Feedback: New Loadout / Tag Based Categorical Loadout

[Zelmana]

Howdy! I've seen a few folks discussing the loadout stuff on the OOC channel and didn't want to lose a lot of the response.
 

Discuss feedback for the below loadout changes, the tag based systems, the overall functionality and categorization changes, and ease (or difficulty) of use!




Note! This is not my PR! https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/17054 PR posted by @Dreamix
Please keep suggestions or comments polite and constructive.

[Zelmana]

[DatSamTho]

Yeah, imo, this just seems to be overly complicated and unintuitive. I know that there's a general bias against new things, but the old system was just fine. I don't see this improving things in any real way which compensates for the unintuitivity that I already mentioned.

[greenjoe]

Agreeing with tomkiel, I feel the previous system works fine as it is.

[GeneralCamo]

I see merit in the new system, since I have seen a lot of items assigned to areas arbitrarily that are confusing to new players. But there's a lot that makes it clunky.

Tag selection is very annoying, primarily because it doesn't seem to filter for what I need like wallets or passports. And the search function is broken as it doesn't update on the fly. This needs more time in the oven honestly I feel. 

[Dreamix]

I think tag-based loadout is superior in every way over category-based. If it looks unintuitive or that it takes too much clicks to get to what you want... I think that is just muscle memory, and you got too used to the previous system.

 

Category-based loadout is objectively more confusing, and does not work fine. Categories are just one huge mess of buttons only ordered alphabetically. There is "cosmetics" category right between "belt" and "earwear". "Utility" and "general" are both redundant and may as well be joined up. Categories in general are either basically empty with 5 items, or 30 items with no real order except alphabetical. See the xenowear categories. A lot of items of the same "type" are also spread out between different categories, for example, "surgical apron" is in the "suits and overwear" category - but the zeng variant is in the "factions" category. There is no simple way to find all "medical" gear - you need to click through all the categories to find them... except for when you already know where all the items are, but that's just muscle memory cause we had categories for many years now.

 

Tag-based makes it a ton easier to find specifically the items that you need. It may require 2 or 3 clicks to select the specific tags, but it requires much less scrolling, and less clicking through categories if you are not 100% sure where the item you want is, or even what exactly it is. With tags, there is now an easy way to find, for example, all "medical" items, or even specifically all "medical suits and overwear". Or if you want to see all the tajaran uniforms or clothing and the like, you don't want to scroll through many other tajaran items in-between that aren't uniforms/clothing.

 

As for missing items or tags, or items with incorrectly assigned tags... If I don't see any bug reports, and no one pings me, then things will never be fixed. So yeah, please report bugs, either on github or ping me directly.

Edited September 5, 2023 by Dreamix

[Carver]

After some experiences where I couldn't find something (headphone selection) because the search bar didn't work and the tags applied to it were only the most generic 'no restriction(x3)', I really hate this new system. Even excluding the obvious bugged one, it takes significantly longer to find anything I'm looking for and I'm constantly clearing tags to try and see what I have. I feel that it requires even more tags, if anything, yet this only further compounds the amount of additional clicks to circumvent search bar usage.

[GeneralCamo]

32 minutes ago, Dreamix said:

As for missing items or tags, or items with incorrectly assigned tags... If I don't see any bug reports, and no one pings me, then things will never be fixed. So yeah, please report bugs, either on github or ping me directly.

I think for a start, all of the old categories should now be tags. This will help muscle memory, and these were generally in the correct places. 

[Boggle08]

It's really easy to click the wrong combination of tags, or even just attempt to navigate through item slot categories, and find yourself on a blank screen.

52 minutes ago, Dreamix said:

I think tag-based loadout is superior in every way over category-based. If it looks unintuitive or that it takes too much clicks to get to what you want... I think that is just muscle memory, and you got too used to the previous system.

The only issue with the previous system was that you sometimes had to scroll to get what you wanted. The categories were self evident in what they offered. With this current interface, I feel like a 1940's telephone operator, where I have to manually program the interface in order to get the categories and lists I want. At least since the last time I've played other servers, every single one has used a system similar or adjacent to the previous interface. This isn't just regulars grumbling over new bad old good, this is something that will confuse the hell out of everyone, if it can't accommodate the old way of searching through categories.

Edited September 5, 2023 by Boggle08

[Sycmos]

I'm not a fan of the new loadout system at all. It's not intuitive to navigate, and the tags make for excessively long lists of items if not used properly.

We did not need to change our previous loadout system, or fix something that was not broken.

[Gem]

not a fan. it adds too much visual noise, both in the selection menu and under items' descriptions.

