Since we released update 1.3, we’ve been reading the feedback you’ve been leaving across our social channels.
The Menu and Inventory changes we made are some of the most significant UI changes we’ve made so we’re very pleased we have a community who is so passionate and willing to leave us constructive feedback.
We agree that in some areas the patch hasn’t quite landed where we thought, but we do believe this is still a very positive change and a step in the right direction. That said, we’re taking your feedback onboard and will make sure we get this to where we want it to be.
Thank you, everyone!
Additionally, we also wanted to specifically confirm here that we are working on a hotfix patch for 1.3 which will primarily be to fix any bugs we can get to ASAP including (but not limited to):
Fixing the text filter for the Minions in the Tavern Vault
Making sure the Spell Tooltops appear as expected while FX are playing
Fixing the Gear Loadouts in various affected menus
We’re also going to include some fixes related to some of the feedback we’ve received (such as removing the Salvage confirmation for single items), but since we’re a small team and are already working on our next major update, some things will take a little more time to work through so you’ll see things continuing to be added in following updates!
Once again, we really appreciate the detailed feedback we got from all of you!
First of all, I’m very glad you are listening to our feedback and for the quick response to it. And I’m happy some things will be fixed so soon. However, it seem like you are still missing the point of it. All of our feedback is saying: this is not a step in the right direction at all. I know it’s very hard to admit when something has completely failed after so much time and effort was put into it. And you guys were at least able to take the first step in admitting part of it was bad. But nothing is going to be able to improve unless you can look at it honestly enough to admit it was a total misstep, not just part of one.
Look at it this way: Final Fantasy XIV is one of the best MMOs of the time, but the devs had to admit it was in a terrible state and completely revamp it from the ground up to get there. Without that first step of honestly admitting almost everything about it was bad, it would have never become great. So please take the next step too and admit it was a misstep and not what the community wanted, rather than just a partial error.
(Also, I’ll have my own constructive feedback post with ways to fix the issues coming soon, so hopefully that will help!)
99.5 times out of 100 I just want to increase am item/spell/minion a few levels to use up lesser/minor shards and get a better reward from salvaging. Please, please change this in the Hotfix.
“we’re taking your feedback onboard and will make sure we get this to where we want it to be.”
Maybe instead you should try to get it WHERE THE PLAYERS WANT IT TO BE.
1.3 Is the worst thing to happen to this game and a number of us don’t even want to play the game now. Can you please at least change the horrible gear layout back to what it was? I know you’re a small studio and for some reason you’re working on the next major update instead of fixing this one, but this needs to be a priority. Please. PLEASE.
I’d be so interested to know why the team believes it is a very positive change and a step in the right direction. What I mean is: in order to believe that, when virtually everyone playing disagrees, there must be a specific goal in mind. If we knew that goal, we might be able to come up with ideas that honor your goal and also help improve things for players.
My primary issue with the inventory interface is that presents no information. I’m not a huge fan of a wall of tiles, but I could live with it if gave me information. I would say that at least the name of the set should be with the icons. They are small icons so the name of the specific piece might not fit.
Awesome! To end on a positive… I’m really enjoying the season archive and I like having all of the battle modes in one place!
I know when changes are made to anything in any aspect of life people complain and then either quit and go elsewhere, put up with the changes grudgingly, get used to them eventually, jump up and down until the changes get reversed or deal with the change some other way. With this in mind I had the thought
“IF I STARTED PLAYING THIS GAME TOMORROW AND HAD NEVER SEEN THE PREVIOUS INVENTORY LAYOUT WHAT WOULD I THINK ABOUT THE INVENTORY?”
Everyone has different things they want from a game but when it comes down to it they want to enjoy themselves and have fun. With this in mind when I am playing a mobile game I don’t want the game to be too heavy. I generally play puzzle games, tower defense and to a lesser extent tycoon games.
