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03-28-11, 03:21 PM   #1
Cairenn
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Ask the Devs - Answers #3 "UI"

Q: Do the developers have any plans in regards to overhauling the Combat Log so that players can easier examine the results after a battle? – Jito (Europe [English])
A: The Combat Log needs some love for sure. It was originally designed with the intent of providing players with immediate feedback, sort of like an extension to scrolling combat text and the buff / debuff panel. It turns out to be much more useful after the fact, to figure out what was that thing that hit you so hard, or what caused that proc to go off. We would like to redesign the feature with more of a post-hoc analysis in mind. It can also be a resource hog if you have it up during combat and the filtering isn’t super intuitive. One thing we have done in the meantime is made it easy for the combat logs to be analyzed by third-party sites, which makes it easier to analyze results quickly.
Q: Some Addons are so powerful they simplified the game content to a degree (e.g., boss fights). Do you think that when the majority are using these Addons, the original reasoning behind the game design is violated? And isn’t it unfair for players who don’t use Addons? - 冷影幽光 (Taiwan)
A: This really deserves a long answer. It sounds like a good topic for a future developer blog. To tide you over until then, we can say that some addons do a great job of providing information we really should be providing (and have long-term plans to provide).This includes information like threat, the distance you are from other players , when you have a killer debuff on you and things like that. On the other hand, when addons are too helpful, they are playing the game for you and you’re just doing what the addon tells you to do. When the mod tells you so much information about the fight that you don’t even really need to pay attention to what is happening in the world at all, then we feel that crosses the line. I don’t know that we could put the djinn back in the bottle at this point though. It would feel really harsh to prevent addons from tracking some of that information, and in some cases we’re not even sure how we would prevent it.
We continue to try and come up with new mechanics that ask players to pay attention to the fight itself instead of just pushing whatever button the addon tells them to push. You might be alerted to when Atramedes emits a Sonar Pulse, but you don’t know where it is going to be. Sinestra’s Twilight Slicer requires you to look at the battle field and not just your UI. To be fair, we are also trying to do a better job of telegraphing to players when bosses will use predictable abilities. The Conclave of Wind and Nefarian for example do their special abilities at predictable intervals along their resource or health bar.
It is a fine line to decide when an addon becomes mandatory. Ideally you could raid without any addons, and some players do. Information is often power in complex raid encounters though, and we agree that in some cases we don’t provide enough information yet. Does that mean Blizzard needs to replicate some of the screenshots produced by players who install thirty mods and completely overhaul their UI? Probably not. Our raid UI is a good example of what we are going for. It provides enough information for many players (and we have plans to add more to it overtime). It’s not going to incorporate the favorite feature of every raider out there, and for them, a very customizable third-party addon is a perfectly reasonable solution.
Q: Will there be changes related to the bank and bags system? E.g. for set pieces (wardrobe), quest items, tabards... will the 16-slot-standard-bag be extended? - Yenaeia (Europe [German])
A: We think bags are about as big as we can make them. Imagine if you got rid of all of the folders or directories on your computer and just stuffed everything into one big directory. That feels like the direction we’ll head if we keep down the path we’re on. Instead, we think a better solution is to make it easier to find what you’re looking for and provide alternative storage for things you don’t use often. We do have plans to convert tabards into a manager similar to our Title UI on the character page. We also are exploring some ways to let players store old set pieces and the like that they don’t use often. We debate the quest item issue a lot. Our concern is that if quest items are squirreled away in some special UI that they feel less like items at all. Why require you to collect bear asses instead of just incrementing the bear asses counter? That might help solve your storage problems, but it makes quests feel even less like you are doing something in the real world.
Q: Previously, the character was not interfered by the nameplate because there was always some space between the character and nameplates. I don’t exactly remember when but suddenly the nameplate covered the top section of the characters making it hard to identify the character/NPC’s status. I’m just wondering it was changed to be like that. – 제임스카메론 (Korea)
A: [We’re assuming this question is referring to the V-nameplates. If not, this answer won’t make sense.] We changed the way nameplates work quite a bit in Cataclysm. One mistake we made was anchoring the nameplate to the top of the frame. This means that when you are zoomed in close to your character that the nameplate can obscure your face. In 4.1 we’re changing the anchor point to the bottom of the frame so that it will grow up as you zoom in instead of growing down.
Q: Milling and Prospecting are incredibly dull and very manual tasks at present, especially when you do them in bulk. Speaking as a scribe, the entire manufacturing process from herb to pigment to ink to glyph is both time-consuming, boring and sending me well on my way to repetitive stress wrist and index finger injuries. – Keb (North America/ANZ), googce (Taiwan)
A: Yes, we totally understand why this is a problem. The reason we can’t make it work just like other trade skills, is that we don’t know which herbs and ore you want to use. If you have some cheap ore and some very expensive ore, we don’t want to accidentally use the expensive ore. There are a few ways to fix this. One is we just redesign Milling and Prospecting. If they were recipe-based, then we would know exactly which material to use. It would also add a huge list of repetitive recipes to your Professions pages. We could also make some kind of new UI (think of something simple, like the Reforging UI) to let you drag and drop the materials you want to use. The advantage of the “box” solution is we could also use it for Disenchanting.
