New League Design (mobile) discussion

[Z-Wave]

Okay... I guess this is a necessary one for you @Kinkoid @Noacc

People are not happy about your changes, including me. But what exactly are we not happy about? Here's a list I put together from what I see and what I could find on the Discord feedback channel:

General issues with this change (and others):
- It was neither properly announced nor tested. Solution: Announce it in detail in the Patch notes and use the test server to test it at least one week in advance so we can help you with constructive feedback.
- It was implemented suddenly and on the last day of the leagues, so it caught a lot of players by surprise when they tried to finish their season on mobile or in a small browser window. Solution: Same as above.
- Poor resource management due to spending time on a design change in an already well designed area of the game. Rather redesign the arena, mission or market screen for consistency. Solution: Focus on redesigns where they matter and maybe spend more time fixing bugs or adding new gameplay features instead.
- The change took away a lot of useful information and didn't give us any new one. Also the new design hurts the gameplay in various ways. See below for details and solutions.

Specific issues with this change:
- The league timer is gone! That's sad since we use it a lot for clear communication especially when we are in different time zones. Solution: Bring it back.
- There's a lot of wasted space since you can only see 5 players now instead of 9. And since one or two of these 5 players is yourself, the effective number of visible contenders is down to 3-4. Also it's kind of ironic that you want to make it easier to use on mobile but you waste a lot of vertical space when the phone is held in portrait instead of landscape (or when the browser window has a portrait aspect ratio)... Solution: Decrease row size and use full mobile screen in portrait.
- Viable information is missing: How many points does the currently selected player have? What's his level? Solution: Rearrange the buttons and make this information visible again.
- We can't click on a player icon to get redirected to his profile anymore which takes away strategic information from us (e.g. which equipment they most likely have). Now it's far too convoluted to get to their profile page via leaderboard. Solution: Make the player icon clickable again.
- The information button doesn't work (on mobile). Solution: Fix it.
- The sort by Ch. function is now far too close to the Refill/x15 button and can cause easy type errors on mobile. For some players the refill button is missing which is probably a bug (and a slap in the face of gold card owners). Solution: Make it visible for everyone and position it further away from other input areas.
- Clicking on a player expands his area while overlapping the player below (on mobile). Therefore the very next player in the list can't be clicked. Solution: Fix it by pushing the next player down (or not expanding the clicked player's area).

All in all it's a pretty disappointing change because there are no benefits (as far as I can see) but huge disadvantages... I'm sad since you probably put in time and effort with only good intentions, but these resources were wasted in my opinion and much more needed elsewhere (bug fixing, customer support, consistent redesign etc.). At this point, it's probably best to roll out the old design again and either pretend this never happened or put some serious effort into fixing all of its disadvantages.

Okay that's all for now. Thanks for reading this and please also have a look at the discussion below because this is just my personal verdict. I most likely missed some other issues or even positive takeaways.

To everyone: Let's discuss this respectfully and give constructive feedback. 👍

[jelom]

In adition to what @Z-Wave said, another bug in the new design: most of the times when you try to click in a player it is selected another one, especially if you have scrolled in the list.

Overall the new league interface makes more difficult and time consuming the task of finding and selecting players to battle.

[DHarry]

I'll summarize @Z-Wave's post with my own feelings.

 

It is absolutely dreadful. Why Kinkoid. Why wasn't this tested? 

 

(I guess my constructive feedback is, please use the testserver to test things / changes like this. )

[Horon]

I also like to have the old design back and fully agree with z-wave's post.👍

[Chthugha]

The new design was on the test server... on tuesday.
You can read Habi trying to convince stonewall Kaos to not launch it because it wasn't working yet.
But yeah, should've been on the test server first for at least a week, probably longer, so we can address everything wrong with it.
Right now they should just shut the test server down, because it's not used for what its name implies it should be used for.

I would like to add that not that long ago they also changed the harem page for the worse.
Loading times have increased quite drastically (for me), and the amount of girls was reduced from 16 to 9 in the screen.
That makes collecting money worse as well.
In fact, it's so much worse, that I resorted to just collect using the koban button in the town screen, and I just don't upgrade girls anymore on mobile, because on the way back it leads you to the harem page.

To be fair, it rather feels like Windows 8.0.
>Let's make everything look more modern and better.
>But it's not working!
>But it looks better.
>I want a working system, and not a system that you think looks better.
>But it's so shiny.

[snowman22]

1 hour ago, Chthugha said:

Loading times have increased quite drastically (for me), and the amount of girls was reduced from 16 to 9 in the screen

You probably already know this but on the off chance it helps: After my harem screen seemed to go low res and only 9 headshots fit I found reducing the zoom to 90% (one ctrl minus of Firefox) puts the display back to almost exactly the way it was.

