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On September 18 2016 05:24 Charoisaur wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2016 03:40 opisska wrote:On September 17 2016 03:54 Excalibur_Z wrote:On September 17 2016 02:58 Elentos wrote:
They should just give people an option in the menu to show it at all times, show it upon mouse-over or never show it. Generally that's not something you want to gate behind an options menu. There's an extra burden of knowledge there (you have to know that the option exists, you have to know what it does, you have to know why--or whether--it's beneficial for you). I know it's easy to say "just make it an option" but that's very rarely the best solution. The other thing is that it has to have some default behavior even if you did make it an option, so what would that default behavior be? I think the mouseover thing is probably a satisfactory compromise and agree with the devs' reasonings completely. You only care about how many workers you have when you're deciding whether to expand or after you've been raided, which are specific and special circumstances. I am sorry, but this way of thinking is exactly the reason why so much of new software is such shit. Yeah, make whatever you think is the most genius way of doing thing the default - but what the hell does it hurt to have an option?! It hurts because casuals feel intimidated by a huge options menu. casuals want to know what they are playing and what options there are so they will scroll through the options and when there are to many options available and they not even understand what they do exacly it can definitely intimidate them from playing sc2 because they think it's so complicated. and no, an advanced settings tab wouldn't help because casuals would still click on it. you heard it here folks, casual players who play casually (not hard-core) now include crazy people and people with severe brain deficiency.
Big menus are never the reason why a player would stop playing the game. This is some next level mental gymnastic here.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with adding "advanced tab" and putting other options there as well. In fact, leave the less important options where they are and put everything else in advanced tab, or just put "worker count toggle" somewhere in "game" options or whatever.
Players are never intimidated by amount of options. I don't even know who come up with that myth. Have you ever seen a post on any forum saying "yeah gameplay was fine but there are too many options int the options menu so I quit playing"?
Having many options is fine. But these options should have good well explained tooltips, and that is it.
The real discussion should not be about how to implement it and where should it be displayed, but why should there be a counter in the first place.
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On September 18 2016 15:44 Mendelfist wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2016 07:12 opisska wrote:you are against "hiding" things you want to meddle with and the solution is to not have them at all? There is a third option. DONT HIDE THEM! The advanced options UI in Firefox could have been useful. The designers could have done their job, and made it a reasonable sized collection of options that the advanced user may want to change. They were lazy and put every option they could think of in there instead. The result is that I don't know if there is anything in there that I would like to change. I've never found it. The Starcraft UI doesn't have "advanced options". Maybe you could add it and make room for more options, but it's still a bad idea to make it into a dumpster where you put "everything else" without extra thought. UI design rules still apply for the same reasons they apply everywhere else. -- Edit: In general I'm against "advanced options". It encourages the behaviour above. The correct way to handle a lot of information is to categorize it so it becomes easier to find. Having the same type of options in several places is the wrong way. In the case of Starcraft and Worker/Army it belongs in the Gameplay tab not an Advanced tab, so you get a NO vote from me for "advanced options" too. Edit2: So yes, the answer in this specific case is that it's better to not have the option at all.
And now please explain me specifically, why is it better - not using abstract concepts and capital "NO", but specific examples of things that not having the option makes better for specific people. I don't know if I have any chance, but I still hope that if I make you think specifically about the issue, not just repeat phrases that you have learned somewhere, that you will notice the logical inconsistency of your argumentation. Even though in this particular example, the point is really unimportant, learning to think logically instead of dogmatically may improve your life, so why not try?
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On September 18 2016 17:46 opisska wrote:, but specific examples of things that not having the option makes better for specific people.
Do you want an option menu that says "these options are for people that don't care about usability", or what? And that makes it ok? Adding a feature or an option always incurs a cost. As an UI designer you must decide if it's worth it. Calling the UI "advanced options" does not relieve you from that responsibility. If an option is not important you should not add it to any UI, regardless if you call it "advanced" or not.
And I'm noticing a condescending attidtude in your last post. Drop it.
