Shidra's post sums up my feelings.

Also, due to the devastation of newer players dropping vitas, I have a good idea: make the option for toggling vitas something under the "Game" tab in options. Dropping vitapods starts disabled unless manually changed, something which newer players probably won't bother with doing.

Either that or give a chat command to do this, like /dropvita. This way it's hidden from players who don't want to do it and also makes it impossible to do it accidentally.

Constructive criticism:

Caketastrophe is fun, as it was last year, and contrary to a ton of people saying it's the same event, it's actually a bit different. One difference is that the nests found in the clockworks can spawn a ton of mini-cakes (OOO is into mobs of enemies lately).

Good:

• Getting any sort of update is a good thing, and this one is pretty cool.
• Vials look cool.
• Minimap is more functional.
• Although placement could be improved, the shield health bar is pretty cool
• Enemy health bars are a welcome addition
• Weapon switcher animation is nifty, however, I find that it can be distracting when in a fight and I suddenly think I'm being ambushed
• Shiny interface is kinda fun
• Last but not least, Devilite nerf. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I hate these guys, and this make them much more manageable.

What I would love to see changed:

• I want to be able to see my Energy window at all times. I find that I have become a paranoid player when I can't see my energy status.
• Please allow us to drop vita pods... when I play with my kids, and accidentally pick up a vita, It would be nice to be able to drop it for them
• The vials, although cool looking, are more difficult to identify when on the ground
  1. The vials are also harder to ID once picked up, and looking to the bottom of the screen for them is very strange.
  2. I think the slot number and the vial count number should be switched, it's hard to tell at glance which is which
• Why did the interface get flipped upside down? I'm not a fan of taking almost every UI item and putting it on the opposite side of the screen, it would be nice to flip it back over and keep it more consistent with the old UI
• It is more difficult to get to the energy depot now that we have to open our interface to see the energy meter.
• I can see my energy when I am in the ready room... I'm glad it's there, but this should be a permanent display in ALL areas, not just RR, the Energy meter should always be on-screen. At a bare minimum, mist energy should always be on-screen. We need to be able to very quickly glance down and see how much we have left.
• The inventory is a little hard to look at. Perhaps the contrast is off, or something, but it's a little too shiny, other shiny things seem spot on.
• Did I mention the Energy meter? We need to see it at all times. Period. I think everyone agrees with me on this point.

anybody else notice the persistent small energy symbol that hangs at the bottom of the screen when taking an elevator?

That looks awful and cluttered.

Regarding Lockdown (or PvP in general) why does it display your own health meter twice? There's the big, main health bar, and then there's a party member display of yourself as well. That should be removed.

I can't throw away my pillz/vials when i am dead !
and i want to see my energy/crowns without pressing "I"

I'm sure this has been said, but don't have the patience to read all of this! So if it's a repeat, take it as a vote.

1) I want to drop my vitapod!
2) Make hotkeys to expand the menus menu and such. That'd be nice.
3) Weapon scroll HUD seems glitched with 3 weapons. With two, I see the weapon I have, and my other, above and below. With three, I see the weapon I have, and a copy of it above, and my next weapon below. In other words, i can never see all three weapons, i always see my equipped one twice.

Just 10 minutes before the reboot but, I will write my opinions anyway.

-Aesthetics: Well, at first I thought the new UI looks bad, but now I am fine with it. You could use the old font instead of Arial though.

-Health bar: 95% of the time I have no idea about how much health do I have, the shield bar is completely useless, I often don't even see the portrait. I understand that you don't want to leave the giant health bar alone here, but you could just keep it down the screen.

-Weapon wheel: Has no use, didn't help me with my new 3rd slot today. I believe I could do better without it.

-Monster health bar: I wish we could toggle them with a hotkey.

-Warnings: Stuff like "Inventory full" "max health" is useless.

-The flash that appears when you hit a monster: Cheap.

-Elevator screen: Kinda cool, you could choose a less awkward position though.

