Improvements to the Action Bar and Unit Frames ?

[Soma]

yes im happy with this. hopefully SE will give us some options to change the color. (although it doesnt look like it)
adding bars is a good thing also. just give us the ability to toggle as many as we need.
if they add more bars maybe that will fix the issue were i have to click or retarget mobs to scroll threw the bars.

[Vahzl]

They will be adding a bouncing mickey mouse head, so you can sing along to your abilities.

[Rydin]

Are 95% of the players blind?

To the OP: Sensationalist comments like this completely undermine the spirit of the forums. Ask your self, as a developer, would you listen to someone that started their thread with "Are 95% of the players blind?"
All the "If they add xxx I will stab my eyes out" or "If they don't xxx then I'm gonna jump in front of a train" or even "All of you idiots who don't know what you're talking about" just makes you look silly...

All of this forum hyperbole, when used alongside a complaint, comes off tantamount to a child's temper tantrum.
That is not the way an adult gets their point across. Forum Rants are extremely counterproductive.

As far as the point of your thread; What if I told you the Action Bar fix took 1 person 1 hour to change. Would it still be a complete and utter waste? Or would you still think it still could have waited months until bigger problems were fleshed out?

What if I told you people with slight visual impairments have been having trouble playing the game since 1.18 because they have a hard time seeing which ability is highlighted?

Would it then become a major issue for you?

the number #1 priority at ALL times is that the game remain playable by everyone. This was an issue that was hindering people from playing and needed to be addressed.

[Synfrag]

@ The people saying it isn't broken are you using a mouse? Because just about everyone I know who uses a controller has trouble with it, myself very much included. I run a 22" HD Monitor 18" from my face and in Thanalan with the sun shining it is almost impossible to see which action you are on.

Just realized this was said many times later in the thread. My bad...

[Azztaroth]

the only improvement i can think of is the highlighted action needs to be more visible. at a quick glance in combat i have a really hard time identifing what skill is selected. aside from that other improvements are welcome.

[Alfortis]

Cool this was bothering me when I was playing a few days ago. I'm glad they fixed it .

Also OP, not to insult you're intelligence but i'm sure they did not stop the battle program team, music team, the motion capture actors, sales team, localization team, debuggers, environmental effect programmers, classes designers, story line team, engine designers, battle animators, weapon designers, and etc just to implement this.

Ill bet that it was a guy who knows how to use a tablet and Photoshop and drew some arrows to make make the action bar stick out more. Then he spoke to the UI programmers and they replaced the current highlighter with the new arrows. Then the QA or maybe the programmers tested the to see if it works. Ill bet that this took no more than two days to complete and it was done by a very small group of people. I doubt this completely halted the dev team.

I'm no game designer btw so maybe i'm wrong.

[Scape]

I can see the actions just fine, I think they look great. It is a little tough to see what is selected though. There is a faint yellow glow that highlights what you have selected and it can be very hard to see, especially if on top of a lighter background. Would be nice to be able to customize its color so I can make it a bright purple or something.

[xeqtr]

Hope its better for sure, though I get the feeling it will just be bigger like everything else hehe.

Hope I'm proven wrong.

[Reinheart]

Please understand there are different groups of devs... changing UI on the action bar is pretty damn simple and is a quick fix, it doesn't take that much time to do unless they went all out fancy but looking at the image in the topics it's simple change and it really doesn't take much time for it...

OMG!?!?!?! 15-30 minutes of dev's precious time spent on a action bar UI change!?!?!? OH NO ITS THE END OF THE WORLD!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCpjgl2baLs

Hope its better for sure, though I get the feeling it will just be bigger like everything else hehe.

Hope I'm proven wrong.

Bigger the better right? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq8xuVnB-Pk

[Ferth]

I'm glad that this is a change that people who use controllers will welcome. I don't use a controller so it means bupkiss to me. I'm not mad that they are implementing this change... I am confused as to why it deserves the big banner on lodestone.

Something like that suggests that SE is trying to give this announcement a sense of gravity that doesn't fit the actual change to gameplay. Which in turn, makes the announcement seem trite.

If people are having issues with this then it's great that they are fixing it... but honestly... I was hoping for better information than this... and with the weight SE has tried to give this announcement it makes me feel like this is our snippet for the week.

If they had posted the updates to the chat log post from friday with a banner I'm sure it would have exhibited much the same response, but they snuck it in under a banner about an update to the grand company page (which if you ask me was equally as trite.)

Mainly, this kind of information seems disingenuous. "We won't give you any useful information... but here's a pretty banner!"

Of course, that's speaking from the perspective of someone who gains nothing from this change. I can see how if you have actually had issues with the visibility of the action bar how this information is nice to have. Frankly, I didn't even realize people had this issue until this thread.