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On September 18 2016 18:07 Mendelfist wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2016 17:46 opisska wrote:, but specific examples of things that not having the option makes better for specific people. Do you want an option menu that says "these options are for people that don't care about usability", or what? And that makes it ok? Adding a feature or an option always incurs a cost. As an UI designer you must decide if it's worth it. Calling the UI "advanced options" does not relieve you from that responsibility. If an option is not important you should not add it to any UI, regardless if you call it "advanced" or not. And I'm noticing a condescending attidtude in your last post. Drop it.
Yeah, that makes it ok. Why wouldn't it? Again, all I am really asking you for is to provide example of how exactly it is "not worth it", who does it specifically hurt - apart of the pride of the UI designer. I just refuse to accept being deprived of an option just because somebody thinks that it's mere existence is hurtful, without providing real reasons.
Again, let me clarify, because you have mixed those things in the previous discussion: I am not talking about options that should be elsewhere - those if are burried in a place that is difficult to access, that's a bad choice. I am talking exclusively about options that you would not put in because you consider them not important and you do not want to clutter you options UI. For these options, I just do not see how not having them is superior to having them in a sub-optimal location and you have still not provided a single argument.
I am not "condescending" and I do not like your line of defense there. You are committing logical fallacies and I am pointing them out, you do not get a free pass out of criticism just by saying that you do not like to be criticized.
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On September 18 2016 18:22 opisska wrote:Yeah, that makes it ok. Why wouldn't it? Again, all I am really asking you for is to provide example of how exactly it is "not worth it", who does it specifically hurt - apart of the pride of the UI designer.
It hurts the users of the UI, obviously. For every option you add it becomes less usable. If it's ment for users, usability is important.
We already have an example, SC2 and the worker/army counter. This option would belong in the Gameplay tab. It's not worth the added clutter to have it there, because it's not an important option.
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On September 18 2016 18:33 Mendelfist wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2016 18:22 opisska wrote:Yeah, that makes it ok. Why wouldn't it? Again, all I am really asking you for is to provide example of how exactly it is "not worth it", who does it specifically hurt - apart of the pride of the UI designer. It hurts the users of the UI, obviously. For every option you add it becomes less usable. If it's ment for users, usability is important. We already have an example, SC2 and the worker/army counter. This option would belong in the Gameplay tab. It's not worth the added clutter to have it there, because it's not an important option.
I am sorry, you aren't listening at all and just repeating things over and over again. Have a nice day.
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I've played the game for a couple of years, so I always have a decent grasp of about how much of my supply is workers and how much is army. I constantly forget that this extra thing that would allow me to make sure now exists in the game because the supply count is not in a place where I generally have my cursor. Maybe other people us this frequently, I don't know. But you can win games and improve just fine with or without showing worker and army supply separately, so it's mostly a quality of life addition.
Quality of life additions are things you should be able to adjust in the settings, because these depend largely on personal preference. Like your team color preferences, those are not world defining but recently got added because people wanted to play in different colors. What really has no place in the options menu and is a waste of UI space are the options nobody in their right mind would want disabled like the ability to select enemy units and structures (which can actually lose you games) but that one is even disabled by default. That one is a waste of space and hurtful to new players, it's unjustifiable.
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On September 18 2016 18:35 opisska wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2016 18:33 Mendelfist wrote:On September 18 2016 18:22 opisska wrote:Yeah, that makes it ok. Why wouldn't it? Again, all I am really asking you for is to provide example of how exactly it is "not worth it", who does it specifically hurt - apart of the pride of the UI designer. It hurts the users of the UI, obviously. For every option you add it becomes less usable. If it's ment for users, usability is important. We already have an example, SC2 and the worker/army counter. This option would belong in the Gameplay tab. It's not worth the added clutter to have it there, because it's not an important option. I am sorry, you aren't listening at all and just repeating things over and over again. Have a nice day. Thank you for trying. You are the only person in the argument that was being rational. Luckily as others have pointed out, worker count is a fairly minor issue and if you're already an experienced player you're already accustomed to keeping track of your worker count. So it's really no big deal either way.
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Agree with at least having an option to always show it.
