The latest update to the item rewordings seems to have knocked the nice ordering-by-value of the inventory out of whack – I have Collated Research coming before Foxfire Candle Stubs, Puzzle-Damask before Silk Scraps, and Identities Uncovered before Proscribed Material.
[quote=Toper]I think the hovertext "You unlocked this with Nightmares 5 (you needed 4)" is kind of backwards. The whole point of having it, I think, is to display unlock requirements and/or costs; they shouldn’t go in parentheses.
For Qualities, I’d prefer "This requires Nightmares 4 or more (you have 5)". This also shortens the prefix to every hovertext, which even for newbies is just clutter; and if "plain English" is the goal, it’s good to get rid of the lock/unlock metaphor.
For stat/item requirements, probably "This requires Watchful 70 (you have 83)" or "This requires 200 Rats on Strings (you have 3969)". I think the "or more" is implicit for item counts and stat requirements.[/quote]
I agree with all of these points.
The new phrasing seems much less clear than the old to me…
[quote=Toper]I think the hovertext "You unlocked this with Nightmares 5 (you needed 4)" is kind of backwards. The whole point of having it, I think, is to display unlock requirements and/or costs; they shouldn’t go in parentheses.
For Qualities, I’d prefer "This requires Nightmares 4 or more (you have 5)". This also shortens the prefix to every hovertext, which even for newbies is just clutter; and if "plain English" is the goal, it’s good to get rid of the lock/unlock metaphor.
For stat/item requirements, probably "This requires Watchful 70 (you have 83)" or "This requires 200 Rats on Strings (you have 3969)". I think the "or more" is implicit for item counts and stat requirements.
edited by Toper on 6/30/2015[/quote]
I agree completely, the most important fact is the requirement (which is particular to the action), not the amount I have (which I could already know or find out lots of other ways). "Requires" is far more clear and natural than "is unlocked by."
I’m looking forward to seeing the formatting return a bit more to normal. It’s odd hovering over a card and having everything be in bold. The actual rephrasing has some quirks to work out, but others have suggested good ways to fix that.
Edit: Actually, I do have a bit of feedback. I’m currently seeing the Turncoat icon on the Affair of the Box, saying:
That bit in the parentheses is awkward. Is there a way to change the phrasing specifically for options that are locked by a certain quality? I suspect switching what goes in the parentheses might help, since it would say something more like, "This requires no more than 3 Turncoat (you have 0)" which is far more clear.
edited by Sara Hysaro on 6/30/2015
The bolded text on, well, everything is a bit overwhelming, especially in the case of items with long descriptions like the Violet Amber.
[quote=Leucosia Lacrimosa]
The bolded text on, well, everything is a bit overwhelming, especially in the case of items with long descriptions like the Violet Amber.[/quote]
I’m in agreement here. My personal preference would be to have the item name and stat effects in bold and the description and "where to find" info in standard text. It would also be nice if the "flavor text" on opp cards were un-bolded, leaving the unlock requirements and title in bold. That seems like it would be the most easily readable.
[quote=Leucosia Lacrimosa]
The bolded text on, well, everything is a bit overwhelming, especially in the case of items with long descriptions like the Violet Amber.[/quote]
Second to that: the headlines and descriptions should be in different styles.
This happened before the changes, and I’m not sure where I would test it again, since I saw it on a one-time storylet. But it seems like a good thing to report while quality req.'s are in Failbetter’s focus.
The storylet was Ambition: Nemesis: Unmasking Your Nemesis: Identify a second suspect. There’s a long list of options with no requirements (you answer to solve a riddle). When I ran out of actions, a hidden requirement appeared next to one option ("You need no more than Ambition: Nemesis: no more than X.") Sure enough, this was the correct answer to the riddle.
In summary, hidden requirements become visible if you have no actions (at least in this storylet). It may not matter much for most storylets, but it did spoil the fun on this one.
edited by TheThirdPolice on 6/30/2015
…I feel like making items distinguishable from each other at a quick scan is more important than making items in a category line up with each other. Like, I feel like the shoes and gloves could blend in too easily with each other on the sell page. also i feel like, say, "150 Nodule of Deep Amber" makes less sense than "150 Deep Amber" - that’s a plural issue, mostly. I don’t know how difficult it would be to make it change from "1 Nodule of Deep Amber" to "150 Nodules of Deep Amber". or if there would ever be a situation where you would have only one nodule, barring a player selling all of their amber except one.
