Test Update 07/11/2023 - Patch Notes and Discussions

I really dislike the notion that to achieve class balance, they are going to nerf mages as opposed to boosting the DPS or skills of the other classes. I really hope they decide against this change as it is bound to upset quite a few people.

UI still not fixed

As per the issue with lag IF I am understanding it right, between all the hits, misses, pets, swam pets, nukes, dots, abilities, discs firing off, "im pulling a number out of my butt with this" the problem is 5000 things are happening in a raid all at once and it needs to be toned down to 4000 things to reduce the lag? Instead of doing these half measure nerfs why not just merg and axe things again like what has been done in the past with aa's? Axe swarm pets entirely and merg the dps they give between the abilities/spells or just merg it all to the main pet. If people login tomorrow with a notification that lag has been a huge problem and swarm pets heavily contribute to this. Due to this we are axing swam pets entirely and merging all the dps they do to the main pet "again pulling numbers out my butt" the aa has been changed to your pet will now do 200% more dps passively permanently. Just seems like a better fix, I imagine a pet heavy raid could prob pop out 500 swarm pets and the lag has to be stupid.

What about the UI still isn't fixed? If you are talking about the inventory window always being on top that is due to it being part of the new UI engine and the rest of the windows part of the old UI engine. This is not something that is broken and it will naturally be fixed as more windows are converted and will go away fully once all windows are converted and the old UI goes away.

We are now into what the fourth month that the UI hasn't had anymore windows ported over? The one and only port over being 21st March.

Are they actually working on getting more windows ported over? Or with the lose of Dzarn and TrueNorth do they no longer have the staff to complete it?

As I have stated before, they are likely working on fixing issues that popped up after the first set of windows got converted in order to minimize the amount of issues after they convert the next set.

but are they?

None of us know for sure what they are doing

You are correct we don't know for certain but I do feel that is a safe assumption to make considering all the issues they had with the first release of the new UI. It should also be noted that when I made this same comment in the past I did receive a like from a member of the dev team.

Working on 'fixing' it for four months?!
Maybe it's time to admit it's broken, pull it from the live servers and work on 'fixing' it then release it to the Test server when it's actually working ?

Admit what is broken? If you are saying that it is the inventory screen always being on top I have been suggesting since the launch of setting it up so players could chose to use the new or old UI items without having make a custom UI.

It seems like the new UI should have been done as a skin that people could optionally load if they wanted. Rather than having it be the default for everyone, make it so that you had to do /loadskin newUI. I have the white inventory problem so I switched back to the old UI. If it works like that for the old UI, it seems like they could have done the same for the new UI. Or at least make it an optionally loaded skin until they had all the windows converted. It seems odd to release a non-critical UI update where there are problems like the new UI windows always overlapping the old UI windows.

If there's not going to be any benefit other than scaling some windows for 4k monitors (which I haven't seen any evidence of other benefits), then I agree...the new UI should be an option, not the default.

It most definitely should NEVER have been pushed to Live until it was completely finished.

What do you mean "admit what is broken" ?

The new UI.
They have released 4 windows (out of how many dozen?), and of those 4, 2 of them don't work and require 'workarounds' to get them to a workable state.

All of these issues were pointed out when this was released to the Test server, but they decided to ignore the reports and push it live anyway.

Now, months after the initial release, there has been nothing done to resolve any of these issues, nothing has been pushed to Test.

And the one work around that saved the game for 40% of the players was found by a player. And said player is given no credit for finding it.

Again, what about those windows is still broken? My understanding is that they have released fixes for them already. I asked what was still broken about the windows which seems like it should be simple to answer.

Also I thought the work arounds where to deal with the window always being on the top which isn't something that is "broken" and is just a side effect of the ui migration.

The big thing here is that we (mainly me) have been trying to fix the currently ported windows/elements before doing more. Learning an entirely new UI system is a challenge, especially when a C/C#/C++ programmer hasn't touched JavaScript/CSS/HTML in 20+ years (or ever). My main goal has been getting the new UI to be less prone to, "what the heck just happened?!" moments and making it overall more bulletproof. One big step was getting the links working correctly for the Story Window since we use links in many other windows (Item Display, Chat, Help, etc.). Spell gems and hotbar buttons (especially with custom assigned icons) were another big frustration. Plus I'm still trying to see if I can do something to make the font less....wonky.

We do have a list of windows and a priority of when we want to get them implemented. As you might be able to guess, getting the popup dialog window working is at the very top of my personal list. Likewise, anything that may show up while the inventory window is up is also very high priority (no one wants to miss a raid invite because they were trying to clean out their bags).

There's also something in the works that's going with next month's update that should make a lot of people much happier, but I can't share details until it at least passes our internal peer/QA testing. I've spent the better part of two weeks on just this one thing, and I'm hoping it'll make a difference.

I know it's frustrating to hear, "we're changing the UI!" and then nothing but crickets. It's frustrating for us too! But we ARE working on it, and we do plan on converting more windows once we iron out the issues. We don't want to push out a half broken window and call it good enough, it does you all no good and kicks our own morale in the teeth.

The problem with the inventory window being white still exists. I have to run with the old UI for that reason or else I can't use my inventory window at all.

Thank you for responding and giving an update.

you just said it yourself, the quantity window popping behind other windows, or off the side of the screen, random sections of the Inventory window going white, flashing, etc.

All the issues reported from Live servers were originally reported from the Test server but the pushed the UI to Live regardless.

And now, months later, there is still no update, no more windows have been converted, (the converter still doesn't work).

The only thing I said was the inventory window being on top of others which is not "broken" as it is a side effect of being on the new UI engine. As for the rest of what you mentioned I was under the impression that they had gotten all of those issues fixed which is why I asked what was still broken.

And yet that is EXACTLY what you guys did. The bugs were on Test for nearly 2 months and you did nothing to fix them, instead choosing to push them to Live in a broken state.

Why are we supposed to have faith that you guys won't do the exact same thing on the next round of updated windows, if and when that ever happens?

I'm still trying to wrap my head around why on earth you guys didn't get the whole UI working on Test BEFORE releasing it to the Live servers. The only reason I can come up with is that you decided to push a broken game element to Live in order to make some sort of artifical deadline. Because what you did and the manner in which you did it makes absolutely no sense.