Honestly, it is much more of a pain to close the game and relaunch it after completing missions and clicking continue (which it causes an invisible mouse cursor bug and launching a campaign will crash) and the current workaround is clicking on “back” button. Which that is kind of more important than just not being able to type.
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I am absolutely with you on that one.
Everything is wrong with the UI, its like an alter of insult compared to other RTS’s and their UI. big, thick, giant buttons and UI fragments filling in the space with worthless clutter, not using space properly when there is available, the hilarious downgrade in information display, the lack of a better search function for custom game maps after the map section is cluttered with maps that have 235092830923ur02awe9r as their name.
And i’m just getting started, map download size is suppose to be 512 but it breaks at 310 because of UI issues, the performance is poor enough that people who can run classic graphics to play the game can’t get through the mainmenus to get to their game.
The menus dont remember the last game you played like it used to remember, every single time you’re dumped on a clean slate area to go dig through the folders.
Keyboard based navigation is not even remotely as smooth as it used to be, lobby chat and universal chat shouldn’t even be mixed in 1 box when someone is in a lobby. and no pressing tab doesn’t magically make a new appropriate box for you to chat in, its the same box and everything is flooded in it, even friend DM from OUTSIDE of the game.
Playing the Campaign was moved into the Singleplayer umbrella, it makes sense except if it wasn’t for the guy who worked on the campaigns insisting it should be right there on the main menus.
Actually, creating custom games through single player used to have its own UI section and it put map selection, map settings, and the lobby into one area, but Reforged uses the Lan method of creating custom games FOR the single player custom games section, so if you want to change your map on the fly in a singleplayer custom game lobby you have to keep going back, and in, back and in, back and in.
There is so many things that are so big in the UI that can be used to overhaul and make space for a more convinent and smooth looking UI experience that i have brain function error every time i look at it.
Custom Campaign left hand side menu is literally too big and displays practically no useful information for the amount of space its taking, covering up peoples ability to display their custom videos.
The mission selection area can be far more smaller, and difficulty selection shouldn’t even blacken out your screen and bring up the choices, it should just be a seamless drop down on a corner somewhere smooth and slick.
But of course you wouldn’t know that, the UI was designed for 4.3 aspect ratio and they either didn’t have enough time to include 16.9 redesigns, which is why everything is so big, or they failed to realize these problems.
Custom Games scorescreens no longer carry the art piece that the game used to show, and the icons that people could customize entirely out of a personal selection of their own chosen icons is not available in the scorescreens, even though the object editor still has the option to customize them.
https://www.hiveworkshop.com/pastebin/4b23f8dc9eb4ed500a662e396908d39b.24991
https://www.hiveworkshop.com/pastebin/70f44538106c52ad2a01ffba924792e2.25000
“It works” is not enough for me. and plus, ive kinda stopped caring about your judgement, you practically reported 0 bugs compared to me with negative 100 effort in trying to show your ideas, and you just sit here act as a glorified priority judge on other peoples bug reporting. report your own bugs and ideas, make photoshop showcases, and let others do their own and may the best man win. this whole judgement situation only makes you look as an annoying nuisance. i made peace with you last time we spoke and was doing fine before i saw other people complaining about you across the community about behaving like a know it all judge. i guess they aren’t wrong.
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That’s your opinion, and I can understand why you feel that way, but for me, it does what it’s supposed to do, its easy enough to understand, and on a functional level, it’s probably the least broken part of the game aside from that chat bug. So I respectfully disagree.
The games UI only started to get somewhat tolerable after the recent updates. i’ll tell you one thing though, alot of people blame this on the Chromium nature of the UI but in my perspective i dont really care what its using underneath as long as its fixed and redesigned to be better, WebUI’s can still be good if designed right.
I just can’t digest the UI after knowing it went from what to what.
The ingame options menu being summoned from the main menus itself playing the slow animation is also very annoying to me. it used to be instant. Both in the old game, and in 1.32.10 but they “fixed it” in 1.33 or 1.35 to play the slow animation. luckily you should be able to atleast see how instant it used to be by watching random video picks from either Wtii or Grubby during the years long 1.32.10 era. what you’re looking to compare is seeing them go to options while they’re in the game.
When testing maps in the world editor, after a few seconds you hear a menu sound and if you pause the game to try and restart that instance your game freezes, so you’re forced to quit entirely and go back and click test game again.
This whole situation just frusttrates me greatly, its probably obvious that i’m very passionate about this topic cuz i redesigned alot of ideas by consulting people that keep hitting my designs with critiques until i fix everything to be better, then present them. i dont know if Blizzard will ever do anything 
They FINALLY got around fixing the loading screens displaying text in a misaligned way, and you know what was there fix ? they mirriored the problem from left to right without actually fixing the alignment.
check the second comment by me to get proper comparisons. its hilarious.
I dont know if its a matter of my personal opinion or whether or not subjectivity plays a part here, i mean, if you play the game in a manner that you dont encounter the issues or care about the problems or missing things that others do or have, thats fine i hope you enjoy the game, but for me for example there is very clearly massive objective things wrong with it.
I mean yeah, it is true that a lot of the stuff i mentioned happened more recently, but it did happen and made things better. How much better is subjective and depends on the user. How things used to be isn’t important, how they are right now is what’s important.
