Patch Notes

[ajax34i]

IMO we don't need to know whether it's GCD vs. ability-CD, and personally I just need to know whether the ability is available or not.  Don't care about conditionals; I get used to playing at the appropriate range and to activating conditionals properly over the first 10-20 levels.  I just need the bars to tell me, at a glance, is the ability on cooldown, is it available, or is it dimmed / not available.

They haven't done it yet, so I don't know how it would look, but I think I may prefer having lit-up black-and-white buttons rather than dimmed buttons.  If the ability is available, it's in full glorious color (all their icons are so saturated), if it's not available it's a bit less lit up and black-and-white.  Just so I can still recognize the icon.

Anyway, we'll see.  I put in a petition complaining, they replied asking me to post in the Ideas and Suggestions forum.

EDIT:  Heh, they've put up a poll about it.

[Sky]

IMO we don't need to know whether it's GCD vs. ability-CD, and personally I just need to know whether the ability is available or not.  Don't care about conditionals; I get used to playing at the appropriate range and to activating conditionals properly over the first 10-20 levels.  I just need the bars to tell me, at a glance, is the ability on cooldown, is it available, or is it dimmed / not available.

You may not care about conditionals, but they are important for some (me).

GCD vs CD you do need to know, having CDs greyed with a timer mechanism (and maybe even a slight (!!) flash (on that ONE ability)) would be quite enough. Throw on a red tinge to the grey on conditionals (the red number is a bit tough on a 1080p across the room). Really seems like about all you'd need.

v1 was almost perfect, just needing a conditional indicator.
v2 needed the greyed-out CDs, too tough to see when a long-timer CD was done
v3 is just kind of a mess, a couple decent ideas but it doesn't work

[Ingmar]

What exactly do you mean by a conditional indicator?

[01101010]

I was having a hell of a time last night figuring out if Rail Shot was up or not pretty much the whole time. Unless I let the GCD melt off to see what was highlighted which is an extra second of not doing a damn thing. DO NOT LIKE.

[Sky]

What exactly do you mean by a conditional indicator?

Like if something is out of range, it's not just greyed out (could be the last seconds of a long CD).

Regular icon = condition met (range/position/pre-req); not on CD
Red shade = condition not met; not on CD
Grey shade = condition met; on CD
Grey shade with red tinge = condition not met; on CD

The flash needs to leave the GCD; but it's not a horrible idea for regular CDs, just needs to be toned down. And as I've mentioned, would be nice to get some kind of border spider crawl effect if you queue something to indicate you pressed teh butan.

[Ingmar]

That sounds way too complicated for me. (and color-blind unfriendly...) Greyed out when I can't use it is good enough, I can probably figure out why.

[ajax34i]

What exactly do you mean by a conditional indicator?

I think conditionals are whether you're in range, behind the target, in stealth, or targetting the correct target (player vs. NPC, friendly vs. enemy).  Some abilities have prerequisites.  I'm not sure if "whether you have enough mana / focus / heat" is included in the definition of "conditionals."

[Sky]

That sounds way too complicated for me. (and color-blind unfriendly...) Greyed out when I can't use it is good enough, I can probably figure out why.

Not sure how a 2x2 grid is complicated. I'd rather have the information available to me if I want it.

It's obviously easy to implement, since the separate elements have already been re-jiggered. Ignore the color if you don't use it. Better yet, expose it all via options; their options menu is a paucity of options (coming from EQ2).

Damn ajax for throwing another monkey wrench into it. I say we run with Ingmar's suggestion and make that conditional (lack of resource) a green shade  

[proudft]

I was having a hell of a time last night figuring out if Rail Shot was up or not pretty much the whole time. Unless I let the GCD melt off to see what was highlighted which is an extra second of not doing a damn thing. DO NOT LIKE.

For some time I've just taken to hitting that (well, High Impact Bolt as my trooper equivalent) when appropriate and not caring too much if it was actually ready or not. Looking down at the toolbar to see what is active is something that WoW's popup stuff really trained out of me.   Also part of this is PvP's fault where I have always just buttonmashed what I WANTED to have happen and, maybe it will happen and maybe it won't, we'll see.

