UI Feedback
I posted this on reddit, but I'm copying it here as well. Here's a link to the other thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/gwent/comme...k/ui_feedback/
The recent patch had some nice improvements to the post-game UI from a visual standpoint, but there are still a lot of improvements that could be made in other parts of the client. Overall, the client looks great, and navigating it feels smooth, but it suffers from a lot of needless clicking. I know that this post is going to feel very nitpicky and that many of the “issues” are trivial, but I feel that fixing them would help bring the final touches to what already feels like a polished client.
Entering the Game
Right off the bat, the Sign In / Quit buttons when starting up the game should be removed. If you started up the game, it means you want to sign in, not immediately close it. (The only reason I can imagine this page being there is if they add an account system with login info. Even then, it would be great to have it automatically sign in if there is the option to store log in information.)
Upon logging in, there is a “skip” button that appears for a fraction of a second before it becomes a “continue” button. It is nearly impossible to click on in that time, so removing it would make entering the game feel smoother.
Menus
Across the board, when you need to select something, there is rarely an indicator that there are more options that you can see when scrolling.
Speaking of scrolling… The deck selection menu under Casual/Ranked matches starts off with your first deck centered (revealing the first 3 options before scrolling). The Deck Builder has the “New Deck” option visible to the left as well (making 4 visible before scrolling). In-game card choices like the Mulligan phase start with the options all the way at the left (making 5 choices visible before scrolling). I feel like this should be standardized with the first option always all the way to the left, making the most options visible before any scrolling takes place.
Collection
The faction names at the top and the left side of the screen do the same thing, so one of them is unnecessary. If the ones up top were compacted a bit (see Hearthstone’s class banners as an example), you could select between all of them from the top without needing to scroll, and the area on the left could have either the bronze/silver/gold buttons or Filters menu open by default.
Speaking of the Filters menu, there are several minor inconveniences.
The way that Premium Cards and alternate-art cards (Wild Hunt Riders, Nekkers, etc.) are handled is really poor right now. Since both are shown in the collection you not only see more cards you don’t own, but also must scroll through more cards to find the ones you want. I personally really dislike the system Hearthstone (and now Gwent) uses of having separate gold cards rather than just upgrading existing versions, but that is straying a bit outside the scope of UI feedback and will be in another post. If the current system isn’t changed, I would still like to see some sort of consolidation to have the same card only take up one spot in the collection.
Deck Manager
The slider/scrollbar at the bottom to select cards is smooth, but somehow feels pretty icky to me. It’s not a problem now since there aren’t very many cards, but I could see it becoming an issue as the game grows. I don’t have a good proposed solution, but I feel like the deck shouldn’t take up twice as much space on the screen as the collection you are building it from.
The All/Gold/Silver/Bronze buttons above the current scrollbar could easily all be visible at the same time without the need to scroll left/right through options to get to them.
I don’t like the position of the Clear Deck / Save and Exit / Filters buttons at the bottom. The Save and Exit is a final action, so it feels more naturally to be off to the side rather than right in the middle of things you might want to do while editing the deck.
Finally (and most importantly), building a deck with the collection manager separate is a huge pain. When building a deck with an incomplete collection, it is really common to want to craft an extra copy of a card or even see what cards you’re missing that you might want to include. Both of these are unnecessarily cumbersome to do under the current system.
In-game UI
It is very inconvenient to not be able to see your entire hand at once when performing the mulligan, particularly when playing a deck with breedables, where you need to check back and forth to make sure the new cards aren’t duplicates.
I really appreciate that the last card played by your opponent is shown prominently on the left of the screen, but it needs to show card text when hovered over. When I was new to the game, I had to open up the graveyard practically every time a special card was played to read what it did.
Also, if the card has a targeting effect, there should be some indicator of what unit was picked. Most of the time, you can figure it out, but there are times like Nekker Warriors (did they copy Wild Hunt Riders or Foglets?) where you might miss vital information if you weren’t paying attention at the right second.
To add to the above, cards that interact with the graveyard are incredibly frustrating to properly play against if you want to make a fully informed decision. Every time Skellige discards a card or monsters consume a card, you are forced to open the graveyard to find what it was since the information is not displayed elsewhere. Udalryk is by far the worst offender since you need to look through your graveyard and try to remember what card is missing from the ones you’ve played this game to know which one was stolen.