Q: Would you please implement a feature that allows players to change the order of their characters on the Character select screen? – 흑풍육손 (Korea), Fanahlia (North America/ANZ), Perle (Latin America)
A: Sure. Does 4.2 work for you? :)
Q: Are there any plans to implement further things into the standard UI that we currently rely on addons to provide? More specifically I mean things like Recount and Omen. - Bauertehpala (Europe [English]), Актинидия (Europe [Russian]), 柴德洛夫 (Taiwan), Terini (North America/ANZ)
A: We are experimenting with adding a threat meter to our new party and raid frames. Tracking DPS is a little trickier. We feel like it’s something we should offer but we’re still debating the right way to do it. It could be something that the combat log or the achievement statistics system (neither of which are anywhere as good as they could be) morphs into.
Q: Any plans to improve the Trade channel to allow buying and trading directly from chat? – Abolita (North America/ANZ)
A: Ultimately, if you want a centralized location where buyers and sellers could meet, we already provide that. If you’re trying to just circumvent the 10% Auction House cut, we don’t really want to encourage that. If you want to use chat channels to haggle, you can do that already. The one situation where we think the current systems don’t work well is for really expensive crafted armor and weapons. We understand that players may not want to waste the materials until they have a buyer. Nor do they want to pay the Auction House cut on a 20,000 gold item when the volume on these items moving through the market is always going to be low. We are exploring some ways to solve this problem.
Q: Internal Cooldowns are pretty hard to track currently (I'm thinking of Nature's Grace, since it's an important element of my gameplay as a Resto Druid). Do you plan to add a feature in order to make it easier to track Internal Cooldowns? - Anyä (Europe [English])
A: This is a difficult problem to solve without a lot of additional UI bloat. We could put a debuff on the player, which is the solution we sometimes take with long cooldowns like the 60 sec one of Nature’s Grace. We could also consider something like letting players put passive abilities on their action bar, and then provide an option to view cooldowns as numbers instead of the current ‘sonar wipe’. The way some of the third-party addons handle the issue is by just throwing up more UI in between the player and the character, which is the kind of thing we are very, very cautious about adding.
Q: Are there any plans to expand on the current mail system? It's rather cumbersome to have to withdraw, one-by-one, my mail when I have pages of it. – Patrïck (Latin America)
A: This sounds like it is really an Auction House problem. The mail system is intended to be a little throttled and slow to discourage spam and junk mail, and works just fine for “real” mail between friends, alts or guildies. The problem is the design choice we made to hitch the mail system to the Auction House. Players dealing with a high volume of commodities have no choice but to deal with tons and tons of mail (and this is particularly bad for diverse commodities with low margins, like glyphs). We are discussing different ways the Auction House can work, but we’re not convinced the right answer is just to make the mail system more automated.
Q: Before Cataclysm launch, you talked about maybe giving the chance to players of increasing their main bagpack number of slots. Are you still having that in mind or did you forget about that idea? It has been 6 long years with the same bagpack! – Proenix (Europe [Spanish])
A: Believe it or not, it’s just technically challenging. The original backpack just wasn’t coded with expandability in mind, and bumping it up now carries the risk of losing players gear, which of course would be catastrophic. It’s still on the list, but it’s not as simple as someone changing a 16 to a 24.
Q: Will the Defualt UI ever be moveable and re-arrangeable without the use of mods? – Ruind (North America/ANZ)
A: We are taking baby steps in that direction. We already allow you to move the focus target, and in the 4.1 patch we will let you move your player frame (your health and resource bar) and your target frame as well. We also allow quite a bit of customization of size and position with the party and raid frames. If you consider what the screen looks like with every possible UI element turned on at once (including things like the durability dummy and Arena team frames) there is almost no space left to actually see the world. If we allow players to start moving every element around, it would be very easy to stack elements on top of each other and obscure information. More hardcore players probably understand this risk and how to fix things if they break the UI for themselves. The challenge for us is making sure that players who really shouldn’t be messing with their UI don’t stumble into it. If you aren’t in the game industry (or maybe even the software industry at large) you might think it’s as simple as burying the check box deep in the options or adding a big, red “I screwed up! Please reset me!” button. But we can assure you that it’s not.
Q: What if there was a separated target system? For example, if I can set defensive and offensive target at same time then I don’t have to switch target to use heal or other emergency skills for our friend no matter what target I’m attacking. I think this feature is especially useful for some classes, such as Retribution Paladin and Shadow Priest. – Whitewnd (Korea)
A: We understand why that might be beneficial, and some games have gone that route, but we’re not huge fans of the idea for a couple of reasons. One, it just adds more complexity to the UI, which you can see from previous questions is something we’re trying to remain vigilant against. More importantly, we like players having to make the choice of who their target is. We don’t want to make the game so smart that harmful spells always seek out enemies and helpful spells always seek out allies. We do this in a few rare cases, like Discipline’s Atonement, but in general we want players to make the second-to-second choice about whether they are playing offensively or defensively.
The original thread is here.

