Button Bloat: Data for discussion

[Shurrikhan]

So, button-bloat has two impactful ways of defining it. First, there's having so many buttons as to be physically uncomfortable / less responsive for many players. Second, there's unnecessary convolution (like a CD that is the sole means of access to another action having a button separate from that action).


For the first, especially, I feel like button-bloat counts ought to consider separately the actions that have no likely use or no use in instanced content. That trims Repose, basically axes Shirk and Shield Bash, effectively axes Cure, Physick, and Benefic, etc., etc., to give a slightly clearer picture of what all this means in terms. There's also arguably the matter of whether the less used actions even need to be particularly easy to reach, but let's save that for later.

In either case, I do think it's worth being mindful of multiples of 4 (a controller palette), 8 (a controller crossbar), and 12 (a keyboard row), and maybe not going one over their nearest common multiple if that extra button offers very little additional gameplay value, as per definition #2 below.


For the second, well, we probably ought to be looking at which buttons provide very little increase in available complexity relative to their button cost ("I press this button for Ikishoten, but I press this button for Namikiri! ...Nevermind that the latter can only even be used after Ikishoten...").

it only struggles on soft scrolling which really only affects AST

Soft-scrolling is definitely a place where some "micro-AI" or "smart-targeting" could do a ton of good, as could other tangential improvements like being able to simultaneously hold a Hostile Target and a Friendly Target, removing the inability for macros to queue and allowing them additional targeting settings (such as @st or @soft-target), etc.

Examples of "smart-targeting" (or, smart-snapping") might be something like an option to have, when you Draw a Melee Card, your soft-target snap to the last Melee DPS or Tank that you buffed with a Card (perhaps even with a set priority order for the snap that you could set in the macro [rehauled slightly for greater accessibility]). Other potential improvements could be something like the option to have, once you hit Play, your UI highlight via Soft Target indicators all Priority and Other applicable recipients, and you just nudge your stick to the angle and (relative) depth of the viable target you want to affect with Play.

I suspect there's a ton of little tweaks that could make the controller experience feel far better. Button count isn't something they struggle with, but there's plenty of room for improvement where a lack of mouse is concerned.

And sure, right now it only particularly affects AST... because there's very little extremely urgent healing required. But could you imagine if you actually needed to ST oGCD heal two people (not next to each other in the party list) in the very same GCD-gap to prevent their deaths? I could do that on mouse (though far more easily if mouseovers weren't penalized unless playing with plugins), but I'm not confident I could do so reliably on controller. And I'd love for that situation not to be just a pitifully unrealistic spitball, but not so much if there would be players who'd face a very obvious technical limitation just from not having a mouse.

Can't put HB tags in HB tags, this is a tragedy

I could

have sworn that

you could?

It seems to work just fine, regardless of placing the HB brackets on the same line or separate ones.

TECHNOLOGY!