Option to Remove the Circle Image on Skill CD

[dayspring83]

I didnt see this nugget in the patch notes. What a pleasant surprise it was! I love it!

[WaffleFaerie]

I would also like the ability to toggle this on and off. My eyes read it as a visual obstruction more than anything else, kinda like animated fluorescent tube lighting overtop of my icons. It's just a sea of rolling white lines that blots out all the colours, and it's the colours I look for to see what's ready and what isn't. The old gray shaded icons were just right for me.

That being said, I *love* the idea of the little numbers ticking down, but I just find the white clock circles so distracting that it's hard for me to focus on them. If I could get rid of the big bubbles and keep the little numbers, that'd be awesome.

[Niwashi]

The white circles hide the icons the bar is supposed to be showing us. I can usually handle that on my more frequently used jobs and classes, where I can rely on muscle memory at least for common skills, but trying to play a less familiar class is nearly impossible as I can't see which buttons trigger which actions. (There is the help text above the crossbar, but I learned the skills mainly by icon rather than name. If I can't see the icons, then I have a hard time figuring out which is which.)

And the countdown numbers, which we'd actually asked for and could have been useful, were instead turned into tiny little dots in the corner. Why? They already had it implemented perfectly in the tooltips that you see when you go to the Actions & Traits window. There it will show a skill icon with the countdown timer in nice big numbers sized to fit the icon. Why wasn't that version, which they already had designed for the tooltips, put on the hotbar versions of those same icons so that we could actually see the numbers?

[Lukha]

I definitely want this to be changed to something you can toggle on or off. It's not completely awful, but I don't like the way it makes my skill icons look, and it's very distracting to have something constantly moving on that part of the screen.

I wouldn't mind if it were JUST skills with their own cooldowns, but to have it appear on every single GCD skill every single time you use a GCD skill is atrocious.

I appreciate that SE is trying to make the game more accessible for people with impairments; that's a great thing and definitely something they should do, but in every single case they just force the change out rather than making it an option, when a change that might be helpful for one person might make things much harder for another.

[Zhexos]

Hello, everyone.

The following is a comment from UI Lead Hiroshi Minagawa in regards to the new recast timers implemented in Patch 3.2.

Greetings,

Thanks for the quick feedback!

During development, we had a long debate about whether or not to make design changes to the recast timer.

If there was an option which would allow you to choose between the new design and the previous design, there wouldn't be any issue; however, due to memory restrictions, we cannot hold data for two types of animation. Therefore, based on comments received during our testing, we continued to make improvements until 90% of the team was in agreement, and in the end, we decided to implement an improved version.

With that said, I would like to go into a bit more detail about this. The explanation involves some technical jargon and information, and it is primarily geared towards those of you who wish to know the finer aspects of this, as well as how the development team's decisions are made.

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The issue we wanted to resolve with this improvement
Since the display when an action's recast is nearly complete and when the action can actually be used again were the same, there were times where some actions with long recast times weren't executable even when it looked like it was possible.
(*We've been receiving comments on the forums regarding this since quite a long time ago--right after A Realm Reborn released, actually.)

For end-game content, a few seconds can result in a life-or-death situation, which can cause a large amount of frustration, so this was an issue we wanted to resolve.

Ideas for improvement

A) Change how the icon is presented when an action becomes available
Change how the icon is presented when an action's recast is near completion, so that users can tell right away when an action will soon become available.

Display the remaining recast time as a numeric value
*Since we cannot add more displays on top of existing icons (which is a measure to lessen display density), we therefore used the part of the display which was used for TP cost. There were comments from testers mentioning that they wanted the number to be displayed in the center of the icon; however, this would required preparation of a different part or the placement of a process which would check the situation to change the displayed position. This was rejected because it would increase the load.

Limitations related to the design change suggested in A)
Currently, we cannot increase the capacity for texture images on the UI (HUD) which are constantly displayed.
*The capacity limitations on video memory for the lowest spec environment
In regards to the textures for the HUD, in order to account for the stability of the memory status, it has been structured in a way where it does not re-read, therefore we cannot address this by preparing two types of animation patterns for the recast.

If we changed the structure so it can re-read, it will involve a large amount of programming resources, QA resources, and there would be a high risk of related bugs that would continue into future expansions.
*Considering the risks, to start out we have removed the possibility of re-reading HUD textures from our structure.

Having a structure that requires an engineer's time who can design this type of UI system, implement it, and maintain it (which is rare), would, in the long term, result in a reduction in the quality and amount of service we can provide. As a result, it would be a disadvantage for the players.

To prevent and increase in stress being placed on screen rendering, we had to change the design for the recast animation so that it maintains the structure of having one image animated in a pattern.

When considering these factors, we had to choose: use the previous design or use an improved design.