[Ramke]

After trying this for a few days I've.. not changed my opinion and think this system is extremely clunky and unintuitive, as well as overwhelming with the amount of options and clunky need for combinations.

To provide an example:

I'm thinking of creating a Himean Tajara, so I want to see what himean options there are for them. So I go for the view that Tajara players can get as a result of a whitelist (which was all in one place before), I click the Tajara tag. Nothing shows up. Then I have to click the "no species restrictions" tag to remove it manually, because for some reason you can combine "restricted" and "no restrictions".

I then get presented with the old list, but filled with non-Tajara augments and other cross-species items, making it much worse than the previous loadout system. So I try to narrow it down with a search.

The search barely works and errors out occasionally, on top of not just being able to press "enter" to search:

The search also does not find what you need unless you have the right tags selected. There's no general or "broad" search. Removing all the tags removes all the items. Unless there is and I'm just silly?

 I was still unable to find what I was looking for:

But it's there in the list. The search just doesn't pick it up. I assume it's because I don't have the right origin selected? Why is it greyed out if I'm looking for items that are restricted to Tajara and just want to find a hit for "himean"? How is a new player supposed to figure this out if they're trying to inspect the options before making the character?

To say the old system is confusing to new players might be right because we have a ridiculous amount of loadout items, but if someone who's familiar with the lore and remembers loadout item names struggles to use this, I find it hard to believe a new player will have better luck with a more convoluted menu. You may call me stupid, but in this case consider me the low bar on how stupid people would interact with this menu. Now combine that with not knowing what they were beforehand.

I have to agree with all the other feedback in the thread, barring the PR creator's. If the intention is to create a system easier to narrow things down and find things you want exactly, what's wrong with just adding a global search and keeping the old system?

1 hour ago, Sycmos said:

We did not need to change our previous loadout system, or fix something that was not broken.

Edited September 5, 2023 by Ramke

[White Void]

Simply for the sake of being another person on the list, i agree with others, i didn't like the new menu at all, it actually makes it worse to find stuff

[Duthco]

I want to give the tag system an honest shake, since it does seem like a fair amount of effort went into solving what was seen as a problem, so I've waited a bit to post here.

 

When I first saw it, I poked around at it, and didn't like it very much. But I realized that could be entirely because Brain says, "change = bad."

Yesterday, I decided that I was still too afraid to put my readings to the test and try Medbay in practicum and instead I would make a Security cadet to see how it functioned as intended. 

While I disagree that reading through categorized lists is a terrible way to organize things, there did seem to be some... missed opportunities with the previous organization paradigm. Like, I made the reasoning in my head, that the Zeng-Hu Vinyl Gloves previously lived under "Factions" because they were work attire, but there's no reason they couldn't have lived with the wristwatches.

But now, say I'd like to see all the Zavodskoi stuff all in one place. This is something that toggling only the "Zavodskoi" tag allows, which I quite like. Then, the things still show up where contextually relevant: e.g. the Zavodskoi Security Sleeve Patch also shows up when I only have "Security" selected, which is also quite nice.

Notably, that kind of thing would be possible under a categories paradigm too, but only under the bloat of many redundant entries. Not so under a tags paradigm.

 

I will say, it looks much nicer today than it did yesterday, although I do look forward to a return of the search bar. 

I like the default being no tags selected.

I think today's ordering of tag categories is just a bit better than it was, from my subjective point of view. I prefer the Slot tags towards the top, General tags next, etc.

I've no real objective explanation for how this might be better, but I just like this vertical ordering more than how it was. (See previous posts' images for comparison.) I'm sure, if put to task, I could bs some reasonable/believable explanation, but I'll spare you the floridity in what is already becoming a lengthy post. 

I also like how, at least as of today, the default tags also don't list everything a character has equipped at the top, which seems to now be exclusively the task of the "Show all selected items" toggle.

 

In short, my exercise of making a character with this loadout system was successful and without too much frustration.

Spoiler

I will say, removing a shirt or pants article while there are other accessories layered on top of it, breaks it. If you add it back, they're now below, if they reappear at all, and I found I needed to remove everything layered and put them all back in order... which is annoying, but I think this might've always been like that, and is therefore irrelevant to this specific feedback thread.

Lowkey, the ability to specify an article's layer and adjust it on articles already in place would be amazing, but again, I think this is largely not germane.

 

Ultimately, there are things I like and things I don't.

- I can't say it's more intuitive to select a tag so as to find things that aren't restricted and then scrolling through a list than simply scrolling through a relevant categorized list. (Like it's nearly the same situation, except it's now slightly harder to find things that don't have a buzz-word tag.)