-Screen shake in PvP: Nitronome has 3 big problems for party: 1. Knockback 2. Flash 3. Screen shake. It makes you give openings, leaves you vulnerable. If everything that hits you shakes the screen, then it will become unplayable.

-Party health: Hard to realize if they are dead. You never know if they have enough health for the level.

-Status flasks, pills: They look awful, especially pills. The old ones had a unique and much better look.

-Devilite nerf: I was fine with them kicking my ass in return for me kicking theirs. They were one of the very few challenges in the game.

Conclusion: Old UI was much better, both in looks and use. The new UI is good for newbies. Half of the newbies are under 14 and looks like SK is changing its target audience.

ya Btw I really hoped there would be some uber cool promos for the anniversary not a grinding event.. I hear we havn't had a promo in a while it would be nice to have one once in a while atleast.. Thank you :c

(copy-pasted from another topic)

My first response to seeing this update: "This is an April fools joke, right?". My roommate's first assessment was "This is gross."; I couldn't disagree. After playing with the new GUI, I have quickly come to realize the new GUI is not only completely ridiculous looking, but also poorly functional and very poorly planned out.

This is the type of graphical interface I would expect to find on a video game that came out of a cereal box of the late 1990's. This is the type of UI that Internet Explorer started to use, right before its market got completely dominated by the more sleek, compact, intuitive browsers like Firefox and later, Chrome. This is the quality of UI that I would expect from an undergrad school project of kids who just learned visual programming.

Hear me out, OOO. I tell you this not because I hate you, but because I want very greatly for you to succeed in overcoming this failed attempt.

CONS with the current system:
-mandatory weapon scroll wheel. Here is a thought: maybe people dont want to see a bunch of giant icons pop up on screen every time they change weapons? Aside from the fact that it doesn't work properly, you should at the very least allow people the option to remove anything from their HUD that is visually intrusive, distracting, flashy, and completely unnecessary.

-Blue. Shiny, deep blue. Why. The menu colors, auction house colors, and escape menu colors are at an all time high for ugliness. The best HUD is the one you forget is even there. More contrast does not make it look better; more saturation does not make it look better. Light neon-blue on deep shiny blue is not an acceptable contrast choice for menu coloring. First of all, people are gonna be absolutely sick of blue in about 30 minutes. People are gonna get discomforted by looking at the same bright colors all the time; its just visually annoying. Additionally, the font on the drop down menus is ugly, and many of the characters are way too fuzzy to quickly identify the item. Also, the overall "shinyness" of everything really is not appealing.

-A giant picture of yourself, facing you, while youre trying to play the game. Honestly, I cant even begin to comprehend this. I know a lot of this game involves creating a little "persona" for yourself through costumes and accessories, but no one want a picture of yourself stuck on the screen at all times; that's just silly, distracting, and a waste of very valuable screen real-estate. Just make the portraits optional(and perhaps a reduced size option) and I think you'll make everyone happy.

-Shield indicator getting bigger when you block. Its nice that we can finally see how the shield mechanics work, but things shouldn't be popping around and resizing in the middle of the game. It looks silly. A much easier approach would be to encase the health in a SUBTLE outline that diminishes when the shield takes damage (this would visualize that the shield protects the health, but only when in use and not broken; some people still dont understand this.)

-Health and shield in top left. It should be in the bottom center. You should be able to look at your health without taking your eyes off of anything, and that is just not possible when its in an asymmetrical position off in a corner.

-Screen moving every time you take damage. Distracting, annoying, not at all immersive. Make it optional.

-Enemy and item fog above enemies and items; Giant, very bright triangle indicators moving in circles around what you're targeting. It should be optional, and they both look way too bright and annoying. Remember, subtlety is key.

-New "splash" image whenever you attack. No one needs excessive blue and red lights everywhere. When killing a group of enemies in a vortex bomb the excess lights are so ridiculous that I can't even see what enemies i'm hitting. Completely annoying.