Development inspection for the design change

We made four large design adjustments and held a vote during play test sessions.
*There were many more fine detailed design adjustments.

We all voted to see if we preferred the previous design or the new design, and gave the reason behind our choices as well as our thoughts on it after trying it out for about a week. During testing, we had testers play it in a normal manner for about a week.

1st test - tested and evaluated the improved version with members from the UI team and other development team members.
2nd test - QA testing, vote ratio between old and improved version: 3:4
3rd test - QA testing, vote ratio between old and improved version: 1:2
4th test - QA testing, vote ratio between old and improved version: 1:9 (this is the version which has been introduced in Patch 3.2)

There were 50 testers, and comments were taken from both actual players and non-players.

Opinion as the UI lead
The design we have currently is something which received 90% approval from internal testing; however, you can also say that, 10% of the testers were against this design, which means
out of 10,000 players, 1,000 players would be against it.

If I decided to take the safest route for this matter, it would be to leave it as it was until now without announcing anything or doing anything at all. (Clearly this route is missing the bigger picture for the long-term.)

There have been comments mentioning that if the recast timer can be displayed numerically, it should be possible to keep the previous recast animation. During the 3rd round of testing, I also thought this (where one out of three was against this), and I was thinking we're not going to make any changes this time.

However, as a result from making further adjustments, we were able to reach a design which 90% of the group agreed on. *Leaving out the fine details, we also took into account bias from multiple votes.

We made a decision after looking at it long and hard, but because there were a lot of comments where people felt uncomfortable at first, but got used to in a week and like the improved version better, we decided to go with the new design.

*The majority of testers were private players, so their comments are based on alternatively trying the new recast design and the previous design.

While this improvement was only one UI task, we proceeded while considering our overall policy for future UI changes. Considering the many benefits that this change could achieve, we decided to implement it.

*I'm sure people will ask why we aren't trying to make something that everyone likes, but if we don't follow this approach, we won't even be able to come up with something the majority can agree on. ;_;

The future
I'm sure there will be other improvements in the future that we will not be able to prepare an option for. Though we will implement these kind of changes, we would like to receive comments from various view points. This time around, not only have you mentioned that you liked the previous display method, but you also explained which parts of the new display was concerning. This type of information is very useful, and I would like to thank you all!

From the comments we have received, there were many about the white border on the edge of the circle being too strong, which made it hard to see the action's icon.
*This was also brought up by the testers.

With these comments in mind, we'll consider lowering the white from the border by about 10 to 20 percent in order to tone down the contrast of the overall hotbar and to increase the visibility of action icons.

Is it impossible to add an option?
Cutting straight the conclusion, it's not impossible in the long run.

There are two types of images in the current UI: one which needs to be placed constantly in the memory and images which can be loaded when they need to be displayed. The recast display is something which needs to be constantly placed in the memory.

There is a large amount of UI images for this type, but we're arranging them individually as well as making optimizations to make room for placing two types of recast images. We would then be able to add an option for it.

However, arranging and re-stacking existing data like a puzzle may break those displays, so it requires various display size testing. To be honest, it's a lot of work, and we won't know the outcome until we try it.

The optimization work we do isn't something which can be seen by players, so this isn't mentioned in the patch notes, but it is something that is done continuously. We may be able to have enough room available in the future to have another set of recast animations.

That pretty much sums up what I can explain at this point.
I look forward to seeing everyone's comments!

[Eidolon]

Hello, everyone.

The following is a comment from UI Lead Hiroshi Minagawa in regards to the new recast timers implemented in Patch 3.2.

so tl;dr : PS3 limitations?

[SigmaOZ]

An option to remove them is welcome but I definitely wouldn't use it because I love how the animations look and yes, it makes so much easier to see when the skills are good for use again!...

[ArtEmisPalmecia]

Thanks for the information , but I have to agree with others. Now there is too much animation happening with the hotbars, and for some like me, its become more distracting than helping.
This was done with near perfect execution back in v1.2 days, so it is a shame that similar results cannot be replicated here.

Also, please don't forget bullet 3 from an old presentation used...

[Fevelle]

I love the new animations. The old ones were a lot harder to keep track of my Healer CDs, especially on controller.

[Niwashi]

It just looks like an issue of focusing on one point while ignoring others. There was indeed an issue that it was (in the former version) hard to see when exactly some of the longer cooldowns completed. And this change does indeed make that more obvious, so it's a win on that specific point.

Unfortunately, at the same time, it hides the icon itself which is supposed to tell us what skill is assigned to that button. If it comes down to a choice of not being certain when a button is available or not even being able to see what the button does, then I for one would like to know what the button does. Muscle memory can get a lot of it on familiar jobs, but if muscle memory was enough throughout, then we wouldn't even have icon hotbars display on the screen. It seems SE forgot what their primary purpose is.