Feedback on new site flow

The best point from everyone

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  Foofad replied on February 07, 2009 18:34

  Alright, so I've held off on commenting until I've had several hours of usage logged on the new layout, and I'll go ahead and say now that I'm positive about the changes, with exceptions.
  
  I'll work from the top of the page down, and starting with just the aesthetics. I'll touch on gameplay changes and so on after.
  
  The upper nav bar is a good change from the way it was before. Descriptive icons, very clear and intuitive. Not much else to say about the bar itself.
  
  The black bar containing the activity meter, playlist, and log buttons totally detracts from the look of the rest of the page. You need to find a better way of integrating that into the pale white background. It looks silly to have this black rectangular appendage sticking out of the square game space, over a white and mostly rounded/organic background. No joy.
  
  The game space itself hasn't noticeably changed in appearance so I'll just move right in to the new log/playlist area. For starters, the new playlist is ugly ugly ugly. The layout of the song purchase buttons relative to the field the album art/track/artist are in is clunky. They are taking up an entire playlist entry's worth of space... for two buttons. You could, as an alternative, instead change the buttons to rectangles half the height of the current rounded squares, and stick 'em in the bottom right corner of the song entry, roughly opposite of the album art. That will save you enough space to double the amount of songs you can display on the playlist at once.
  
  Further, having the gray background of each song's entry in the playlist extend further down than the album art looks very strange and doesn't keep with the aesthetic of the rest of the presentation.
  
  Next, I'm not really pleased with using that same right scrollbar for both the playlist and the log, exclusive of each other. I liked the old style, with having the playlist visible on the left and the log visible on the right at all times. But naturally that did take up a lot more space, and so I can dig the idea of combining the two once I get used to it. That said, what's a bit irritating about the new system is that when you dance with someone and their miniprofile appears, it appears to the exclusion of the log/playlist. I would much prefer something like the old system, which displayed the miniprofile above the log. That was awesome and had great flow. Now, I have to actually exit the miniprofile by clicking on the log button above on every single dance in order to see what people are saying to me. That's irritating.
  
  Moving on, the featured loot and next week's playlist area hasn't changed much near as I can tell, so there isn't a lot to say about it. No problems with the presentation there.
  
  Last thing to go over on the aesthetics front: I think having the playlist information down there at the bottom is a bad idea. It's a whole lot of text that could just as easily be hidden away inside a menu, and having that big empty nothin' on the bottom right just below the playlist/log area is visually distracting. I would make the DJ/Playlist information accessable from the Playlist button at the top, and change the playlist/log select buttons above the playlist/log area to better reflect the fact that clicking on that button will actually bring up the playlist history.
  
  Whew, that was a lot. Now for gameplay.
  
  Again, from the top down - I love the core of the dare system. I don't like that it's tied to this new activity meter. I think the activity meter is kind of silly, and automates a function that could instead be player driven. To elaborate on that, I think that the dare system as a whole would be far more interesting if instead of just doing it as a matter of course whenever you hit a new activity milestone, which promotes a solo mentality, you instead afforded players some method of actually challenging other players to dares, which is a multiplayer mentality. You then promote a more community-oriented system of driving loot - instead of loot being all about luck and whether or not the server's random number generator happens to love you today, it all of a sudden becomes dependent on whether or not the person you're dancing with thinks you're up for a challenge.
  
  As to how these dares would be handed out by players, I don't really know. This also opens up the opportunity for unpopular people to never get any loot as a function of people never caring to dare them, so naturally there would have to be some kind of built in balance to counter that; I can totally understand from a developer's standpoint the disinclination to let things get too exclusive. I don't think that's enough of an excuse to take a system which could be incredible if designed to promote a multiplayer setup rather than a solo "dance with a lot of people so that meter gets bigger and then I can do this thing to get something" pitfall. This is not a MMORPG - there's no reason to have a level treadmill. Break the mold!
  
  As for the dares themselves, I like that you guys are adding in new minigames. The DJ game is not bad, although if it's tied to the music in any way, it's not obvious enough to actually feel like it. It's entirely possible I just haven't played it enough to pick up on the fact, but I'd like to have as much integration between the DJ game and the music that's playing as possible. Maybe pulsing lights to the beat.
  
  I do have one gripe. It's kinda silly for dance dares to come up for difficulties you play above. For example, if I play on Crazy, why on earth would I want to do a dance dare on Beginner? The only reason I can come up with is if I'm just plain lazy and don't want to put out any effort to get the loot from it, and if that's the case, then there's something wrong with the system if I'm too lazy to actually go through it as intended. My suggestion - Always show all 4 difficulties of the DJ game, and then two levels of the dance game. One level would be the level you're currently playing at, and the other would be one level higher. Give them both the same loot reward, but allow the higher difficulty one to have a small bonus chance at rare or limited edition loot. Not a lot, just enough so that if you CAN do it, you will; but not enough to make people feel hopeless if they can't. In the case of someone who plays on Crazy, come up with an even harder, dare-only difficulty.
  
  I love, love, lovelovelove the new always-on, all in one room dance game. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was a great move and totally needed, and it works flawlessly.
  
  Lastly - and this is it, I swear - I'm with marykate on scoring being gone. In taking it out, you took out a part of the game that I really loved, that being the frantic dancing with everyone I could find to get the absolute best score I could. That was fun. It was crazy fun, actually, on the really high BPM tracks. I liked being able to track my progress, as well. I liked playing a song on Monday, and hearing it again on Wednesday, and seeing if I could top my last score. It gave a much needed sense of progression and accomplishment which now no longer exists. In return, the experience is much more laid back, and - for me - boring. Instead of feeling like I was going dancing, now it feels like I'm going to a lounge to chill and maybe get on the floor once or twice. Scoring in dares means very little, because from one hearing of a song to the next it's impractical to try and sync up with passages you've played and been scored on before in order to compare how you're progressing.
  I won't out and out say that not having scores anymore sucks, because it's not THAT bad - but losing a feature that was so much of the experience since alpha, and not replacing it with something better, is a little jarring and unfun.
  
  The other knickknacks like stamps and so on are all nifty and great to have.
  
  Okay, that's it. I'll probably develop some of these opinions a little further over the next week, and may update my thoughts, but I think this is pretty definitive. Sorry to write a novel, but this being such a massive change, I figured it was appropriate. I'll close out by saying that, again, by and large I'm positive about the update. There's just a couple of irritating things that can be easily polished out in future updates, and the unfortunate dropping of the post-song scoring, that I'm the most displeased at. Also, and this is far more ephemeral and I'm not sure what it stems from, the site seems just a tad more impersonal. That may just be the effect of the massive layout change though. We'll see.
  
  Thanks for all your hard work so far, guys. You continue to prove that a project like this can really work.
  
  ~Foofad

   

  
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