-Neon green guild name color. Really?

-Vials. They are too bright and hard on the eyes. Also, you have still done little to make them distinguished from each other (lightning bolt on the shock one, ect).

PROS with the current system:
-Making "Show Rank" optional. Good decision, as many people prefer less clutter.

-Making the word "Haven" in the top right smaller: it was a button that new users won't really know what to do with, and its not too important. I do think you went a little overboard though; now its kinda hard to read. It should also be white.

-Additional mini map detail.

-The elevator transitions are ok. Its still not a great utilization of space but it works fine.

I'm getting sick of writing so I'll stop for now, but there are plenty more problems.
I hope you give serious consideration to undoing many of the design decisions you made here.

I understand we're all disappointing with the new UI and all that stuff, but god-dang, people try not to sound so harsh.

In my personal opinion, here's how I think of it:

Good:

+The new radar is useful

+I like the benefit of seeing monster health and their weaknesses.

+I like that cute little shot of your knight in a "LEZ DO DIS!" pose on the elevator, and a heroic weapon-slung-over-the-should pose at the end.

+Devilites got nerfed? PRAISE TINKINZAR THIS IS THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE!

+Monster cakes :D

+I like the new designs of the vials

Bad:

-As a veteran that's been playing this since the first 3 days of its release, and even though it took me literally 5 seconds to adjust to the new UI, it is still kind of tacky.

-I can't move my vials by dragging them. I want to be able to move my health and remedy capsules in the spots where I've always kept them

-One the game's main attractions was being bright and colorful, now everyone's name is white unless you're in the CWs.

-I want to be able to see my crowns under my radar so I can see how much I have just with a split glance instead of opening my arsenal.

-I would like the old Energy meter back in its lower-right part of the screen.

What they can do to fix it:

~Make an option to bring the old UI back. Place it under 'Game' in options > UI, 2.0 or 1.0 (Requires game restart)

~Make everyone's names colored again as their body colors are.

~The ability to move vials and drop vitapods. I always like to drop my stuff for my guys when I have to shut the game off for the night or something like that.

~Although the weapon selection wheel is OK with me, at least make the option to disable it.

What we can do right now:

Get used to it and hope for the best. No need to be all like "UGM THEY RUINED IT THE WEAPON WHEEL BLINDS MY VISION AND I CANT HIT ANYTHING IM QUITTING!!!1!!11"

Since we all think the ranks of people are a clutter, they've added the option to turn that off.

KILL MONSTER CAKES :D

From one of your fellow veterans: Xtweet. I use Steam so I can't use the forums on that account. So yeah.

While I'll give OOO credit for things like monster health (more on that later) and the new UI color scheme, there are more cons in my view than pros.... by far.

= Monster health- thumbs up on the idea, but i think OOO totally flubbed the viewing distance of this stat. While i'm not a gunner myself, my friends that are have voiced complaints of not being able to see it. If you're gonna implement this, make it so everyone can see it perhaps?

= Crowns and Energy- plain and simple: dont hide these from us. i liked it when i could see these 24/7 w/o having to open any window. period.

= Weapon Wheel- while i can see this helping newbies out, people who've completely memorized all their all loadouts for eternity should be able to turn this freaking annoyance off. Duh.

= Health and Player Icons- ok, ill give OOO a point for putting vials and such at the bottom of the screen, but why the heck put the health in a corner?! I think its more useful if your health is.. idk.. maybe where you can see it w/o diverting your attention for Vana's mace?
Then the icons...: I dont like how you cant immediately tell who is the party leader, nor how only certain accessories show up on people. Aka Id like my stuff to show up.......

All in all i think there is still a bit to work on. At least i think that.
~Mush

Some minor gripes that were likely not covered:

Have QC go through each popup window at each resolution, and figure out which windows can be made slightly taller to eliminate scrollbars. Scrollbars that move content up and down a grand total of 10 pixels are stupid, as is putting everything EXCEPT the Start button above the fold.