Post-game Summaries
The pop up letting you know that your opponent forfeited should not cover the screen and does not need a confirmation button. There’s no reason to force us to click an extra time to acknowledge what occurred.
I really like the new graphics to the post game screens and the animations associated with them, but it is a bit clunky to skip through them when I have the desire to. Yes, there is a close button, but each animation needs to be skipped individually, so moving through the screens requires two clicks each: skip and next. While I do agree that it would be great to get the information more consolidated, in the meantime, I think pressing “skip” once should then automatically skip the animations of all the following screens. It’s a simple change, but I think it would make it feel a lot smoother for those instances that you do want to jump through the summaries rather than waiting or closing out of them entirely.
I think the original pre-game rounds/experience/rank should be a bit more visible on the final screens. It is possible to see your original number of round wins and experience, but both are very faint. The final rank screen just doesn’t show what your original rank was before the match if you aren’t paying attention before it adds/subtracts.
Shop
The “would you like to open your kegs now?” pop up after buying a keg is unnecessary and should default to “not now”. Simply have a button to open kegs always there or greyed out in the shop area and let us click on it. That’s one less click if we want to wait, and one less pop up message even if we don’t, which would make it feel nicer.
Closing Thoughts
I know this post was overwhelmingly negative, but the game and UI both feel great overall. The UI is on the whole very smooth, clean, and it’s clearly still a work in progress (recent ladder addition, missing profile page, and so on). This is a nearly exhaustive list of the inconveniences I personally have with the current client.
There are several other improvements I would like to see in the game before Open Beta with regards to other aspects of the game, but those will go in a separate post. Keep up the good work.
I posted this on reddit, but I'm copying it here as well. Here's a link to the other thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/gwent/comme...k/ui_feedback/
The recent patch had some nice improvements to the post-game UI from a visual standpoint, but there are still a lot of improvements that could be made in other parts of the client. Overall, the client looks great, and navigating it feels smooth, but it suffers from a lot of needless clicking. I know that this post is going to feel very nitpicky and that many of the “issues” are trivial, but I feel that fixing them would help bring the final touches to what already feels like a polished client.
Entering the Game
Right off the bat, the Sign In / Quit buttons when starting up the game should be removed. If you started up the game, it means you want to sign in, not immediately close it. (The only reason I can imagine this page being there is if they add an account system with login info. Even then, it would be great to have it automatically sign in if there is the option to store log in information.)
Upon logging in, there is a “skip” button that appears for a fraction of a second before it becomes a “continue” button. It is nearly impossible to click on in that time, so removing it would make entering the game feel smoother.
Menus
Across the board, when you need to select something, there is rarely an indicator that there are more options that you can see when scrolling.
Speaking of scrolling… The deck selection menu under Casual/Ranked matches starts off with your first deck centered (revealing the first 3 options before scrolling). The Deck Builder has the “New Deck” option visible to the left as well (making 4 visible before scrolling). In-game card choices like the Mulligan phase start with the options all the way at the left (making 5 choices visible before scrolling). I feel like this should be standardized with the first option always all the way to the left, making the most options visible before any scrolling takes place.
Collection
The faction names at the top and the left side of the screen do the same thing, so one of them is unnecessary. If the ones up top were compacted a bit (see Hearthstone’s class banners as an example), you could select between all of them from the top without needing to scroll, and the area on the left could have either the bronze/silver/gold buttons or Filters menu open by default.
Speaking of the Filters menu, there are several minor inconveniences.
- Sort: “Default” is identical to “Power” and should be removed. “Power” is sufficient and can be the default setting for the field.
- Group: It feels clunky to click through side to side rather than picking checkboxes like the Rarity and Position options. I would like to see this changed to checkboxes as well. The same goes for the Ownership options, although I find myself using them much less frequently so it is less of an annoyance.
- Speaking of checkboxes, there is an enormous amount of blank space for both the Rarity and Position options. Assuming either of the above are expanded, more room is going to be needed. Either the menu can be widened slightly and the space removed to fit both options into two adjacent columns or the descriptive text could be removed to just have symbols/colors which say what they mean when hovered over.