As best as I can tell I have one (1) graphical indicator on my dude when something is ready, and it's the proc for more damage from Full Auto (some swirling orange things appear around my character).  And I do pay attention to that, since it's right there in the middle of the screen.

[Sky]

Rift was pretty good about that after a while. If you set up something via pre-req it would pop up with a timer. So if my BH electro-darts something, shoulder slam would pop up onscreen.

While those things are cool, it would be nice if they could have just made the small tweaks to the hotbars rather than going overboard with the flashy and the bright outlines and the whatnot.

All of which is beside the point that the level of outrage is way out of proportion to the actual issue. As usual.

I went looking at a few EQ2 vids to see if there was a good example of the line of ants thing for queued abilities, and I'm just not going to sit through that much video to find someone who knows how to play the damned game. But one thing did stand out: I miss having a game with no GCD.

[apocrypha]

These last few hours of discussion expose very well why allowing ui mods is the best solution all round.

Everyone has a different preference. Not all classes are the same. PvP and PvE are different. Game designers generally can't code UIs for shit. Just let the playerbase do it, they'll do a better job in the long run.

Shit, make it like the Apple app store and have all mods vetted before being allowed if you have concerns about quality or exploits, although I don;t think that';s necessary.

[Fabricated]

These last few hours of discussion expose very well why allowing ui mods is the best solution all round.

Everyone has a different preference. Not all classes are the same. PvP and PvE are different. Game designers generally can't code UIs for shit. Just let the playerbase do it, they'll do a better job in the long run.

Shit, make it like the Apple app store and have all mods vetted before being allowed if you have concerns about quality or exploits, although I don;t think that';s necessary.

The problem is that the game was built on a pile of middleware rather than from the ground up with a sandboxed mod API like WoW. Unfortunately, much to my incredible chagrin no one is ever going to put in the effort to do that again.

[Sky]

Funny that the best solution is the way you'd like to see it done. Because it's a different solution than I'd think is best, which would be the way I'd want to see it done (via expanded options ingame).

Everyone should be able to tweak it the way they want to, without having to go hunt down and maintain a bunch of mods to do so.

[Paelos]

There's never going to be One UI To Rule Them All.

This is fact.

[Fordel]

Remove the flashing from the GCD refresh, just have it flash on cooldown refreshes.

[Lakov_Sanite]

After having had a seizure playing wow I'd be happy if nothing fucking flashed, EVER.

Seriously, mods ARE the best solution.  In a perfect world there would be a UI where every single part was customizable, unfortunately you will never get a developer to add that many tools and make them somewhat user-friendly to the average player.  Mods are simply the best compromise.

[El Gallo]

Funny that the best solution is the way you'd like to see it done. Because it's a different solution than I'd think is best, which would be the way I'd want to see it done (via expanded options ingame).

Everyone should be able to tweak it the way they want to, without having to go hunt down and maintain a bunch of mods to do so.

Because if you allow mods you can't have options in the built-in UI?  I'm not sure what you are saying here.

[Sjofn]

Mods are good because if Bioware is smart, they pay attention to what people are modding most, and add that in themselves (or break it if it's something fucked up, I guess!).

[Outlawedprod]

We will be bringing down servers for four hours on February 9th, 2012 from 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) until 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET) in order to deploy a patch. This patch will resolve the following:

    Killing players on Ilum will now consistently grant Valor and mission credit as intended.

Thank you for your patience as we maintain service for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™

[Ingmar]

Midnight maintenance kills me. ><

[Sjofn]

I know I am spoiled but C'MON DO IT AT 1AM PST INSTEAD ARR.

Midnight makes me go WAAAH WHY SO EARLY, 1am makes me go "FINE I GUESS I'LL GO TO BED," I have no idea why.