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As a programmer I understand the desire for simple ui. But as an sc2 player who is familiar with the game I want more options. If options arnt to hard to add, and are useful why not include them, even if you have to hide them away. Also I think the whole casuals won't understand argument is dumb. Just because some one plays video games casually does not atomaticly make them an idiot or unable to translate basic skills. Often if you've seen one or to option menus in your life it's usualy not hard to peruse another one. Also if some ones bought this game and enjoys it I doubt a crowded options menu will scare them off. Most casuals probably won't do much with options except mabey tinker with sound/graphics. As long as they can find these I don't think more options is a problem. In game ui is another story, this does need to be clean for casuals. But allowing us to turn on more features is not a problem. Some of these features are very helpful for gameplay like the clock and grid settings, and should be there even if they are not defualt.
There seems to be a myth of stupid casuals in the gaming community I think this myth is more elitism than reality. Casuals arnt stupid they just don't play games as much as us. they can figure out basic stuff. They just don't have the same skill set as hardcore gamers, I doubt that having this skill-set dramatically impacts your ability to use an options menu.
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On September 18 2016 18:33 Mendelfist wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2016 18:22 opisska wrote:Yeah, that makes it ok. Why wouldn't it? Again, all I am really asking you for is to provide example of how exactly it is "not worth it", who does it specifically hurt - apart of the pride of the UI designer. It hurts the users of the UI, obviously. For every option you add it becomes less usable. If it's ment for users, usability is important. We already have an example, SC2 and the worker/army counter. This option would belong in the Gameplay tab. It's not worth the added clutter to have it there, because it's not an important option.
We have options for how our control groups are displayed in game, and an option to display experience points earnt, how would this be any different? Are you really arguing that this specific option would be a bad one to add because it would seem that the precedent has already been set by Blizzard that they like making these things customisable. They want people to be able to interact with the game however people choose (completely customisable hotkeys, mouse sensitivity, sound levels, privacy settings etc) and allow people to see as much or as little information as they choose (health bars, flyer help, build grids etc)
I think that when Blizzard are confident that the vast majority of people want something, there's no reason to make it an option, but when they aren't sure, what's the harm in making it an option?
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On September 18 2016 18:22 opisska wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2016 18:07 Mendelfist wrote:On September 18 2016 17:46 opisska wrote:, but specific examples of things that not having the option makes better for specific people. Do you want an option menu that says "these options are for people that don't care about usability", or what? And that makes it ok? Adding a feature or an option always incurs a cost. As an UI designer you must decide if it's worth it. Calling the UI "advanced options" does not relieve you from that responsibility. If an option is not important you should not add it to any UI, regardless if you call it "advanced" or not. And I'm noticing a condescending attidtude in your last post. Drop it. Yeah, that makes it ok. Why wouldn't it? Again, all I am really asking you for is to provide example of how exactly it is "not worth it", who does it specifically hurt - apart of the pride of the UI designer. I just refuse to accept being deprived of an option just because somebody thinks that it's mere existence is hurtful, without providing real reasons. Again, let me clarify, because you have mixed those things in the previous discussion: I am not talking about options that should be elsewhere - those if are burried in a place that is difficult to access, that's a bad choice. I am talking exclusively about options that you would not put in because you consider them not important and you do not want to clutter you options UI. For these options, I just do not see how not having them is superior to having them in a sub-optimal location and you have still not provided a single argument. I am not "condescending" and I do not like your line of defense there. You are committing logical fallacies and I am pointing them out, you do not get a free pass out of criticism just by saying that you do not like to be criticized.
I agree with your point, but I also feel you are overly stiff in your argumentation here. 
I mean... you must realise that there is a drawback to adding a large number of options? In the extreme case of having many hundreds of options all on the same page, most of which 95% of the users will never want to touch, it can worsen the experiences for casual users a fair bit, if he needs to change that one setting, but can't find it, or don't bother to look through all of them in the first place as they are so many.
Adding one more option will probably not make a big difference in general, but if it's changed by few users, and it makes a larger number of other users not find existing (more important) options they'd like to change, you can easily argue that it's a change for the worse.
You can of course mitigate this by structuring the options better, and I guess it'll always be subjective exactly where the options become too many. It'll also be the usual tension between casual users and more serious forum-going users I guess.
So while I, like you it seems, wouldn't mind an option for the workers, I find it a bit silly to pretend that there is no drawback at all in having more options.