Last edited by Cairenn : 03-28-11 at 03:27 PM.
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03-28-11, 03:49 PM   #2
Dolby
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Very interesting.

About the bank/bag issue with quests I dont think it takes away from anything if you dont see the items you must collect in your inventory. With an ever expanding inventory of items in this game it would be a big help if quest items were organized some where else. It would make sense to put things in a special place if your collecting them for a special reason.

Last edited by Dolby : 03-28-11 at 04:00 PM.
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03-28-11, 03:56 PM   #3
Coote
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Originally Posted by Cairenn View Post
Q: Would you please implement a feature that allows players to change the order of their characters on the Character select screen? – 흑풍육손 (Korea), Fanahlia (North America/ANZ), Perle (Latin America)
A: Sure. Does 4.2 work for you?
This was definitely the best part of the whole Q&A, hands down. =D
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03-28-11, 04:16 PM   #4
Aprikot
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Originally Posted by Cairenn View Post
Q: Will the Defualt UI ever be moveable and re-arrangeable without the use of mods? – Ruind (North America/ANZ)
A: We are taking baby steps in that direction. We already allow you to move the focus target, and in the 4.1 patch we will let you move your player frame (your health and resource bar) and your target frame as well. We also allow quite a bit of customization of size and position with the party and raid frames. If you consider what the screen looks like with every possible UI element turned on at once (including things like the durability dummy and Arena team frames) there is almost no space left to actually see the world. If we allow players to start moving every element around, it would be very easy to stack elements on top of each other and obscure information. More hardcore players probably understand this risk and how to fix things if they break the UI for themselves. The challenge for us is making sure that players who really shouldn’t be messing with their UI don’t stumble into it. If you aren’t in the game industry (or maybe even the software industry at large) you might think it’s as simple as burying the check box deep in the options or adding a big, red “I screwed up! Please reset me!” button. But we can assure you that it’s not.
I don't really understand this answer. UI lock/unlock & reset buttons (and maybe screen edge protection) seem easily implemented, and frame reposition functionality would pose little risk to "players who really shouldn’t be messing with their UI" provided there was an easily accessible "reset to default" feature. Am I missing something?
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03-28-11, 04:35 PM   #5
Ither
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Is he serious about the 4.2 and character arrangement screen?

I seriously would LOVE to have that... i think
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03-28-11, 04:44 PM   #6
Crissa
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Trust me, when you lose a window because the default UI placed it somewhere your screen can't see, and no one thought to give it a better default, you know there's something really hard about letting just anything move.

Big companies just aren't as responsive to the level of bugs this can bring.

But I still hope more things are moveable ^-^

I think it is a bit annoying that we have character types that never have to change targets (DPS) and characters that are always changing targets (Support). That's why I always used mouseover targeting for all my support spells when I was healing, even when it didn't make my numbers look good (1.x).

-Crissa

Originally Posted by TMcMahon51 View Post
Q: Would you please implement a feature that allows players to change the order of their characters on the Character select screen? – 흑풍육손 (Korea), Fanahlia (North America/ANZ), Perle (Latin America)
A: Sure. Does 4.2 work for you?
This was definitely the best part of the whole Q&A, hands down. =D
This is a good example of something which +like flags would be useful for. I agree.

Last edited by Crissa : 03-28-11 at 04:53 PM.
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03-29-11, 06:09 AM   #7
zork
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Blizz: Ask the Devs - Answers #3 "UI"

Q: Previously, the character was not interfered by the nameplate because there was always some space between the character and nameplates. I don’t exactly remember when but suddenly the nameplate covered the top section of the characters making it hard to identify the character/NPC’s status. I’m just wondering it was changed to be like that. – 제임스카메론 (Korea)

A: [We’re assuming this question is referring to the V-nameplates. If not, this answer won’t make sense.] We changed the way nameplates work quite a bit in Cataclysm. One mistake we made was anchoring the nameplate to the top of the frame. This means that when you are zoomed in close to your character that the nameplate can obscure your face. In 4.1 we’re changing the anchor point to the bottom of the frame so that it will grow up as you zoom in instead of growing down.

