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PD -> On Quality of Life (2/20/2022 1:03:06)
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Normally I would just have posted this in one of the relevant release threads. However I think I'm going to touch on a concept that is far more complicated and that this year is actually going to be much more focused on this:
There's been a lot of mention recently about "Quality of Life" / QoL (And we'll have drinking game every time I or someone else says this) coming to AQ. So far, the two updates that we have had this year, the Shop UI update and this update with Houses and Estates have (at least in my view, retrospectively) have seemed to have mixed results. On the one hand, the new look makes the game feel much more up to date and some of the genuine problems have been addressed. On the other hand, there's been as people have explained here, or have otherwise said been new issues introduced, or the core problems don't seem to really have been addressed. A common theme that I'm seeing anyways being:
1. UI flow changing: Before I go onward with this, what I mean by UI Flow is the basic procedures needed to do transactions on the user's side. Maybe we'll get used to the new UI flow(s) after some point in time with enough repetition, but on the other hand, this is also probably a proxy point to something that people may also have encountered: That the flow is being disrupted (thanks to nearly decade of muscle memory) and that in some case, the new UI is actually harder to use. In some respects, at least for the shop UI, I actually missed the old UI because while item lists were long, the UI was simple enough to tell me at a bird's eye view what I could have. The new UI for the shop has actually introduced a lot of new patterns to be needed for performing transactions. Ideally, when I think of doing these kings of updates, I am for keeping the old "flow", while just adding incremental changes that would have improved what was good about the old UI, without removing what was bad about it. Both of the new updates have betrayed this ideal.
2. The new UI introducing new issues: With a new flow, also came new "look" of the updates. Quite simply, the visual changes have seemed to have introduced new problems. At least one report has had people state the new estates UI (Exhaust Army) is hard to look at due to a combination of colors that don't contrast well, and (for me personally and another user) being at least mildly epileptic. For the Shop UI, it's a combination of some categories being *harder* to access and navigation being much more difficult to use. Either way, the updates have in some cases introduced new problems that otherwise would not have been issues if they were not as radically changed as they have been so far; some things needed to be, but others not so.
3. Lack of communication over what is being changed: The staff so far have made promises over a general theme of this year being focused on updates. But so far we've only really been told during the release newsletters or notifications (or social media) about what those things exactly are. For both of the Update releases, they have been released, but after the initial updates, both which have occurred earlier than their usual release days, they release an initial version and do not seem to make updates unless they're bugs. While I understand that the AQ team has limited bandwidth to do and change things, ultimately giving us a update which can actually make things worse is a dis-service to us.
Now with all of this said, how do I feel like we should be ideally tackling these things? A few points to consider at least:
1. Preserve what is good about what exists currently and build upon that. I think after 20 years of AQ, a lot of people know by now what they like about AQ, and what they do not like about AQ. AQ should follow the KISS principle, or Keep It Simple, Stupid. In the case of the Shop UI, it should have kept a master view of what can be purchased when you first look at it, and be able to generally from that master view easily navigate between categories. And for the case of the estate UI, the extra levels for the estate UI should be just part of the default options menu of 25, 50, 150, and 300. Introducing a new button to access these new transactional options can make you easily miss this.
2. Genuinely target and remove the annoyances of what exists currently. A lot of the complaints that people have are about things that are at least one of:
Repetitive without good reason to be so
Harmful to health (eye strain, hand strain, etc)
Annoying / hard to use
Some other quality which makes the feature / flow un-useable and/or inaccessible
The Exhaust Army option is a good example of doing this (also as I noted too, this also has brought new issues along with its implementation). It facilitates what already is a thing people do (spam war waves) without changing what people like to already do. This is where the majority of the value I believe will come from. When things are implemented in a certain way and demanded to be performed in a certain manner, we have to really ask why the necessity. Otherwise it's an annoyance that should not exist, especially if it means a reduction to the overall fun and value to the game. Things should be implemented in a way so that it is generally intuitive, and not complicated and requires prolonged practicing to get used to.
3. Gradually introduce changes over a longer period of time: Especially for UI updates. To prevent a certain amount of "shock" to the system, I think instead of pushing everything at once without much budget for feedback or changes, that the staff ought to fix small elements at a time, starting with the first two points that could be introduced one at a time whenever permissible. Sort of like a "rolling release" thing where each week, one or two adjustments are made until we're at a point where we like what we see. The way these updates have been done, we only have a chance to give our veto or stamp of approval after everything is said and done, or at a point which it's nearly all complete anyways and changes suggested cannot be done without major rework or just scraping what has already been put into many man-hours without payoff. With a rolling release model, we'll be following all the above rules at the same time; every thing done will have much smaller requirements, but much potential higher payoff for doing what we need to do. Many things are only really 1-2 adjustments away from being a good and fully useable feature, and there are many problem areas that are needed to look at. Let's not use more effort than needed.
There's much more I will say (although I will only have time to say this much for now), but I hope there's enough receptive ears to what I think is genuinely a discussion that needs to happen because the rest of this year is going to be centered around what's being said here. At least, I hope we can right the ship back in a direction we need it to go.
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