Which is sort of also an issue with, say, "200 Whispered Secret" - but it’s not something I ever really examined before. mostly because I wasn’t paying attention, I figure. possibly the reason why I’m focusing on Nodule here is because it’s such a peculiar word.
…it’s stuff I can adjust to, it just feels really weird right now.
Also I think that if possible the titles of things should not be made longer, but that might be more of a personal tic, idk.
A bug seems to have been introduced with the changes:
When you open up the chance box to put a checkmark for a second chance the html <label> text has been changed so that clicking the second (and maybe the third, etc.) option will check the box for the first option instead of the one the label should belong to.
Concretely: On “The Listing Tower” I hover over the chance box for “What new madness is this?” to reveal the checkbox. If I click the html <label> (that is: the text “Spend a Hard-Earned Lesson to ensure a second chance…” and not the checkbox itself) then the checkbox for “A wager of courage” gets checked instead of the one for this option.
This, exactly. The extra ‘lump of’ or ‘scrap of’ is nice in theory, but just makes it harder to quickly find and distinguish everything.
My (single) Parabola-Linen Scrap shows up before my 9 x Surface-Silk Scraps, instead of at the end where it was before.
I second the suggestion of switching Quality Req order. (In shorthand: ) "This requires Nightmares 4 or more (you have 5)" is better than "You have Nightmares 5 (you needed 4)."
I don’t particularly mind bolded descriptions, but the "Create this using" and "Click this item to" should be differentiated from the description.
EDIT: Mousing over the Swap Incendiary Gossip card shows a messy "Unlocked when a (POSI) is: (all six possibilities without spaces between them)" It also doesn’t say "(you have this)", which the next requirement on the same mouse-over does (A Member in Good Standing).
edited by TheThirdPolice on 7/1/2015
One place where this gets a little awkward is in cases where a numeric quality represents the degree of an uncountable state, rather than a discrete quantity of objects. For instance, in Polythreme, "You unlocked this with 2 Unnatural Exuberances."
I have to admit that some of the item names becoming singular just sounds a bit odd when you say them out loud, especially with the expedition supplies thing.
EDIT: Disregard that, I didn’t notice that it changed to a crate of expedition supplies. Sorry
edited by Deanscig on 7/1/2015
Echoing a lot of other comments here: I would very much like to see the ‘flavor’ text on mouseovers be unbolded, and more than anything the ‘green’ level of challenge restored- I have way too much automatic response to seeing white and knowing it’s a 100% success to easily adjust now. And while I have some suspicions that some of these changes were made with the new mobile app in mind, at the moment this hurts me the most when I’m on my phone/tablet and mousing over things is harder to do.
Also would prefer to see the items be ordered by ‘tier’ as they used to be- it seems like some categories still are but some, like Rags, very much aren’t.
I do also agree that to me, “Unlocked with 4 (you have 5)” was a lot clearer than the new “Unlocked with 5 (you needed 4)”.
I do like the red coloring of the quality you need, though. It’s helpful to have that jump out.
Yes, please please revert this. It’s baffling to me that you guys would have made this change.
(Especially baffling because this is already something you’ve "fixed". I remember when all "straightforward" challenges were green. That was such a welcome change, and now it is gone :( )
edited by hwoosh on 7/3/2015
That’s not a personal tic. The longer names are really annoying.
I’ll echo the request not to have everything in bold.
PLEASE PUT EACH CATEGORY’S ITEMS BACK IN THE RIGHT ORDER. When I’m only a few points of MW short of where I need to be, I traipse on to the Myself tab and side-convert items to raise MW. I don’t remember which ones I need, I just click on the third box.
Re: Curiosities, since there are so many, have you considered splitting them into "Curiosities" and "POSI Items" - or perhaps "Sidestreet items"?
Got the big wake-up call on this one this morning when I blew a challenge because I saw white and just clicked; fortunately is wasn’t anything hugely important, but the failure first thing in the morning sure was startling.
It’s easy but very tedious to set up if you don’t try to be clever about it and just store both a singular and plural name for everything in your database.
It’s extremely difficult and error-prone if you try to be clever and do it in code instead.
I may or may not have learned this lesson the hard way.