A Message from the Devs on 1.3 Feedback

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!

4 Likes

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.

4 Likes

There are 4 different rarities of this spell in this UI view. This is not a “positive change” or a “step in the right direction”

New game! Name the rarities! Make sure you salvage the legendary!

Bonus game:
Pick the highest rarity spell! Also, name that Rarity!
Screenshot_20220902-114700_Puzzle Quest 3

13 Likes

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.).

5 Likes

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.

I really really hate this update.

12 Likes

Hardly even Play now since the update, the gear menu is just horrible and made me just lose motivation to play daily like I use too.

10 Likes

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.

Why is this a very positive change again?

8 Likes

Uncommon
Rare/Epic
Uncommon
Common

1 Like

You want to know where “a step in the right direction” gets you?

This is where it gets you.

2 Likes

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.

6 Likes

I loathe how it’s impossible to see what your actual spells level is if it’s level capped on a particular character.

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

6 Likes

LOL, I’ve deleted the game after an update having at least 3h playing session/day. Very positive indeed, congrats to the team!

4 Likes

Linking my feedback post and example home menu here, since apparently the devs need the feedback in one place to find it easily.

Also, to add to this, since it seems like we’re stuck with these changes, what I’d need at minimum to be able to keep playing the game:

  • Larger icons (for everything that was made smaller, such as the chests, gear, etc)
  • relocated gear button
  • Battles not being all on once screen and requiring scrolling
  • More info on gear, spell, and minion icons (name added back at minimum)
  • Sorting being similar to 1.2 again (can sort items by type of equipment without having to select a slot on your character first, sorts not only greying things out, no more multiple taps on the same thing doing something different for each tap, etc.)
6 Likes

Would you devs at least let us know whether or not you are going to fix the trainwreck the gear layout has become? I’d like to know now so I can uninstall instead of waiting/hoping for a fix.

Before:

After:

Why is this better? I just don’t see it.

Why is so much space taken up by stupid graphics that I can see over and over again on other screens. I want information about spells!! ffs :cry:

10 Likes

I much prefer the previous version of the spell screen but would also like the spell cost to be shown there as well. There’s plenty of room.

3 Likes

So we, the players, provided detailed feedback on all the ways the devs made the game basically a miserable experience instead of a game players can’t wait to spend lots of time playing and instead of truly acknowledging this or making a sincere effort to improve the game, the devs come back with a message that this new nightmare was a step in the right direction? Okay.
The new update caused a huge issue with mass salvaging gear, so the devs suspend the gear vault overflow message so that the didn’t become literally unplayable. But they announced that at reset today, they would turn that message back on because they’ve fixed the issue AND they’re going to finally give us more gear space (not enough by any means, but more). Okay.
At least an hour before reset, now salvaging gear isn’t possible at all and the game completely freezes and has to be manually forced close. But we just hope this isn’t the promised new hotfix because the gear vault overflow message still isn’t appearing. So we hope everything will be working correctly after daily reset. Okay.
Daily reset hits and the game is literally and physically unplayable. Because the gear vault overflow message IS turned back on AND you still can’t salvage even once piece of gear. So you can’t play the game. At all. And the eagerly awaited extra gear space means absolutely nothing because THERE IS NO EXTRA GEAR SPACE AND YOU CAN’T EVEN PLAY THE GAME. You can’t play in any mode because you can’t get your gear down to the limit. And you can’t salvage your gear. And the game just keeps freezing over and over and over again.
What are the devs even doing?
It is starting to feel like they are deliberately trying to tank this game.
And that makes me incredibly sad as I’ve been playing Puzzle Quest games for over 15 years now on a variety of formats and I’ve been playing PQ3 for almost a year and a half.
And I’m a fan who has paid out money to support this game.
And I just want to delete it from all my devices and walk away because I’m so frustrated right now.
You guys must be bleeding players and yet you don’t seem capable of righting this sinking ship and I’m just so very sad. And frustrated. And angry. And disappointed.
And I’m not the only one.

5 Likes

I really wish I could play the game but I guess rolling out the hotfix on time was more important than making sure it actually worked and including the one thing you promised.

You made me create a forum account to post this. I’m assuming this was your master plan all along. Need to drive up those forum account numbers.

3 Likes

Hey regardless of whether it’s positive or negative it’s “engagement”. They win either way.

I’m with you here. I got sick of asking whether or not they were going to fix the gear layout. For some reason the devs won’t answer. I uninstalled and now I just come to the forums on occasion to watch the sh*tshow.

1 Like