The nameplate change is what I'm looking forward to most.

*edit* damn created new thread. Wanted to comment...
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03-29-11, 11:09 AM   #8
Cairenn
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Originally Posted by zork View Post
*edit* damn created new thread. Wanted to comment...
Fixed it for you.
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03-29-11, 11:47 AM   #9
Gruffness
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Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
Very interesting.

About the bank/bag issue with quests I dont think it takes away from anything if you dont see the items you must collect in your inventory. With an ever expanding inventory of items in this game it would be a big help if quest items were organized some where else. It would make sense to put things in a special place if your collecting them for a special reason.
I think an expandable "Quest Bag," much akin to our "Key Ring," would go a long way in solving storage issues when dealing with large numbers of special quest items, loot and other things that only exist for particular quests. Items that have other uses such as spider meat or bear/wolf meat (for example) would still be treated as normal though I should think that the amount required for a quest should allow that item quantity to be stored in the "Quest Bag" (think siphon) for the duration of the quest. It would help prevent accidental sale of needed quest fulfillment items, meaning items in the "Quest Bag" can't be sold unless dragged into a normal bag, either default or player made etc.

It would also maintain the look and feel of the current inventory system.
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03-29-11, 12:00 PM   #10
Mischback
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But the feeling of "damn, I have to go and complete some quests to make space in my inventory" would be gone.

Yesterday I started on a new realm to meet some of my RL-friends ingame. One of them said: "Hey, I'll start you with 500g!" and I responded "Just hand me some decent bags for leveling up and I'll be fine".

Since my very first char I felt like "having enough storage means less time of travelling means more time to actually play". Having Quest-Items in a seperated bag just doesn't seem right to me (talking as Tank with his bag full of alternative Trinkets, a DD-Equip and a PvP-Equip in his bags, but without any farming profession).
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03-29-11, 06:28 PM   #11
Crissa
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I would rather have a wardrobe option for bound equipment. Honestly, I'm never, ever going to go back to some of these places and get this stuff, but I want to keep my Tier sets and clothes.

And some of these places or times don't exist anymore! And what am I going to do with all these tabards? At least the point with 'it seems less like an object' doesn't apply to old clothes.

You could code an addon to make a bag slot 'no sell' if you wanted to, though... Just like those addons that auto-sell things for you. Adding a bag that did that would require re-coding the interface, I think, though.

-Crissa

And that nameplate fix sounds good. I don't use them, but number one on my list for not using them? They get in the damn way of seeing things!

Last edited by Crissa : 03-29-11 at 06:33 PM.
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03-29-11, 06:31 PM   #12
Xinhuan
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Inventory management is part of the game. If you created a special quest bag, it would remove that part of the game. If you ended up with too many quest items clogging up your bag, that's an indication that the quest hub needs a redesign to have less quests that use quest items, not an indication that quest bags should be introduced.

Some players naturally keep everything cute that they can get their hands on, they are sacrificing inventory room, a personal choice for them. If they chose to say get rid of all the T1 and T2 sets they kept in their bank for years, they would not have the problem of running out of inventory space with 16 extra additional slots.
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03-29-11, 08:57 PM   #13
Crissa
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Choosing between combat/non combat shouldn't be part of the game - it invites imbalance and a false choice between entertainment and optimization. It's a really old argument that there's no good reason for the 'you should choose' side.

Besides, at this point, there isn't anything in the game that shows that I've been to Molten Core aside from the loot, since the history has apparently been lost. (Why does the Armory pretend that it knows that stuff when it doesn't?)

-Crissa
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03-31-11, 03:15 AM   #14
MadCow
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Originally Posted by Cairenn
Q: Would you please implement a feature that allows players to change the order of their characters on the Character select screen? – 흑풍육손 (Korea), Fanahlia (North America/ANZ), Perle (Latin America)
A: Sure. Does 4.2 work for you?

I..uhm...yeah..ok. I just dont get this. is this just something(no offense) anal retentive people worry about or is there some reason this is needed that I'm not privy too
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03-31-11, 05:45 AM   #15
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I don't understand why quest items out of all things would be the items being stored in a special way. How many quest items do you usually find yourself carrying? Not a lot.

I think gears sets/tabards and perhaps food/drink are the #1 bag fillers.
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04-23-11, 05:48 PM   #16
A_Nolan
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xtra Inventory bags

extra bags in order of need

we now have mounts, pets, and "money" keys

tabards - need to defiantly have its own set like mounts it overfills after a while
quest - most quests are not giving items now so its starting to phase out
armor - no real reason to make it a separate bag whole point of bags to begin with
weapons - same as armor
food/drink - same as weapons
rp clothes - same as food/drink
professions - you can buy bags

i don't like the idea of duel cloths system like eq it makes armor annoying i like the clothing system we got.
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