[Chthugha]

2 hours ago, snowman22 said:

You probably already know this but on the off chance it helps: After my harem screen seemed to go low res and only 9 headshots fit I found reducing the zoom to 90% (one ctrl minus of Firefox) puts the display back to almost exactly the way it was.

We are talking about mobile play here... how the heck do I ctrl + - on a phone

[Cantrix]

   Bad looking design doesn't make use of most of the limited space on mobile devices(which is a common sense it should do), not functional- all the useful information is hidden until you click on a player which leads to limiting the useful space even more. All the sorting buttons are extremely small on top of the unnecessary wide player tabs.
From a visual design perspective all elements are clustered too close together, there is no negative space to help and emphasize important information (like stats of players were shown in the previous page).
All of this leads to bad overall look and functionality that doesn't lead the eye of the user to important information, which is either hidden or spread too wide alongside the whole lenght of the screen.

Visual design(web design by extention) should make a page(product) more well structured and easy to use, NOT impair user experience.
Roll back this bad composition of the ToF, because it is simply UNUSABLE.

[Zenni]

I agree with @Z-Wave and @Chthugha ... i dont see theese changes for better... now all is much more complicated and make us waste more time finishing trivialities... and the bug of the ToF that @jelom says is really a pain in the ass

[Varlock]

+1to return old design back... New is terrible and unusable.

[DHarry]

22 hours ago, Chthugha said:

The new design was on the test server... on tuesday.
You can read Habi trying to convince stonewall Kaos to not launch it because it wasn't working yet.
But yeah, should've been on the test server first for at least a week, probably longer, so we can address everything wrong with it.
Right now they should just shut the test server down, because it's not used for what its name implies it should be used for.

I would like to add that not that long ago they also changed the harem page for the worse.
Loading times have increased quite drastically (for me), and the amount of girls was reduced from 16 to 9 in the screen.
That makes collecting money worse as well.
In fact, it's so much worse, that I resorted to just collect using the koban button in the town screen, and I just don't upgrade girls anymore on mobile, because on the way back it leads you to the harem page.

To be fair, it rather feels like Windows 8.0.
>Let's make everything look more modern and better.
>But it's not working!
>But it looks better.
>I want a working system, and not a system that you think looks better.
>But it's so shiny.

Kinkoid: You want it to be functional? Ugh! 

 

Anyway, yes. I agree. It's what I meant by test it first. Not just put it up there for a day to see if it breaks the servers, but to see if it actually does something functional.Test, collect feedback, fix, test -> release. Happy Kinkoid, happy players. 

 

Anyway, I was thinking about how I should be more productive and all, but I like this game too much. I should praise Kinkoid for trying to help me to get ahead in life and stop wasting time on their game by making it less and less attractive every step of the way. Good job.

Edited October 4, 2019 by DHarry

[dekachinpo]

I agree with all the above. I’m struggling to get things done in the Leagues. Most important issues for me are: not being able to battle the player I select (at least not at first try);  not being able to see their full ego... which forces me to open their page, discover they’re too strong, exit, go back in... ;  not being able to see the timer. 

All these points are covered in @Z-Wave‘s and @jelom‘s posts, but I figure more people requesting the same things might convince you, devs.

Edited October 4, 2019 by dekachinpo

[windia]

To all your arguments I just wanna ARD feelings:

It went down to be a crippled page.

[linkdream]

In addition to what has been said, I have 2 suggestions:

- Make this design optional, that we can enable/disable from the settings menu.

- Always record a pointer to the last position a player clicked on. Stop putting me on the player above me on the ranking. I almost never want to be there. I always want to continue from where I left the last time. This “bug” has always been there and it’s not related to the new design.

Edited October 5, 2019 by linkdream

[nope1]

I want the old one

[Crimson scale]

Between the harem page and the new league page it seems like they are just trying to tell us to just use the "do it for me" button, 

but as a free player I cant be wasting 12 kobans every time I want to collect my earnings.

[jyepie]

What a horrible, horrible design. 

Truly horrible. Really really bad. Its so bad now

[Gambit126]

I would go so far as to say, Why?  Why did you take something that was working perfectly fine and break it like this?  Isn't the idea behind mobile design to make it easier to read and use?  Is so, then in this case you failed horribly.  What we see is much less information than we saw before, not to mention a whole lot fewer opponents also.  Selection process leaves a lot to be desired, as I tried to select one, only to be given another opponent than the one I selected.

 

Please take it back to the way it was, and while you are at it, make the timer so we can read it on our phones this time.  That is the only change I have ever asked for on the League screen.

[Zteev]

I agree that this is an awful change. Basically it's one of those things that turned out to be a complete failure, so it would be best to consider the development time a sunk cost, and just revert to the way it was.