The hotkey labels on the UI buttons at the bottom now make it more glaringly obvious what things are lacking hotkeys. Please add in hotkeys for the remaining buttons. While you're at it, please make hitting ESC close the main menu; the main menu is currently the only thing that cannot be dismissed by hitting ESC, and you can't control your character until you dismiss it.

While we're at it, PLEASE separate "attack" and "interact" into two separate keys, and have the default mapping be one key for both (much like the arrow keys are mapped to both "Face NSEW" and "Move NSEW"). If you had the time to do a complete UI overhaul, you have the time to do this.

There is now a substantial delay between stepping on an elevator and being presented with the end-of-level stuff.

The loading screens are now even more obviously outdated than they used to be.

There is now no visible icon of your currently equipped weapon. Please consider adding that back into the interface somehow.

Oh, and specifically related to the anniversary event: Big cupcakes don't display status effect particles properly (presumably because the particles are aligned exactly like how they would be for jelly cubes, which are smaller, so the particles end up inside the cupcake).

Here's a few pictures showing the the field of view at lowest resolution. It's not the best evidence but I hope it at least gets a point across :

-Old UI vs New UI in battle at the most minimal level.
Note: This isn't including any elements that pop up such as Targeted Enemy Health Bars or Claypots/Keys/etc.

http://i.imgur.com/qP0ABiX.png Old UI "field of vision" when fighting
http://i.imgur.com/3R1aIeZ.png New UI "field of vision" when fighting
http://i.imgur.com/kW9M10T.png Old UI(Purple) vs New UI(Orange) overlap

So by the looks of it, with the addition of actually hiding alot of the buttons, the UI 'windows' that really have changed the most in terms of space is the bottom right with the CE/Mist 'window.' When you're in a guild, there will most likely always be chatter and it seems a bit cumbersome to type /clear every so often. For the low resolution players, the New UI definitely seems to impede their vision from the left side compared to the old style. Looking at them seperately, it looks like the new UI seems less 'cluttered' but when doing a comparison, it tells a different story IMO.

-Weapon 'scroll'
http://i.imgur.com/wyPjhfx.png As the text says, the slag guard is almost completely covered by the weapon scroll wheel. Knights are of similar size so this feature can also entirely cover up an enemy knight in Lockdown.

-Pop-ups
http://i.imgur.com/fJTVScq.png Just having 3 different elements appear for one thing seems a bit overboard.
And just adding haze to an already easily visible "Crosshair" again seems to be overdoing it. The old version was enough to tell us everything we needed to know in one single step.

I have a few very important questions.

- Aside from Eury, patient soul that she is, reading through all of our comments and keeping a tally of our feedback, are any of the OOO devs looking through all of this?
It's one thing to ship a product and say give us feedback.
It's another thing to ship a product, ask for feedback, and then never read it.
I think OOO could honestly learn something about what we want if they sat and looked through a fraction of these posts.

Snowdusk originally posted this, but it is still painfully relevant.

- Are there any plans for the OOO crew to explain why they changed things the way they did?
I've never seen the forums this riled up about something before and I strongly believe this needs to be addressed personally by OOO. Just hand waving it by saying, "Oh, it's for the Battle Sprites," is a complete load of snipe... poop.
There is NO doubt in my mind that the old UI would have worked PERFECTLY for any incoming content. Sure it may need some very minor changes, but it worked and looked great.
So can they PLEASE just take 30 minutes out of their day to type out a reason for their doing this? If they're worried about the lost money from taking such a small amount of time out of their day, I am willing to pay them for their time so they can explain this.
Just please don't leave us hanging here with an ugly UI, a broken art style, and no explanation whatsoever. PLEASE.