And you could also argue that it is a bit mean to try to force other poor forum posters to formulate coherent logical arguments as we discussed earlier in the ABT. :D
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On September 20 2016 15:52 washikie wrote:
As a programmer I understand the desire for simple ui. But as an sc2 player who is familiar with the game I want more options. If options arnt to hard to add, and are useful why not include them, even if you have to hide them away. Also I think the whole casuals won't understand argument is dumb. Just because some one plays video games casually does not atomaticly make them an idiot or unable to translate basic skills. Often if you've seen one or to option menus in your life it's usualy not hard to peruse another one. Also if some ones bought this game and enjoys it I doubt a crowded options menu will scare them off. Most casuals probably won't do much with options except mabey tinker with sound/graphics. As long as they can find these I don't think more options is a problem. In game ui is another story, this does need to be clean for casuals. But allowing us to turn on more features is not a problem. Some of these features are very helpful for gameplay like the clock and grid settings, and should be there even if they are not defualt.
There seems to be a myth of stupid casuals in the gaming community I think this myth is more elitism than reality. Casuals arnt stupid they just don't play games as much as us. they can figure out basic stuff. They just don't have the same skill set as hardcore gamers, I doubt that having this skill-set dramatically impacts your ability to use an options menu.
This has nothing to do with "causals are stupid". It has to do with usability and acessibility, and I think you are just making things up when you say that "causals" (whatever that is, this community is not divided into two groups) won't touch any other options than sound and graphics. Ignoring usability for options is just bad, and hiding them to get away with it won't exactly increase usability.
I can't see any arguments here, other than "I want it and people can figure it out". No, that's not an excuse to make a cluttered UI. Sorry.
Feature creep is very very common among software developers, and it is hard to get an understanding when you try to fight against it. "If a few good features are good then many good features are even better". No.
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On September 20 2016 16:48 IMSupervisor wrote:Show nested quote +On September 18 2016 18:33 Mendelfist wrote:On September 18 2016 18:22 opisska wrote:Yeah, that makes it ok. Why wouldn't it? Again, all I am really asking you for is to provide example of how exactly it is "not worth it", who does it specifically hurt - apart of the pride of the UI designer. It hurts the users of the UI, obviously. For every option you add it becomes less usable. If it's ment for users, usability is important. We already have an example, SC2 and the worker/army counter. This option would belong in the Gameplay tab. It's not worth the added clutter to have it there, because it's not an important option. We have options for how our control groups are displayed in game, and an option to display experience points earnt, how would this be any different? Are you really arguing that this specific option would be a bad one to add because it would seem that the precedent has already been set by Blizzard that they like making these things customisable. They want people to be able to interact with the game however people choose (completely customisable hotkeys, mouse sensitivity, sound levels, privacy settings etc) and allow people to see as much or as little information as they choose (health bars, flyer help, build grids etc) I think that when Blizzard are confident that the vast majority of people want something, there's no reason to make it an option, but when they aren't sure, what's the harm in making it an option?
I'm not sure what your point is. Not all options are equal. Some options have a large impact on the game, and are also very individual (mouse sensitivity). Other options are not. Maybe some people would like to have slightly thicker window borders? That's a silly example, but there is a wide range of cases between those too. In the latter case Blizzard should just make a good design and leave it at that. I don't think my position is very remarkable.
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Not sure if this is worth the discussion it triggered. Like, do we have nothing more important to implement? Add the fcking option. DONE. Next please.
