The Importance Reliable Feedback, Relevant Information, and Attention to Detail

The Importance Reliable Feedback, Relevant Information, and Attention to Detail, and why Addons Can Fix Everything that Doesn't Work.

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I want to talk a bit today about the Interface of the game, it's triumphs, it's downfalls, and how I hope the Interface can be improved in the future.

While ARR does some great work in making the UI customizable by the user right out of the box, the actual information presented has some serious shortcomings.

Lack of information is a real problem in the game as it is right now. It is tremendously difficult to make the 'right' tactical decision mid-boss fight when you can't see percentages. It is infuriating to have to guess when a newly-resurrected character becomes a valid target because there is indicator showing this. It's dumb that there is no numeric feedback for the countdown on ability cooldowns. There are so many little UI oversights in the game that it is often painful to play, just because the Interface is either incomplete, or disagreeing with itself. It feels like whoever is leading Interface Design has never picked up an MMO before this one, and it shows.

It is a serious problem when the Interface is getting in the way of making the right decisions -- when you have to guess on the status of buffs, debuffs and cooldowns because the information given to you isn't clear -- when all these problems have been solved before 18 times over and you are wondering yet again why the designers don't seem to 'get it'.

A classic example of a misunderstanding of the problems surrounding the game is in the most current patch: 2.05. Players were complaining about the resurrection animation. Take a look at this post:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...52#post1413252

It's great that they are responding to player feedback, but there are two things wrong with that approach.

First, this doesn't actually fix the problem of being unable to see when the player becomes an valid target for friendly spells. A progress bar, similar to a cast bar over the player, with perhaps a green overlay indicating "The player has taken the res, it's going to be *this long* until they become a valid target" would be all that's necessary and all of a sudden there really isn't a problem any more because people aren't being forced to guess when they can move, when their friends can start casting more spells, and when they can start to be affected by enemy spells. The end result is that the game isn't any easier, but the player is given tools to make a better decision, which is how these problems should be approached.

Second, a huge opportunity was missed by the System's Design team to actually turn the Resurrection mechanic into something more. Why not allow a player to be healed when mid-rez? In a lot of fights, when that 2.5 GCD is indispensable, it's not even a realistic option, but if room was made to spend the time on your friend being resurrected, then it's probably earned and the reward is being able to heal your buddy as they are coming up again. If that proves to be too powerful, then doing something different, like putting a healing debuff on them and making it a more difficult opportunity cost to assess. There so much that can be done with that mechanic and they decided to do nothing. It's lazy, it's sloppy, and it's indicative of problems with the systems design team.

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Getting back to a post about the Interface, the truly disappointing thing is that all of this could be solved if the API for Addons was released with the game. All the time spent making the Interface customizable out of the box was wasted. Literally.

Gabe Newell said once that to try and compete with your customers is a mistake because 'anything we can do, they can do ten times faster, and ten times better if you just give them the tools'. This is completely true with the interface of MMOs and it's an observable phenomena that has been repeated 10 times over in the past 7 years. If you would have given the community to build you an interface, they would have built one that was an order of magnitude better than what we have today, but we are now stuck waiting 7 months for those tools, and as a result, we are stuck with an interface that can barely stand toe-to-toe with Everquest's interface circa 1999 in terms of relevant information.

It was a huge mistake and an example of gross mismanagement to not release an Interface API with the game. It's an equally huge mistake to lose sight on what is important in an interface and what it's role actually is. Somewhere between the mono-chromatic color scheme, pretty text and quasi-editable action bars, their seems to be a complete lack of focus in the design. Sure, it looks great in a screenshot, but at the end of the day, it's not functional, and that's all that really matters.

I'd love to see my laundry list of problems fixed, but I don't want Square-Enix to do it. It's not because I don't trust them, but it's because their community can do a better job.