First impressions of the new EQ2 Players

the fact that its missing alternative text for images and the fact it won't load in all browsers shows that the developement wasn't a team effort and I wonder if it was an experienced web designer. The simple changing of a a few lines to detect which browser and load a css based on that browser is a basic thing web designers learn to do early on. Also many designers learn to make sites usable by all types of people. Handicapped, blind or even people who simply hate graphics.

I will say the site looks nice but its slow hence its using way to much eye candy with no functionality. As for boycott etc all you're doing is trying to get everyone to FORCE an issue without any constructive feedback in your thread at all. This isn't a flame site and surprised your posts aren't deleted or edited by a mod already as I have done in the past and earned a few nice warnings.

SoE - Hire an experienced web designer. Get his qualifications down and check the sites hes designed. Make sure his Team is also experienced and don't try to dump a large project as this into 1 or 2 people but instead invest in a web design team that goes all out to provide look, funactionality and ease of use in a site.
Stop trying to make every single site you have a marketing tool for other things. Yes links to those things are good but to force such things as being the BIG picture of a eq2players.com site is wrong. Same as when you put all those dang advertisments onto a paid site. Now this is a free site but you removed what everyone wanted.
Trim the fat and give back the functionality of what we had before. Then work on advertising your nice little services via a rotation of SoE products not a big OMG buy station cash. OMG get the game. Clue for you SoE we have the game or we wouldn't be coming to EQ2players instead we would be going to an soe site such as eq2.sony.com or something to see what products you have. Eq2players is for "players of eq2" to find what we are looking for in game related information. And sorry but Zam is not a site I want to use either.

Avianna@Butcherblock wrote:

"Standing up and doing something about it" doesn't have to involve childish "protests", that only result in the retardation of growth for your guild, in an attempt to force SOE to do what you want. I've made a sensible thread which has grabbed the attention of a dev - who has taken the time to address our issues - and they're even in the process of testing the new alts feature.
Complaining is one thing, screaming and kicking like a child is another. "OMG GUYS, THEY TOOK THE ALTS AWAY ON EQ2 PLAYERS, LET'S BOYCOTT GUILD RECRUITING, THAT'LL SHOW THEM"... No, no it wont. That's the impression I get from your tirade.
By the way, I didn't throw any tea into any ocean.
Good luck, again.
Moving on - I see there has been many other legitimate issues addressed, like alt text on images, bloated navigation, etc etc. Along with more people commenting on the lack of column sorting, etc. Needs to be fixed guys!

Apparently its free now ???
Because i was going to cancel my Sub to it in its new form.

As awful as the old one was, sometimes days out of date, it did actually work.
This new one is junk complicated and is just an advert for SC and the next expansion.
You should have just dumped EQ2 Players and stuck up an advert site, oh wait you did .

I have to agree with the complaints about many missing features now. I would rather pay to have them back honestly, I used many of the tools for my own analysis of various things that others have mentioned.
Regarding guild officers/managers looking up alts, multiple accounts is very very common these days, I have SIX accounts myself, how would you possibly determine what "Alts" I have and on what server?. I am not saying the alts search has no value, but I think some of you are putting far too much emphasis on it. It is akin to having people list all their chars in all other games so you can determine if they carry a bad rep any where else.
Cruunch

Cruunch@Guk wrote:

Cruunch,
Could you list some of these tools out for us? Also, any other tools you'd like to have that the previous site did not?

Its good to see that feedback is being listened to and that already some things are being fixed/added.

Tools I liked were spell listings for each class along with the disco of the spell etc. Although it never did get updated. Alts etc
One thing I think is the ability to remove toons from your account that are no longer there. For example I have Papabard on Runnyeye but he was transfered to Najena and I would like to get him off the list. Also Qanyena was moved to Najena and to another account but still shows up in my character list.
Ability to sort guild roster ability to select class when doing best of the best leader boards etc.

Papabard@Najena wrote:

I have a Mystic showing up on my list that I deleted well over a year ago...

