SE, from bottom of my heart, change damn GCD animation

[Serilda]

Also a fan. Mashing buttons which look as though they're ready only to find that there are still a couple of seconds of the cooldown left was tedious and annoying. That's not to say I'd protest if they did manage to get an option to keep both sets of people happy someday - choice is always good - but I'd rather keep this new system than revert to the old one if that's the only alternative on offer.

It's a fallacy to say that the likes in the thread about the topic are the full picture, because people are significantly more likely to get invested in a topic which actually interests them than the other way around and there's no accurate way to tell how many diffferent people read the topic but didn't care enough to log in and leave a Like etc. People who are happy with the new display don't care as much as those who find it distracting.

[Chessala]

If you just stop focusing and raging about them, you won't notice them anymore. Right now it only bothers you because you focus on it and keep thinking how annoying it is....and you focus on it more.

I was fine with the old design but I appreciate the new one too and especially the counter.

Now the AOE indication....it was great when Heavensward came out (strong outer circle, almost nothing inside). They changed it back to almost filling the circle again, which sucks majorly for me and yet, do I whine about it every other week? Seeing overlapping AOE is a pain like this and yet I deal and so do others. So deal with this change as well.

[Rowyne]

thats how it feels @.@

^OMG this!!!

[DragonFlyy]

People actually look at their bars? I have mine memorized, both location and cooldown. Then again as a healer, my cooldown is finished pretty close to when a spell is done casting.

[AsteriaStarfall]

If the little tiny GCD animations are bothering you, you are spending way to much time looking at your hotbars and not what is going on in game.

[Yasuhiro]

Out of curiosity what's wrong with the new ones for some people?
I don't mind them but I really don't think they needed to change them either, nothing wrong with the old ones.

[Mycow8me]

Too much movement down in hotbars. It draws attention to my eyes/distracting.. I hated it when it first came out, and i still hate it. Only way ive found to cope is to change some to macro icons and use muscle memory...

[Waeksyn]

The trouble they were trying to fix is making it easier to know when the skill is ready to fire again. The old method had the icon gradually "brighten" using a clock sweep. Trouble is, it looked full in the last second or so (95% of the icon was bright, hard to see the sliver that wasn't). So, they added another graphical element - a bright white ring in addition to the clock sweep brightening. Now, the ring must disappear before the skill is ready. This makes it easier to tell.

The trouble is, both methods, but in particular the new one, makes the hot bars visually busy - "noisy" in communications lingo. This makes it more difficult for many because you now must try to notice something in a sea of visual distraction. This is particularly bad because this treatment is applied to all actions, including GCD. One action results in a dozen icons becoming animated. GCD actions are done on player rhythm more so than visual cue. Non GCD actions are the ones that need the cue and it would be much easier to see if not distracted by all the GCD noise.

The change they applied was lazy (no change to the sweep method or differentiation between GCD and off GCD). There are many graphical treatments that would work better without adding visual noise.

[Zojha]

Out of curiosity what's wrong with the new ones for some people?

They are bright, white circles.

Brightness tends to draw attention, which is why typically, skills that are on CD are darkened (still are!), so they innately draw less attention (Indicating: Can't use this, move along eyes!). That's a rather general video game convention, because it's simply been proven people pay more attention to the flashing lights than the shadow below. In addition, we tend to pay more attention to moving things than still things and those circles are definitely on the moving side of things.

It's simply counterintuitive and distracting, like a flashing advertisement moving up and down somewhere on the screen. You shouldn't pay attention to it, you know you shouldn't, it's not relevant right now, but...the eye innately gets drawn there.

[Magis]

Here's the post : http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...00#post3588300

I like the new cooldowns, reminds me of 1.0. That being said, I've always had a problem with some of SE's "because limitations" excuses.

According to the above link, the issue is the PS3's small memory (or in this case video memory) size. However why would you have both animations loaded into memory at all? If a user switched between animation styles, the application should unload the old animation, and load in the new one. The only real penalty is physical storage (of which the data would take less than 1mb), and the few milliseconds to unload/load the new image when the user switches the style in options (which the game engine is doing all the time ANYWAY).

This reminds me of the time SE said they wouldn't add more macros due to bandwidth limitations.... even though macros are stored client side.