My minstrel is now at level 13 on Lamorak and, after months away from the game, I could fill pages and pages of comments about the problems and quirks that the game still has and my point of view about the direction where it should go. So I put all this aside to gather up a small list of fixes and new features that (as CCP defined them) I can call “quality of life fixes”. Meaning that they aren’t much about opinable changes but just direct and sensible improvements that could be accepted positively by everyone (without considering the difficulty of the implementation, though).
They also follow a principle that I think should be always applied to every game and that is a recurring fault in DAoC: when a new patch is ready to be released publicly, one of the devs should browse through each fix and new feature to see if it passes a simple test. If the test is passed the fix can be approved and published, if the check isn’t passed the new feature/fix must go back in development and adjusted accordingly.
The test is simple: a player should always be able to understand a change or use a new feature without reading the patch notes.
You’d think this is obvious but you would never believe how many times, even recently, this simple rule has been broken. It’s important that EVERY part of a game is directly accessible. Noone should be required to read manuals, FAQs, Grab Bags, spoiler sites and 3rd party programs to enjoy the game at its best. This because, shifting Lum’s quote here below, “a vast majority of your customers doesn’t have access to or doesn’t share that knowledge”.
Previous part here.
My proposed additions/fixes (for now):
– There are now visual marks for quest givers but they do not appear when you move between the steps of a quest already started or when you have to return to an NPC, which is a big usability issue in the actual quest system. I suggest to add a new mark that should appear in these situations and similar to the one already used but as a vertical glow around the legs of the NPC, like an aura that will be easily noticeable from the distance.
– I noticed that the tooltips on the stats often do not update correctly when the numbers go above the caps. Aside fixing this problem I suggest to add a tooltip to the hitpoints (to show also here the default value and the cap) and to the other fields like WeapSkill, WeapDam, Armor, to add informations about how these are used in the ruleset and on what they depend. These new informations could be added as new tooltips that expand themselves showing the new informations after a few seconds the mouse hovers on a field (like it happens on Paradox games, ask Lum). With some radical work the delving process of spells, skills and objects should be completely replaced by mousehover tooltips.
– NEW (slipped from my list): Add a mark to the map window to show not only the position of the character but also its direction. Maybe even tooltips to show the names of players in the party. Add the possibility to select maps freely, without having to be in the specific zone.
– NEW (slipped from my list): Instead of forcing everyone to click multiple times on the loot bag in order to get each item (which is extremely clunky and annoying), just modify the interface so that one click only (right click maybe) brings up a loot bag window. This bag will show each item dropped with a checkbox next to it (already checked by default) and an “OK” button. As this button is pressed, all the items with the check will be automatically looted.
– Adjust the /who command to be accessible from a dedicated UI panel with selectable fields and with the support for complex queries (with and/or operators) between the various fields (Name, Class, Level, Guild, Current zone, Grouped or not). Integrate this panel with the LFG tool to have a powerful, accessible and centralized panel where to search players. Maybe transform this new panel into another tab in the social window.
– Crafting. Add a consignment system. This can work through a new NPC that takes orders from the players and makes them available publicly to the crafters. A player can set up an order with the item he wants to buy, price and time available for the duty. The price is paid as the order is created and refunded if the order wears off without being fulfilled. The consignment system should also show the medium prices for an item so that the players can see and set reasonable prices. The crafters can then have access to the NPC and browse (and filter) a list of everything that they can craft at the moment. As the item is produced and consigned to the NPC, the crafter will receive the money for the order and the item will be stored in the NPC waiting for the player who made the order to claim it. The crafters can also “tap” an order for an hour so that they have the time to create the item and consign it without the risk of finding the order already completed by someone else. During the hour the order is tapped, noone else will have access to that order. In the case the hour passes without the item being consigned, the player that tapped it won’t be able to tap it again for 24 hours.
This system may be rather innovative for the genre and it has also the quality to work as a complement of the market system used in the housing zones. So it doesn’t overlap the functionalities and is supposed to provide more tools that both crafters and buyers can use actively to enjoy the game more directly. (the two system are also supposed to have the positive effect of balancing each other).
– Add a new panel to stat_index_window. This new panel will offer a direct access through a dedicated UI to ALL the functionalities available on the Herald. So the players can track themselves from this new window or a particular player, the ranks, the guilds, the status of the realm, the crafters and so on. This should work as an outgoing connection directly to the Herald and not as new features to support in the server code. The goal is to make all those informations accesssible and easy to use for everyone directly from the game client. The client shouldn’t bother the actual server but just open an external connection to the Herald and format the informations with an appropriate UI.
The statistics on the Herald are one of the best and unique qualities of this game. Having a direct support of these directly in the game doesn’t appear an added functionality but it will, instead, help it to show its real qualities in a more accessible way and not as a detached, optional feature that most of the players do not use. New players often aren’t even aware of this. Having this feature bundled with the interface will put it in front of everyone and easily accessible. While this isn’t really something new for the game I believe it could be a *major* improvement that definitely deserves the development time required to support it.
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Finally a note for the would builders. The quality of the art has increased considerably, this is undeniable. But there’s still a gap between the “beauty” of an environment and its usability. The new zones in Catacombs are wonderful to see but AWFUL to navigate. Often the players jump from odd places and breaks the normal paths exactly because the environment is NOT MEANT FOR THE PLAYERS. This is a critical design problems. These areas should not be designed just “to be pretty” but also to be functional.