That's my biggest gripe. Deleted toons still show up

the deleted ones i can deal with but the duplication of toons on server moves is what bothers me lol i have seen some people with 4 of the same toon because they keep moving lol

DarkViper wrote:

No offence, but this thread isn't so long that you can't read and see for yourself. I'll give you a few things, but it is simply a PARTIAL list, I would hate to have something ignored because it wasn't mentioned on a list.
1) Alts - no ability to look up alts, no matter why you need to
2) Sortable tables - whichever table it is, in Windows programs have the ability to click on column headings to sort by that heading is considered essential and not something you skip. If I recall from my programming days, you can simply call the existing code library to get that.
3) Top to bottom the website does not take into acount screen size. If I poke the button that gives me a lits of my characters, I cannot scroll or move my mouse on down the list to get to a name not shown. Which lead to...
4) None of the page is negotiable using alternative mean (ie. keyboards instead if mouse and so-on) It was reported that non of the graphics had alt text. Whether it was skipped entired or the data calls simply didn't bring it into the document I don't know. Personally, as much as I had to do alt text when I am coding web pages, I realize the importance for the clients I've had in the past and the people I have helped at college.
5) I didn't test it, but based on no. 3 and 4 above, I would be willing to bet the site will not be negotiable with a small screen.
6) Achievements and Leader Boards. We are stuck with what you give us - not the freedom to look up what we want. The old way was restricted as for the items to query on, but at least it would allow some things (and with creative queries, sometimes give up the information we wanted to see.
7) There is more, but in my fatigue I'm not remembering them.

So they're excited about giving us more of the information we wanted. So who asked for all the sales stuff to be shoved in our faces when we log in? EQ2 used to have some class, now it's just one cheap sales pitch after another. We already have the game, that's why we're looking at this website. So apparently this new site is free.. I suppose we get what we pay for. I'd much rather be paying and have the site as it was, but working properly.

While I do web design on a very limited basis these days I used to do a fair amount of it, one book that really opened my eyes to making websites both flexable and accessable was one called "bullet proof web design" its not that large of a book but has a lot of real good information for both the new and experienced web designers out there and I think the SOE web team could definatly benifit by looking through it.

Check out the changes in the site:

1. Leaderboards appear to have the same functionality as before.
2. Alts are back.
3. I can't SEE the focus, but I can tab through (have no idea where I am on the screen unless I'm watching the bottom on the status bar) I haven't tried it in reduced colors to see if that is better.
4. It took me a couple timed to figure out exactly how to do it, but I can negotiate to the end of my character list on my screen at smaller dimentions (well, however that is spelled)
5. Privacy options include the same things as before, including the bit about alts. It does NOT however, populate the drop-down with your current settings, they all say "Visible to Everyone". It would be nice for them to reflect the current settings as it did before with the check box system.
6. The item screen I find visually distracting with it's odd list if (+ 250 health) type buttons. They also wrap around the box like text, ie. (+250 (line break) health) Some fo the statistics (health, Wisdom, etc) are captialized, some are not. Didn't there used to be outlinks to other websites for the items? or am I thinking of Wiki?

===================
OK folks, they listened - give it a good look and see if all or most of your concerned were addressed.
((edited formatting))

1. On the profile page, when I click the "Adventure" bar I see stats for Scribing, Tinkering, Sculpting, etc. When I click the Harvesting bar I see Slashing, Parry, Defense.
2. When I look at my general stats today, I see 7600 health and 3200 power, yet usually my character shows about double these amounts. Obviously the system recorded my stats when I was dead or naked or mentored.
3. I see the water breathing charm in my charm slot, which I wore all of about 5 minutes yesterday even though I played for hours without it. Why does the system seem to choose the absolute least opportune moments to take my gear and stats to the website, which doesn't change for several days?
Is there any way to predict when the database will be tapped to get my displayed gear and stats? I remember back in EQ you could do certain things like log out or exchange coin with another player and you would see a "Character data saved" message in chat. Would it be considered an exploit to make it so the database is updated only when you log out, unmentored, from the character? This way you could put on your "good" gear that you want displayed before logging out and not have inconsistencies like the ones listed above. Why show stats and gear if they are not going to accurately represent the character?

Is it just me, or if I click on my alt that's on Antonia Bayle, I get an error message? My alts on Nagafen display fine.. Perhaps the site is having issues parsing the space in the server name?

No its not just you. For some reason, my alts on the RP servers (Antonia Bayle and Lucan Dlere) have a delay on their pages where the additional tabs, including the Admin tab, is visible but yields no response when you click it. I ended up going though my list of alts (even alts I deleted 3 years ago) before coming back to the RP server characters. Eventually it worked, but the delay was strange.
Edit #1: Apparently the tabs do not work on my chars on Mistmoore now. How funny!So I guess theres no distinction between server toons.. its just ... fussy.
Also, if you look at the Persona/Stat tab, it gets cut off at the bottom. It may be because I dont wait the full 2 minutes for everything to load though.
I am on a brand new PC (64) running Windows 7 and view the site under Firefox.