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On September 20 2016 17:04 Mendelfist wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2016 16:48 IMSupervisor wrote:On September 18 2016 18:33 Mendelfist wrote:On September 18 2016 18:22 opisska wrote:Yeah, that makes it ok. Why wouldn't it? Again, all I am really asking you for is to provide example of how exactly it is "not worth it", who does it specifically hurt - apart of the pride of the UI designer. It hurts the users of the UI, obviously. For every option you add it becomes less usable. If it's ment for users, usability is important. We already have an example, SC2 and the worker/army counter. This option would belong in the Gameplay tab. It's not worth the added clutter to have it there, because it's not an important option. We have options for how our control groups are displayed in game, and an option to display experience points earnt, how would this be any different? Are you really arguing that this specific option would be a bad one to add because it would seem that the precedent has already been set by Blizzard that they like making these things customisable. They want people to be able to interact with the game however people choose (completely customisable hotkeys, mouse sensitivity, sound levels, privacy settings etc) and allow people to see as much or as little information as they choose (health bars, flyer help, build grids etc) I think that when Blizzard are confident that the vast majority of people want something, there's no reason to make it an option, but when they aren't sure, what's the harm in making it an option? I'm not sure what your point is. Not all options are equal. Some options have a large impact on the game, and are also very individual (mouse sensitivity). Other options are not. Maybe some people would like to have slightly thicker window borders? That's a silly example, but there is a wide range of cases between those too. In the latter case Blizzard should just make a good design and leave it at that. I don't think my position is very remarkable.
My point is Blizzard like having options that increase or decrease the amount of information available to the player in their menus and this shouldn't be any different. Are you talking generalisations about UI design or this specific worker supply info?
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On September 20 2016 17:04 Mendelfist wrote:Show nested quote +On September 20 2016 16:48 IMSupervisor wrote:On September 18 2016 18:33 Mendelfist wrote:
We have options for how our control groups are displayed in game, and an option to display experience points earnt, how would this be any different? Are you really arguing that this specific option would be a bad one to add because it would seem that the precedent has already been set by Blizzard that they like making these things customisable. They want people to be able to interact with the game however people choose (completely customisable hotkeys, mouse sensitivity, sound levels, privacy settings etc) and allow people to see as much or as little information as they choose (health bars, flyer help, build grids etc)
I think that when Blizzard are confident that the vast majority of people want something, there's no reason to make it an option, but when they aren't sure, what's the harm in making it an option? I'm not sure what your point is. Not all options are equal. Some options have a large impact on the game, and are also very individual (mouse sensitivity). Other options are not. Maybe some people would like to have slightly thicker window borders? That's a silly example, but there is a wide range of cases between those too. In the latter case Blizzard should just make a good design and leave it at that. I don't think my position is very remarkable. My point is Blizzard like having options that increase or decrease the amount of information available to the player in their menus and this shouldn't be any different. Are you talking generalisations about UI design or this specific worker supply info?
Why shouldn't this be any different? Not all options are equally important. In this speific case I don't think a new option is justified. It may also be true that some of the already existing options aren't justified. Maybe some options that aren't there should be there. This is one of the things that UI designers get paid for to decide.
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On September 20 2016 17:16 insitelol wrote:
Not sure if this is worth the discussion it triggered. Like, do we have nothing more important to implement? Add the fcking option. DONE. Next please.
Cant agree more
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I feel like all of these people getting their panties in a bunch over this don't even use the feature in the first place.
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I would personally find the feature useful if I were given an option to have it always on, as I don't have the time to play frequently but do enjoy playing well, and having a way to help me train more efficiently during the time I have available is a good thing for me. I'll forget to mouse over but if I can have it always on it'll be easier for me to remember to glance at.
I see cons to including an option for it, however. Any feature Blizzard adds will invariably require upkeep. Since this seems tied into the observer functionality from their description, it is not likely to be an option that costs a significant amount of time to maintain, but the cost does exist and each minor feature that needs a few QA regression bullets each release will add up over time. Even on well-kept compartmentalized enterprise software we still find regressions show up across the codebase even in "simple" places from time to time because of mutability, threading, etc that we did not expect because the product is too complex to keep all at once in any given engineer's head.
The argument for a clean menu/UI is not really holding weight with me, unless we're going to drop unnecessary options from there first. This is a much better training tool than several other options in the Gameplay menu.
I think including the option in the menu rather than a config file is better, since this is a tool more likely to be used by casual players who want to improve at SC2 but may not be technically inclined enough to know to use config files, and not dedicated enough to figure out how to do it. I personally would have no problems with the config file, but I have no expectations that some of my friends who play for fun would know it was even an option, or how to modify it.
Overall, I vote a tentative yes, depending on cost to maintain which I am optimistically guessing is low, as it has improvement utility and is effective, and I have a personal interest in the option.
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EPT