- I agree for the most part, with previously mentioned sentiment that, it doesn't seem done yet, but at the same time, I'd imagine there's no faster way to get feedback than via debut. I do think it's a little odd that there wasn't automatically created a feedback thread for a change like this. It was only after a day or so it was noticed that there wasn't one, and Zelmana started this one. Like, this is the kind of thing I would anticipate would necessitate some feedback from non-dev types. (Of course, expecting "change=bad" to be the core sentiment expressed.)

- While "Cosmetic" previously lived between "Belt" and "Earwear" because the letter "C" is between the letters "B" and "E", I like the new slightly more contextual arrangement where it lives among things that are largely, not attire-focused categories.

- I almost agree with the notion that "General" and "Utility" could be merged, but, by my read, it would seem that articles under "Utility" do something or hold something very specifically, whereas articles living under "General" are just things. I think maybe photos and the photo album might could go to "Utility," but an ontological conversation about specific items seems on the edge of germane, so I'll pin it there. 

- There are aspects that I don't care for that have been mentioned already in this thread, so rehashing them would only really serve to make a long post even longer, so I'll just leave it at this handwave. 

 

Action Items: (Just suggestions, feel free to ignore if I'm overstepping)

- In service of brevity, I think the word "Restriction" on the Tag categories list to the left of the tags lists on the Loadout Menu could probably be dropped from "Department Restriction Tags:" and "Species Restriction Tags:" without loss of clarity, especially since one of the tags in both categories is "No X Restriction". Further, the category, "Corporation Tags:" is an exact execution of what I'm talking about.

- The category name "Miscellaneous Tags:" seems to miss the unifying trait that most of the articles therein are not attire, and are generally usable or held items of one sort or another. (Ignoring Religion. That one is concise and well fit, and really doesn't belong under another existing banner.) I'd propose "General Tags:" or something similar. I suppose still "catchall" but with a different tone.

 

 

IN CONCLUSION:

I'm ambivalent on the whole new Loadout tags paradigm.

That said, I get the impression that it was a great deal of work, and in service of the community. So just saying "New = Bad" doesn't feel right, in my opinion.

Thanks for bearing with a long bit of waffling.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Duthco
Extraneous "a"

[lilahnovi]

I personally don't feel muscle-memory is going to make this better.
There are extra clicks involved to switch categories, and the lists just get longer. I have to click a tag to make it go away, rather than just selecting another tag, which would help with making it feel intuitive (e.g. clicking ears - done with ears - click ears again - Now click hat. Instead of clicking ears - done with ears - now click hat.)

In the end, I just find myself clicking only one tag on the top, because I'm not going to bother with everything else, and scrolling through the now-extended list of things, which now makes it feel worse than before. I get the feeling more than a few people might end up doing this - or maybe I just know what I'm looking for, and I'm just not going to bother with all the tags.
Plus, extra tags makes it feel like I'm definitely going to miss something I might find useful, so I tend to apply more broad tags overall. 

Also, visually, this is not kind. At all. It's too busy, and the categories (item slot tags, misc tags, etc) do not match up with the clickable tags. It just feels like a gigantic pile of words salad. Maybe if there were lines to separate each category, it might feel a little more visually intuitive.

Sure, there is a probably a better way to do the loadout system. I don't think this is it.
It might have been good as an optional bit to empower the search system, however. Something you could use to find that thinger you want. I can see that being useful.

[GeneralCamo]

I touched on this in the discord, but the one major advantage with this is we can finally get rid of most of the selection categories. No more will you struggle to find a cowboy hat because it is under "hats (colorable)", not to be confused with "hats" 

[KingOfThePing]

Okay so since my last post was deleted I am writing again:

 

I don't like the new loadout. 

 

It makes a simple category based system, which was perfectly fine and able to handle the options we have a very convoluted, partially buggy and uninuitive mess. 

 

There was no real reason to switch and the new system is inferior in user friendliness. 

[Misiek1001]

The old system was completely fine. I genuinely have no idea why we need this, being completely honest.

I'd support a revert to the previous loadout, as what we have now is confusing and far too much of a pain to navigate.

[MattAtlas]

This PR isn't being merged due to people mostly not being a fan of it. but I'd like to precise that 'this isn't needed because the old system worked fine' is the only kind of feedback that I hate hearing. Things working fine doesn't mean someone can't try to improve upon them if they find them to be lackluster. Whether the improvement they try making actually makes the experience better is a different question, but nobody should be discouraged from trying to improve something that works as is.