[apocrypha]

Funny that the best solution is the way you'd like to see it done. Because it's a different solution than I'd think is best, which would be the way I'd want to see it done (via expanded options ingame).

Everyone should be able to tweak it the way they want to, without having to go hunt down and maintain a bunch of mods to do so.

In my view (and I'm starting to feel like I should type those three words at the start of every single post here since f13 is just snark central these days) those 2 paragraphs are partly contradictory.

Yes, you could develop a UI that had an enormous number of options built in to it, but I don't think it would ever be possible to have enough options to please everyone. And that's a lot of expensive development & coding time. Having a modular UI and built-in mod system lets your players do that work for you, for free!

Look at the things people have done with WoW's mods. The thousands (if not tens of thousands?) of tweaks and mods. Do you think that the range of options available in EQ/EQ2/Rift (none of which I've played, so this is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one) match that?

I don't think I'm being biased by my own personal preferences here, I genuinely think that WoW has the best UI of any game I've ever played simply because the mod system means I can have the UI however I want it. They've iteratively improved it over the last 6 years so that the default UI out of the box is pretty damn good, but that's just the starting point if you want to put in the time yourself to make it how you want it.

[eldaec]

You should all have to play all MMOGs through the EVE UI. It builds character.

[Flinky]

Midnight maintenance kills me. ><

Look on the bright side. Here in Australia, the downtimes start at 7pm. 

[tmp]

Mods are good because if Bioware is smart, they pay attention to what people are modding most, and add that in themselves (or break it if it's something fucked up, I guess!).

BioWare couldn't even be arsed to fix their own "social" forum mod section to indicate when a mod was last updated. For two years and counting. Nevermind adding any sort of functionality for mod browsing, searching etc. Or even filtering out the empty "it'd be cool if someone made this" projects.

In other words, mods don't seem to be very high on their list of interests. And the answer to that "if" is a "no".

[apocrypha]

Changes coming to GCD UI:

http://www.swtor.com/blog/incoming-changes-global-cooldown-ui

Options! 

[DraconianOne]

Friday's Community feedback had lots of little gems.

Patch 1.2 will contain:

First phase of Legacy System
Guild Bank
New Warzone
New social gear (including heavy and medium armour)
"Hue to chest" reinstated (with further customisation options to come)
Target of target
Ranked warzones

Dual-spec is currently being worked on (but AC switching isn't).

[Wolf]

I've been getting some weird crashes this weekend, that weren't there last week, so I'm guessing a patch has something to do with it? My companion will spaz out on something (either jumping down from a ledge or gathering something), they'll start porting next to me when I run a bit, but still don't move once they're ported and in 30-45s the game will crash. That's happened on 2 characters in 3 different zones. Anyone else getting these?

[apocrypha]

Yep, I've been having exactly that with Gault, and only with him. I can send him off to do crew missions and I can summon him on the Fleet but anywhere else and my game will crash in under a minute. I submitted a detailed ticket and got a copy-paste response saying wait for a future patch.

[Wolf]

Yours sounds a bit more severe. Mine will be fine after the crash and I got maybe 4 or 5 in as much hours.

[apocrypha]

It's not really a problem because I hate Gault! Mako every time! 

[Kageru]

So the legacy system is basically automated twinking and encouraging alt levelling? Makes sense I guess since they invested so much time in the levelling content. It should have been fully fleshed out on launch though, adding reasons to level alts at the 3 month mark is going to be too late for a lot of people.

[Threash]

Yeah i have a 50 pt 41 assassin and 35 marauder, by the time 1.2 comes out the whole legacy thing is gonna be useless to me.

[Sjofn]

I knew the Legacy thing was going to be useless to me, the question is just HOW useless. 

Once again I'm a little irritated all my characters are on the same server ... when I get around to making my opposite gender alts, I'm going to be on a new server anyway now. ><

[caladein]

I'm still only on my third alt past the starter stage (50 Op, 43 Merc, 24 Assassin), so it should still make it out in time for a few Republic characters and like a Sith Warrior (to save me from making a dorky Zabrak).