*****
And this last question isn't nearly as important, but is related nonetheless. Here goes...

- Has OOO seen my thread?
As much as they're not obligated to, I nevertheless want to hear why they felt the need to change the UI when the old one could have functioned just as well (and judging from the feedback on my thread, even better than the current iteration.)
This is something that is going to bug me for a LONG time because I just did not see the need to change the UI, which more or less defined the soft and simple nature of the game.

UI is badly designed. Too much clutter, and bad positioning of everything. I'm sure every flaw of the new UI has been pointed out already, but I'll just give my harsher opinion.

Unfortunately, the game died along with Anderzej leaving, so the only I direction I see this game going in is not forward. I actually enjoyed playing SK since Beta, but I just realized how quickly things are going downhill. Thanks, OOO.

Also, can I point out that it might be a good idea for the UI to show if you are currently tabbed or not? And if you are, then by who?

Rwar sit down. Yer drunk :p.

Ya the weapon wheel would be neat if it'd be transparent. Alchemer switching means i have a temporary blind spot on the right side of my character.

The only other thing would be the status icon timer. It's hard to take yer eyes off of combat to look at the top left of the screen to see how long you have to be on fire etc.

Besides that, love the new UI! Watchin bars fly off of people is a neat effect.

Ye never yrally been sward swang, Blueflood.

Ye all the West in yer pockets. yo.

Close melee ye may not really relate to the graphic weapon switch overlay.

I didn't notice I didn't have 10 mist again and wasted my CE when joining a party! I want to see that bloody mist tank! I'm far too cheap to use CE for clockwork levels!

Why energy tab jumps like ... sun-rabbit ?
http://savepic.org/3200705.jpg
http://savepic.org/3192513.jpg
http://savepic.org/3180225.jpg
Left - Right - Center
(Also energy panel under inventory is hiding, when inventory opens over missions panel. But it's present)
Ok, central position is good and appropriate for the elevators. But what about others ?
IMHO, better to do separated tab for energy at right side with own "hide" and "lock" ("show always") options.

All the names of the same color (can tell, colorless) - it is ugly, stupid and not useful.
Because of this, it is very difficult to find the right person in the crowd.
And unpleasant to look at the gray mass near the AH.
Where colorful points, running around on minimap ? I miss them.
Need back knights with the names of different colors. Or make it optional.
Just compare this screens :
- was before
http://savepic.org/3276277.jpg
http://savepic.org/3252725.jpg
http://savepic.org/3246581.jpg
- now
http://savepic.org/3243509.jpg
http://savepic.org/3234293.jpg
http://savepic.org/3220981.jpg

Is it possible to make one key "clear screen" ("Close / hide all tabs") ? (Esc button not always worked on me)
And also make button to hide all UI elements for making clean screenshots ?

SFME

-CE/mist bar is not displayed when accepting a party invite that would take energy.

OOO, please return the old UI by adding an option to switch between the new and the old one, then do whatever you want with the new UI. Everyone will be happy.

Guys.. Seriously.. There are 10 pages of posts, most of them demanding the old UI back, since there are way too much problems with the new one. If they cared, they would already fix it by now, revert it back. But they didn't. They patched it. But hei, 10 pages of rage and constructive arguments on what is wrong and why, weren't enough. No, they went and fixed Twack Hammer in FSC. TWACK HAMMER IN FSC! Yes, that is a big deal. You efforts should go into things like that, yep... While there are 10 pages of things that are wrong? Nice job, well done.

Stop making fun of us OOO!!!

We won't get our old UI back.. They will only make new changes to the new one. But hei, guess what- crap is still crap even if you put some sugar on it. If they were a company who cared about their community, we would have old UI back one hour after the new one was implemented. Along with an apology.
I mean what else do you need?! If community is raging, if you have 10 pages of reason why it's bad, does that not tell you how much we love your game?! Does that not tell you that you really screwed up?! I seriously don't know what it will take for you to think for a second..

But that's just me..

Im not screaming at noone mate. And I don't hate them. Im just dissapointed in them.