For every game I have invested a huge amount of time in there are probably two or three games that I played for a little bit, didn’t get into and then ended up deleted from my phone. The more I think about the current inventory in puzzle quest 3 I think that it would most likely have been one of the games i deleted.
In all fairness I’m not sure how the game currently holds the hand of a new player and the tooltips it gives. But after playing for a short while I think I would feel overwhelmed with the inventory the way it is as a new player. To try and memorise all the names of the items and spells and what they do seems like it would have been overwhelming to me. Not to mention trying to organise gear sets and deciding what to keep and what to salvage. Not being able to tell the difference between the rarities of things. Then ending up with a wall of little icons would have me think it’s all too difficult and would require too much work to learn and master. Not to mention everything is so small. I know it helps give more on one screen but to have so many icons and so little text on the 1st inventory screen you get. As a side note I still find many bits difficult to read on a 6" screen. (I swear some of the gear text is even smaller than before) If I can’t read it easily it makes learning even more difficult.
I could be wrong with the above but I have deleted several games in the past after playing them for a few days or a little bit over a week because they just seemed like too much work to learn or were difficult to manage or I spent too much time managing and not enough playing or were just plain confusing. I can’t help but think PQ3 would fall in to this category as it is at the moment. Other people will feel different to me but that’s my opinion.
As I wrote elsewhere lots of the rest of the update is great, just not the inventory and a few other tweaks that need doing.
Things that are great:
Changing characters with one click
The new battle tab
The season archive
Things that are not so great:
The lack of information about item names and rarity in the new inventory
Not having the loadout selection at every point to enter a battle.
Upgrades defaulting to max level
Inventory icons must clearly show the rarity of the item. I was also really hoping for a filter selection by gear type as well (Guard, Royal, etc.).
Here’s another element that is just so infuriating:
I’ve selected my equipped helm, I have the filter button on so that I only see helms on the right hand side gear vault view.
I’ve decided that I’d like to prune my extra helms so I want to just salvage some helms. Now I have to pick one to salvage, click salvage, and then the right hand gear vault menu returns to an unfiltered (i.e. all items) view and now I’m hunting like some idiot for the other two helms that I know I want to salvage.
I really hate this inventory management update in so many ways.
EDIT: someone shared their gear setup with me to ask a question and I’m staring at this screenshot just wondering why the developers hate us so much.
The icons are so small, the character takes up all the screen FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON. Trying to evaluate a gear setup and I have to get out a magnifying glass and play Memory BECAUSE LITERALLY NO INFORMATION OF USE IS DISPLAYED ON THE SCREEN.
Just some further thoughts here: This statement is a core part of the problem currently in the state of the game. Many times this explanation is trotted out essentially saying “although you don’t like these changes, the developer thinks they are worthwhile and appropriate”, but no insight is given in to why? Why is this very positive change? Why is this a step in the right direction? The players for the most part don’t see it as such. What are we missing? The complete absence of developer explanations about changes creates this disconnect with players.
Why should players keep investing in a game where the developers’ dont think the players are worth their time and investment in communicating the reasons behind these significant changes. Perhaps if more information was given we could see the logic in some of the changes and adapt accordingly.
This was the verbiage from the August Community Update:
Change is tough to adopt sometimes but I don’t understand how this “rework” solved the problems described. You could arguably have just added a search bar for finding specific items; that would have been a significant improvement! But instead we have this GUI mess that is hard to read, lacks appropriate indicators about quality and detail of items, requires significantly more clicks to do things, and generally feels less intuitive than before.
This is anecdotal observations on my part but I’m seeing attrition (losing players) greater than I’ve seen at anytime since launch. I don’t know what your back end numbers are telling you but this update (the inventory management part particularly) is not well received and sidelining a bunch of players who otherwise would be playing right now.
Which Channel Fire do I salvage? It took 10 clicks of fucking about going to the upgrade screen of each spell to figure out they’re both level 25 epic rarity spells.
Why have you made this terrible mess, I hate it so much