- I am not sure if this is a technical limitation, but when selecting a filter the animation of the cards going away and being repopulated feels a tiny bit long to me.
The way that Premium Cards and alternate-art cards (Wild Hunt Riders, Nekkers, etc.) are handled is really poor right now. Since both are shown in the collection you not only see more cards you don’t own, but also must scroll through more cards to find the ones you want. I personally really dislike the system Hearthstone (and now Gwent) uses of having separate gold cards rather than just upgrading existing versions, but that is straying a bit outside the scope of UI feedback and will be in another post. If the current system isn’t changed, I would still like to see some sort of consolidation to have the same card only take up one spot in the collection.
Deck Manager
The slider/scrollbar at the bottom to select cards is smooth, but somehow feels pretty icky to me. It’s not a problem now since there aren’t very many cards, but I could see it becoming an issue as the game grows. I don’t have a good proposed solution, but I feel like the deck shouldn’t take up twice as much space on the screen as the collection you are building it from.
The All/Gold/Silver/Bronze buttons above the current scrollbar could easily all be visible at the same time without the need to scroll left/right through options to get to them.
I don’t like the position of the Clear Deck / Save and Exit / Filters buttons at the bottom. The Save and Exit is a final action, so it feels more naturally to be off to the side rather than right in the middle of things you might want to do while editing the deck.
Finally (and most importantly), building a deck with the collection manager separate is a huge pain. When building a deck with an incomplete collection, it is really common to want to craft an extra copy of a card or even see what cards you’re missing that you might want to include. Both of these are unnecessarily cumbersome to do under the current system.
In-game UI
It is very inconvenient to not be able to see your entire hand at once when performing the mulligan, particularly when playing a deck with breedables, where you need to check back and forth to make sure the new cards aren’t duplicates.
I really appreciate that the last card played by your opponent is shown prominently on the left of the screen, but it needs to show card text when hovered over. When I was new to the game, I had to open up the graveyard practically every time a special card was played to read what it did.
Also, if the card has a targeting effect, there should be some indicator of what unit was picked. Most of the time, you can figure it out, but there are times like Nekker Warriors (did they copy Wild Hunt Riders or Foglets?) where you might miss vital information if you weren’t paying attention at the right second.
To add to the above, cards that interact with the graveyard are incredibly frustrating to properly play against if you want to make a fully informed decision. Every time Skellige discards a card or monsters consume a card, you are forced to open the graveyard to find what it was since the information is not displayed elsewhere. Udalryk is by far the worst offender since you need to look through your graveyard and try to remember what card is missing from the ones you’ve played this game to know which one was stolen.
Post-game Summaries
The pop up letting you know that your opponent forfeited should not cover the screen and does not need a confirmation button. There’s no reason to force us to click an extra time to acknowledge what occurred.
I really like the new graphics to the post game screens and the animations associated with them, but it is a bit clunky to skip through them when I have the desire to. Yes, there is a close button, but each animation needs to be skipped individually, so moving through the screens requires two clicks each: skip and next. While I do agree that it would be great to get the information more consolidated, in the meantime, I think pressing “skip” once should then automatically skip the animations of all the following screens. It’s a simple change, but I think it would make it feel a lot smoother for those instances that you do want to jump through the summaries rather than waiting or closing out of them entirely.
I think the original pre-game rounds/experience/rank should be a bit more visible on the final screens. It is possible to see your original number of round wins and experience, but both are very faint. The final rank screen just doesn’t show what your original rank was before the match if you aren’t paying attention before it adds/subtracts.
Shop
The “would you like to open your kegs now?” pop up after buying a keg is unnecessary and should default to “not now”. Simply have a button to open kegs always there or greyed out in the shop area and let us click on it. That’s one less click if we want to wait, and one less pop up message even if we don’t, which would make it feel nicer.
Closing Thoughts
I know this post was overwhelmingly negative, but the game and UI both feel great overall. The UI is on the whole very smooth, clean, and it’s clearly still a work in progress (recent ladder addition, missing profile page, and so on). This is a nearly exhaustive list of the inconveniences I personally have with the current client.
There are several other improvements I would like to see in the game before Open Beta with regards to other aspects of the game, but those will go in a separate post. Keep up the good work.