Menus, Dialogues, Confirmations, and General Redundancies.

[Frost]

It really really really really gets my goat when I have to not only sift through a superfluous amount of confirmations, but to have them all defaulted to "No" or "Cancel". (Not every time, which can be just as annoying due to the lack of consistency)

Confirmations are fine, but confirm the decision, not challenge it...

If you are really taking the UI experience seriously, please take note that there's an unbelievable amount of redundancy in the game, and that defaulting to 'Cancel' when you have an actual 'cancellation' or 'escape' button is annoying and just impractical.

Please assume that the majority of the user base knows what they're doing, and that they are in fact interested in talking to the NPCs they're talking to. Please also assume that if they were to accidentally talk to an undesired NPC that they possess the ability to hit the Cancel button, and don't typically wait to the end of sometimes lengthy dialogue boxes to cancel.

For example:

The process of selling an item on the auction house:
[Highlighted in blue and red to symbolize reasonable and unreasonable actions during the process.]

1) Talk to the Auction House window or NPC.
-- Drop down appears, Buy/Sell/Sales Staus.
2) Select 'Sell'
3) Select item from your inventory.
4) Set Price.
5) Arbitrary Menu "Sell | Cancel" defaulting to 'Cancel'.
6) Select 'Sell'.
7) Arbitrary Menu "Transaction Fee" defaulting to 'Cancel'.
8) Select 'Ok'.
9) Confirm Price. Defaulted to 'Cancel'.
10) Select 'Ok'.


How these transactions should be streamlined for the users:

1) Talk to the Auction House window or NPC.
-- Drop down appears, Buy/Sell/Sales Staus.
2) Select 'Sell'
3) Select item from your inventory.
4) Set Price.
5) Confirm Price, and Auction House fees, Defaulting to 'Yes'.



And finally: The "Have a nice day!" ending lines need to be passive, and not require action on the part of the user.

For example:

Teleports could be a three step process:

Talk to the NPC,
Select destination,
Confirm.


NOT the five step:

Talk to the NPC,
Select destination,
Confirm, defaulted to 'Cancel',
Select 'Okay',
Confirm "Have a nice day!" (That ironically you can't cancel out of).


You don't go to a restaurant and order food like this:

Waiter: Welcome to Chez Square! My name is Mondo-Gordo, what could I get for you this evening?
You: I'll have the Rib-eye with the seasonal greens and roasted baby potatoes.

Waiter: So you don't want the Rib-eye with seasonal the greens roasted baby potatoes?
You: No, I do.

Waiter: Excellent, the price is $25.00 for the meal. I assume you wouldn't like to pay that, would you like me to cancel your order now?
You: No that price is fine.

Waiter: Alrighty, your order has been placed.
You: Thank you.

Waiter: Have a nice evening!
<Waiter stands there in an uncomfortable silence...>


~Please.

[RAIST]

lol.. but omg YES... PLEASE!

[Afrohatch]

I've never had much of a problem with the AH annoying me, but I agree with the "Have a nice day!" thing though.

Another annoyance is the option to set your home point every single time you change your main job in a mog house. It's beyond annoying, an option to maybe disable that question in the config menu would be super cool

[Fiarlia]

I wholeheartedly agree with this topic, and what it stands for.

[Seriha]

Dominion Ops are rather notorious with the confirmation spam, too. So yeah, streamlining is good. :x

[RaenRyong]

Trading in and swapping Battle Trophies around are always the death of me.

[Alhanelem]

Confirmations are necessary to protect stupid people from themselves. Even with multiple confirmations on rare/ex items, people still manage to accidentally throw them away.

[Arcon]

There's countless examples of that, and I couldn't agree more with it. Streamlining some of these choices would improve the overall quality of the game.

Also, consistency. Some warps require chatlog confirmation after the actual warp confirmation (WG warps, OP warps) others do not (Horst warps, Moogle Warps, Conflux warps). Same goes for confirmation menus and other things. Would be nice to get that adjusted, would make it more intuitive to use.

I know I've mentioned it before, but since it seems to fit the theme I'll say it again: please let us use our numpad. It's on the keyboard for a reason. Trading a 453,765 gil payout 15 times in a row with directional arrows takes longer than most events themselves.

[Alhanelem]

There's countless examples of that, and I couldn't agree more with it. Streamlining some of these choices would improve the overall quality of the game.

Eliminating confirmations does not increase game quality.

[Arcon]

There's countless examples of that, and I couldn't agree more with it. Streamlining some of these choices would improve the overall quality of the game.

Eliminating confirmations does not increase game quality.

Not necessarily. It's also not what I said. I said streamlining menu choices would improve the quality. Streamlining implies removing redundancies, assuming logical implications, bundling chatlog details, to make the game faster and better accessible at no (or acceptable) loss of information/control to the user. If that includes the elimination of confirmations, that means that they were redundant or implied or unnecessarily split, which would make them cumbersome to use, which is a sign of lower quality in a game.

It does not mean to eliminate confirmations that are necessary. Asking one time is perfectly fine, asking three times is redundant. Thus the latter occurrence can be streamlined to make the game better to use, at acceptable loss of control to the user.

An example of bundling chatlog information would be stuff like selecting Atma or Dominion Ops, when you have to click through line by line of something that no one reads. People just wanna know the mobs they need to kill and the difficulty, delivered in one batch, skipped by one press of the enter key (or not even that) and immediately confirmed. Same goes for display of key items when popping an NM, up to 7 lines you have to spam, and if you go a bit too far, you skipped the dialogue, because it defaulted to no and have to repeat it again.

These are all subtleties, but they contribute (and add up) to the user interface as a whole, and as they are now they can often be cumbersome to use. Hence streamlining will improve the user interface and consequently the user interaction/control, thus raising the game's overall quality.