Tooltips ??? what happened ???

01/24/2012 11:20 AMPosted by JAFAR

Please integrate a toggle check box in the options menu for advanced/simple tooltip defaults.

While I'd argue that holding CTRL to view Advanced tooltips is only a mild inconvenience (at worst), this is a reasonable request that I'm happy to pass on to our designers. :)

As for why we made the change? We wanted to make ability selection a bit more intuitive for newer players. It's important to keep in mind that not everyone who's going to play Diablo III will be veterans of the franchise, or even similar action RPGs. Even though the game's mechanics are fairly straightforward, the detailed information provided in Advanced tooltips can sometimes be a bit overwhelming if you're not already familiar with what all the terms mean.

For example, this:

Attack a single target with a series of rapid punches

...is a little cleaner and easier to understand at a glance than:

Unleash a series of extremely fast punches that deal 100% weapon damage as Lightning. Every third hit deals damage to all enemies in front of you and knocks them back a short distance.

Damage as lightning? What does that mean? Does that mean I need to collect lightning damage? Does that mean I'm getting gear with the wrong stats on it? (Etc.)

Simplified tooltips are intended to make it easier for novice players to understand what each of their character's abilities do, as well as help them better and more quickly differentiate between abilities that are meant for single targets vs. groups vs. situational powers. That said, for more knowledgeable players, to whom detailed information is more useful, Advanced tooltips are still available with the push of a button.

01/24/2012 02:21 PMPosted by D3BETA

Are there plans to update the class pages with these simplified tooltips?

Don't know off-hand, but that's a good question. I'll find out.

01/24/2012 02:55 PMPosted by Lichloathe

I think you're grossly exaggerating how confused a new player has the potential to be.

You'd be surprised at how alien some basic concepts and mechanics can be to players who've never had any experience with action RPGs before. I actually had to spend a lot of time explaining skills and abilities to my mom and grandmother when they first started playing the Diablo III beta. It wasn't about intelligence, just about familiarity -- they had little to no exposure to the terminology we use throughout the game, so there was definitely some confusion around what each of their character's skills did (or could do). I'm sure they could have eventually figured out things on their own, with the help of the Advanced tooltips, but it would have definitely taken longer and I don't know if they would have been engaged as quickly.

Of course, that's just a personal anecdote, so it's not representative of an entire population of players, but I can definitely see the value in providing tooltips that aren't as technical as the ones we currently have.



Now, that said...

01/24/2012 02:55 PMPosted by Lichloathe

I think the problem here is that some of the original tooltips were just written poorly so that they appear to be more confusing than they actually are.

01/24/2012 02:46 PMPosted by D3BETA

I'd prefer a toggle checkbox in options somewhere, but at least add a line to the bottom of the mouseover tooltips to tell me how to see the useful information.

...these are both fair points which I'll be happy to bring up along with the request for a option for an Advanced tooltips toggle. Thanks for the good feedback. :)

However, I don't find the request unreasonable, one I've heard voiced by pretty much every beta tester, and I see no reason for a Blizzard employee to be so condescending and snotty about it.

And yet we're told to give feedback. Why? To have it thrown in our face?

I don't find the requests unreasonable, either. There's been a lot of great feedback in this thread.

To follow up on a couple of things that I said I would in this thread:

• We're looking into adding a toggle option for Advanced/Simplified tooltips. We don't know when or if this feature will make into the beta, but it is an option we want to include.
  
• We like Simplified tooltips being enabled by default, but agree that finding out how to view Advanced tooltips currently isn't very clear. We don't think it's a bad idea to provide instructions through some sort of hint or loading screen tip and are considering adding something to that effect in the future.
  
• Simplified tooltips have been adopted in the Game Guide. For each class, Simplified tooltips will display on in the Active Skills page. Individual skill pages, though (ex: Bash), will display the Advanced tooltip.