Just on the alt pages alone, I would personally prefer a few changes as far as layout goes.
1. Get rid of the Community News/Marketplace tabs or move them to the bottom. They really don't need to be on the alt page as this is where most people review alts. Put it on the front page so there's less scrolling all around. If it must be there, then please put it at the very bottom of the page. Alternatively, switch the Admin tabs with the Community News tabs so we have access to Administrative pages immediately.
2. The tabs look pretty but they are a big hassle. I prefer the check boxes as I didn't have to wait for loading, and it was just easier overall to make these administrative adjustments.
3. Several people suggested a single checkbox that allowed the visibility access for all your alternates now and in the future. I think its a good idea. Please consider implementing this adding the options visible to all, visible to guild only, not visible.
4. If things must be kept as is, then at the lease do something about the Save Permissions button. Its very fussy. If you don't click it in the right spot, it won't save at all.
5. Load time still seems very slow. The sad part is that it loads slower than the World of Warcraft website.
6. I do like the alt bar on the very bottom. So if we kept that and moved the Admin tabs to the top, I'd be happy with the page layout. The less reloading we have to do the better.

Edit #2: Saving administrations DOES NOT SAVE. The process works (if you can get it to), but if you go back later, the permissions were never made. Thought you'd like to know in case people start coming back with torches and pitch forks
Edit #3: Permissions now work. Confirmed after I logged out and visited my pages. However, if you go back to your toons permissions, it will say "visible to all". Might want to see if its possible to get the adjustments to stick so people don't fret. (and yes I saw the "it may take 24 hours for permissions to go through" disclaimer)

DarkViper wrote:

Let's see. Issues with current build over the last one:

• The ability to sort the guild roster at all. Used to be able to sort by any of the ranking categories. This was a MAJOR downgrade from the last build. And since it loads more slowly than it did before, I'm wondering what we gained from this transition?
• The ability to scan through our guild roster at all for larger guilds. I understand you will be "tweak"ing the number of displayed members to be greater than 5. I can only hope your "tweak" is to at least 50. For a guild the size of mine, I currently 70 pages worth of member listings, and we aren't the largest guild around by far. This should realistically be at least 50 members and possibly more if you ever plan to restore the lost sorting functionality we had with the most recent build.
• The ability to click on a member in the guild roster and have it link you to that character's profile. As it is, if I want to look up a guild member in my roster, I have to navigate to the search and run a search. Why the lost functionality here? This is rather basic stuff.
• Ability to see a list of items a character has discovered, sorted by server vs. world discoveries. This was a great tool that I would love to see restored.
• The ability to have self-made leaderboards or use the sorting feature to make pseudo-guild leaderboards so that you could promote friendly competition within your guild/friends and not only be competing against people who are so far away that you might never catch them. This functionality was both lost on the personal leaderboards and the guild roster.

Really, it seems to me that we gained absolutely no functionality whatsoever from this revamp. Does it look nice? Well, it would without 2/3 of the homepage being taken up by advertising for a game we OBVIOUSLY already have or more station cash items or the same two leaderboards popping up (are those really supposed to represent the top 10 guilds/players? no? then take them down, have them rotate between the rest of the leaderboards, or just make them links to the leaderboard pages).
It gets better. Not only did we not get increased functionality, we LOST functionality. Again. This happened the last time that EQ2Players was "revamped." I can only pray that this time we actually get all our lost functionality back, since last time we certainly didn't.
One last thing. With all this revamp, did any of the outstanding bugs get fixed? I couldn't find any that were on a preliminary look-through. Even the blatantly broken Guild with Most Arena Kills is still busted (although now it is showing most npc kills instead of showing messed up arena kill results that only made a couple of guilds appear).
All I see on this revamp is more advertising (some of which is laughably unnecessary), and a pretty shell. If I had to choose right now, I'd simply ask to return it to the previous version and work to improve that, because if history is any indicator, it will be a year and a half before we get back to the level of functionality we had with that version. I'll take the old shell with the site that works.
It's not that I have no faith in the dev team for the website, but if this is what was being done during all the time since they took it over, I wonder where the justification is for people who took the time to list up all the long term bugs for the site when asked to do so.

edited I quoted the wrong person.

Just my opinion: Harder to navigate; looks trashy, slapped together. The prior web page was so much better. why it was changed to this crappy looking one? Who knows.

Siskiyou wrote:

Ooops I had quoted the wrong person above. Sorry. Anyway Leaderboards don't have the same functions they had before. Before you could select class to find leaders in that class.