The costume pieces that I have yet to buy are buried by the pieces I already have.

The Market interface works as if 'someone' went to HR, or whomever, and said, "Get me someone to do ecommerce," and left. And whomever/HR had no idea what ecommerce was, and googled it, and then threw out a job query based on their search, which had little to no relationship to what 'someone' wanted, and probably included keywords like AJAX and MMO. (I've experienced this many times in looking for a job; whomever writes the job descriptions is far out of touch with what is really wanted or even available to ask for (ten years of AJAX experience, really?!))

So it's fairly pretty up front, and nothing works like users expect it to.

I'm throwing in my thoughts here on what should be changed.

- Pagination: needs to operate sensically, as on a blog, or on the forums. Example: << 5 10 11 12 13 14 15 20 >>

- back button, or 'return to shopping': I don't care how you label it, but it should be smart enough to take the shopper back to the last page they were on, not just the last category they were in.

- shopping history: it needs to exist. Either by removing the 'buy' button from items already purchased, by removing those items from the listing altogether, or (simplest) linking to a list of the exact items. That last is a seriously slap-dash way of handling the issue, but it's a sight better than the gaping void right now.

- search: great, it exists. It's touchy, it doesn't often return coherent results, and it apparently ONLY searches keywords which aren't visible to the shopper. It should be searching item title, item description, item category, and those invisible keywords.

- categorization: this is one of my personal Big Deals. It's great that you don't want to be constantly adding new cats to the side; this is a relief. You've got good categories that cover just about everything anyway. So why do I have to drill all the way down in a category to see any items at all? If I click 'powers', I should be able to see ALL the powers, sets and temp and vanity, available to me for purchase. Only if I then /choose/ to click a smaller sub-category should they then be divided. If I want to take a look at all the individual costume pieces in the Market, I should be able to do that. I shouldn't /have/ to drill all the way down to 'belts', then go back up and then down to 'shoulders', etc. This is egregiously bad in categories which have a small population to begin with, like Powers. Usually after about two clicks, a shopper's gonna think there's nothing in that category anyway, and move on.


Like Arcanaville and others have pointed out, Every Single One of these issues (with the exception of the 'back' button) can be simply alleviated with the appropriate query to the database(s), formatted in a coherent way. The current interface renders 90% of the useful shoppers' queries inaccessible.

And as cool as it is to have the market available in-game, I honestly think you'll get an increase of users, as well as much greater flexibility, putting the Market fully online. Let us access it via a website. Once you've tweaked it out there, THEN hack it for whatever browser window the game uses.

Build to best specs first, then modify as needed for programs that suck. This acts like it was built during the height of the browser wars.

I know the third party that built the back-end behind the Paragon Market.

I know the third party has built some amazing markets in other games.

I have NO IDEA why Paragon Studios accepted the crap that this third party shoveled in their laps when they have done so much better for other games.

What really needs to be done is for Paragon Studios to call the third party on their bad designs and tell them to give them a product that works appropriately, because what Paragon got was obviously not what Paragon asked for. Unless Paragon asked for a broken market, in which case, shame on Paragon.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

#1 on my list:

The "shop" button should not be so close to the dot to click the salvage window closed/near the edge of the tab.

Way too many times have I accidentally clicked the store open then had the game freeze up when I only wanted to peek at my salvage or drag the salvage window elsewhere.