Quality of Life Improvements - Please devs!

#1 - April 18, 2013, 10:06 a.m.

There are a lot of simple things that would make actually playing the game more fun/pleasant/less annoying/less guess based. What would you like to see?

Here is my list, with the first 3 being most important (added great suggestions from thread responses to the list):

1- Make the left mouse button target on click and the right mouse button ONLY rotate the camera on click and not target. If I lose my target one more time when trying to rotate my camera because it was over some random pet I will throw my mouse at a dev.

2- The game needs an internal CD display of some sort for on proc traits and sigil/rune effects, desperately, it would increase the skill cap in a good way by allowing you to actually see what and when it’s coming off it so you can time your own actions appropriately, as opposed to guessing and hoping for the best which is about as good of an approach to competitive gaming as it is to medication.

3- Get rid of the confirmation screen when salvaging pvp items so you can spam salvage after clicking on the salvage kit once like in pve. Please. For god sakes. It’s a skin, and I have hundreds of them, I’m sure i want to salvage it. Tag this under carpel tunnel prevention.

4- Rather than vendors and manual assignment, in spvp runes and sigils should be selected from a pvp only interface where they are coherently organized and can be set up on the go with minimal clicking.

6- The little pop up screen that tells you your pvp match is ready and asks if you want to join needs to chill the kitten out. If i say “wait” it should go away until 30 sec before the match starts not pop back up every kittening few seconds.

7- Go through all on proc based traits, runes, sigils and abilities and please include the internal CD on the tooltip for the ones that don’t have it. Thanks, appreciate it.

8- I know you like your little guy standing on the podium but can you just allow us to queue for tourneys from the pvp menu so we can do it from pve/anywhere in the mists?

9- Option to bind keys on a per character basis.

10- Option to disable skill queue (or at least lower the range).

11- Enable auto target on cast to be set on a per skill basis (sort of like auto cast is now) as opposed to all or none, so players can set movement skills to not auto target when used for mobility while still having the auto target option for other skills.

12- Regular bank access in mists.

13- Pvp vendor also sells invisible bags for a high glory cost.

14- Build templates for easy swapping.

15- Ability to move trait points in pvp without having to reset the whole tree (+5 and -5 buttons?)

17- Create some way for players to store multiple stack of dusts and orbs in the pvp locker due to the high numbers of those materials players end up with.

18- Make “interact” stomp only and tie rezing to a keybind so they are separated. Not being able to choose whether you want to rez or stomp when a downed enemy and team player are next to each other is just really… bad.

19- Toggle option to make the UI click through.

20- Tool to resize and move around individual elements of the UI.

21- Resonable penalty/reporting capability for Akitten and offline players in tourneys

22- Make a crossed swords icon pop up over teammates in the minimap when they engage in a fight, make the icon flash when the teammate is low.

23- Toggle option for canceling targeting on ground click.

24- Stop ‘When enemy is at x% HP, y happens’ traits from activating on downed players and inanimate objects (great suggestion by Harrier.9380)

Evan Lesh

#23 - April 22, 2013, 9:21 a.m.

can’t quote because of post size

1) I agree that targeting has been a point of contention around here since everyone has a different opinion on how it should work. We have not forgotten about this issue, but it is pretty low priority, unfortunately. This polish would fall under the umbrella of a combat team.

2) This would certainly be cool. There was a thread on this not too long ago. This is non-trivial polish that requires some back-end tech to be possible. This feature would also fall under the combat category.

3) This is a combination of how the reward system was designed, and the fact that we can’t have different rarity items in PvP for technical reasons. Once this is solved, each item could have a correct rarity and not always ask for salvage confirmation. This is a feature that the PvP team would be responsible for.

4) Vendors and collections were an existing way to get PvP items into the game. Ideally there should be a proper unlock system, but time and tech prevented this from happening. This is a feature owned by the PvP team.

5) I really don’t like suggestions like this, because its a complete band-aid solution to something that should just be redesigned for PvP. Why do you need to even buy free items to apply it 6 times? This is a feature owned by the PvP team.

6) This is some good polish, but it only affects these two specific collections out of the entire game. I would go so far as to say we shouldn’t need these oddly working collections in the first place (see 4). This particular part of collections is a feature owned by the PvP.

7) Haha yes. This. Polish owned by the PvP team.

8) This is a big one! Expanding our skill tooltips to buffs, traits, and items is already on our radar. No timeline. This is a feature owned by a combat team.

9) The reason for making people go to the mists is because the transition from PvE to PvP is a big one. If I new players were to queue directly into a PvP game, they’d have no idea why all their armor, weapons, and traits were different. Making this a two step process helps to eliminate this confusion. However, we realize that the flow of PvP is not efficient, and plan on working on this. This is a lot of features and polish owned by the PvP team.

10) Something I started, but never had time to get back to. This is a feature owned by me.

11) Not sure how this would work. What problem would this solve?

12) You cannot have bank access in the mists because anyone can port there for free.

13) Sounds cool. I don’t see why not. This would be a feature/polish owned by the PvP team.

14) This is a definite must for the future of the game. It is planned. It will come in time. This is a feature owned by the PvP team.

15) This requires some back-end reworks to become possible. This is a feature owned by the gameplay programmers.

16) The limit of 1 is a technical limitation.

17) This will not happen as it affects way to many things in the game. Why do you have that many things stacked at once as to need a stack size of 1000? The problem is not the stack size.

I hope this gives a rough idea of the kinds of things different teams own and the difference between a feature and polish. Anything I can do to make development more transparent is a win. A lot of people wonder why certain things aren’t “high priority” for the PvP team. Sometimes it’s because some other team is in a position to do it. Our team usually is not scheduled to work on game-wide polish or features, because we have so many PvP specific features to do!

Evan Lesh

#27 - April 22, 2013, 9:40 a.m.

Apolo.5942:
Evan Lesh.3295:
Julius.1094:
16- Ability to stack more than one piece of the same gear in locker, 2 would be ideal.

16) The limit of 1 is a technical limitation.

I thank you for your time here, but dude that is plain sad, where did you outsource the code for this to?.

Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

Evan Lesh

#46 - April 22, 2013, 10:39 a.m.

Varonth.5830:
Goorman.7916:
Evan Lesh.3295:
Collections can clearly support more than 1 item per slot, as seen elsewhere in the game. The problem is that it takes 8 times the amount of space to support more than 1, and PvP has a ton of items. In this case, “technical limitation” means size constraints.

To make collection store 2 items instead of 1 is only twice amount of space.(2bits instead of 1), and you also don’t need 2 slots for all the items, only for specific weapon types(e.g. daggers), so i suppose it is maybe 10% larger at max.Such small fix would definitely help untill fully featured unlock-system will come in place.

Well while this is true, it also requires quite a bit of programming time.

I cannot recall a database type which stores 2 bit. I can just recall BIT storing just 1 physical bit. Even standard mySQL BOOLEAN stores 1 byte.
So if you want to have 1 or 2 bit varying you probably should take some sort of selfmade data type, using CHAR.
There are currently 1901 items, so you need that many bits atleast. That is 237.625 bytes or 238 bytes/chars which is needed at the moment. At the moment they could instead use 1901 fields of the BIT type instead, and easily query each on seperately.
If you want to have certain weapons twice, you would have to start thinking about some sort of bitmask used for each type. Basically you have to make a decision whether you give that item 2 bit or not, and then ‘track’ which item is associated with the n’th bit in your char(x).
So lets assume you give those weapons, that can be dual whielded 2 bits.
Dagger, Pistols, Swords, Axe, Mace.
This would increase the amount of bits to 2174 or 271.75 bytes rounded to 272 bytes.
So we need a field for each account which stores 272 bytes. Within these 272 bytes we define that bit n or the bits n+(n+1) are used for the weapon x.
Now, when you query the database for the items within your PvP locker, you would query that 272 byte string which contains unreadable data, because you are interested in the bitstring. You would then have to run through each byte of this 272 byte array, and apply several bit masks with a & operator, at minimum 4 and up to 8 (one for each bit, if each bit represents one weapon/armor piece, or a bitmask which actually has 2 bits set to 1, if the item allows storage of more then 1). After that you have to compare if the result is true (>0) or false (0).
Ultimately not ultra hard to program, but unnecessary if you are going the scrap the system later on anyway.

Of course you also have to get a logic running which will convert the old database to the new schemata (also not that hard, as you are adding stuff, not trying to compress it further).

The other possibility, which is far easier from a programming standpoint is to use a byte/char for each field.
But as Evan said, that would require 8 times the amount of space per account for the PvP locker.

TL;DR Going from bits->bytes is a trivial change, but takes 8 times the space. Going from 1 bit to 2 bits is a much more complicated change. In any case, people shouldn’t focus on why collections only store 1 of something. People should be thinking of why we don’t have something entirely better than collections.