Then this would be my biggest area of friction with you, you cant just get something worse from a project that’s suppose to make an existing product better, then expect everyone to delete their brain and start fresh clean.
Warcraft 3’s old UI needed an update, and it needed to preserve the good things about it while modernizing it, you know people complained to me about how the chain animations in the main menu is just old and too brittle, i mean well why didn’t Blizzard just modernize that instead of SOMEHOW managing to make it more clunky than it used to be.
I don’t really disagree with you, but while it did take a while, improvements were made, both in performance and usability. It’s at least a little unfair not to acknowledge that at least some effort was made. I’m not saying you should forget what happened, but you also shouldn’t pretend that nothing was ever done. UI improvements were far from the only thing we had to wait literal years for, as well.
But bugs and performance aside, I don’t really think the basic idea behind the UI was a downgrade. There’s a few factors that go into this:
- A lot of people have complained about this,. but using chromium for the UI allows it to be more dynamic and it can be updated more easily, at least in theory. This wasn’t the bad move a lot of people made it out to be. The implementation was flawed, yes I agree, but not the tech behind it.
- there were some bizzare decisions that were addressed and/or acknowledged, and have since been improved. For example, some people were talking about how lan play had been “removed” when the truth was that you absolutely could play LAN, as if you weren’t connected to the internet, you’d sitll see games in the custom games list if they were on your network. So really the custom games menu was also the LAN menu. From a design perspective, I can understand this because it’s efficient killing two birds with one stone, but everyone was lamenting the lack of a “LAN Games” button on the menu. One was later added, and, other than saying “LAN Games,” looks the same as the custom game screen, because it IS the same
- Especially after the latest patch, The main menu is straightforward and easy to understand. Everything single player related is now under a button that says “single player,” custom games and versus are pretty self explanatory, and so on. Whilst online, while it could still be more flexible, the chat window is in most ways better than the original, which was on screen at all times while in the b.net lobby, and not accessible at any other time. In Reforged, the chat is always available as long as you’re online, you can change the size and have it fade when not in use, I legitimately think this was an improvement, even if it could still be more flexible (i.e. make it any size you want instead of just a couple settings)
Is it issue free? Of course not. there is the admittedly annoying (but not as bad as they claim) chat bug that a certain someone has posted about in at least 3 seperate places. it still doesn’t perform quite up to snuff on some systems that can otherwise run the game acceptably, and im sure there’s some other things we could bring up. But is it awful? I have to say no. It gets me in the game, it generally does what its supposed to do, everything is located somewhere that I would naturally expect to find it, etc.
1 - we agree there so not much to comment.
2 - Lan is not the same as singleplayer CG’s, Lan is used for melee tournaments and for people to set up lan parties with friends. single player custom games are just its own thing. the problem is they used to have their own menus tailored to make them less of a pain in the butt to click around.
This wasn’t killing 2 birds with one stone because of a brilliant design strategy, it made single player custom games require more clicks and be more annoying, it was reused because of not having the proper time to developer it, which makes it a downgrade.
3 - Being able to chat online with your friends through the game was the position most people who defended the old clan chat took, but when it comes to lobby chat, there is no point in having everything being flushed down the same hole. the SPECIFIC lobby chat should be its own box and ive demonstrated that up there through one of the pastebin links.
The global blizzard chat that other things like DMs or messaging people online in other blizzard games should be what it is right now, fadable, arguably still not as awkward looking.
That’s the aspect that makes it awful, its multitasking to its own detriment. i dont want to chat with people in the lobby then my friend starts texting me in pink text and everything goes through the same bloody chat box.
It might be technically smaller in scale, but you’re basically saying a Discord servers general chat and your friends DMs should go through the same box and its fine. no its not.
The primary Campaign being outside of singleplayer is technically more faithful to the original game, but the classic team that used to be there decided a change in plan and put it outside of Singleplayer. on one hand people tell me its more accessible this way, on another hand my love for the old UI’s organized state tells me i should be happy.
never said it was the same thing as single player. I was talking about online custom games, not single player
This is pretty standard for almost any game with a chat log though. It’s no better or worse than any other game in that regard. If you hate this, you’ll hate it in any other game. Yeah, in MMOs you can usually customize it a lot more, but this isn’t an MMO and the chat log isn’t as integral to the experience. So they likely didn’t feel it needed to be as fully featured.
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You are right, i would dislike it even if i see it in other games, i think if this happens for modern games that aren’t an mmo its probably because of a few factors which include but aren’t limited to people just not caring.
I play GuildWars 2 and do see that the chat is usually cluttered like this, though i muscle through it either way i think there is a secondary tab specifically for DMs there.
You know why is this an issue for in war3 though ? because in the lobby its usually nice to talk about the map we are about to play, strategies, guides, starting tips, etc.
This shouldn’t be mixed with anything else, and now i realize its quite the unique situation compared to other games where its not that important or you have the freedom to customize it. in other games you usually dont get extremely different verity of custom designed community made maps that genuinely benefit from having its own space to talk about during the waiting period before the lobby is full.
And technically, it used to only be focused around it, except now blizzard added friend chatting which is great, but removed lobby chat box and mixed it with the friends one which is less great.
Well in other games you would typically have tabs that you can assign to show whatever you want to show.
I get where you’re coming from but there is so little chat outside of a game lobby most of the time that to me it really isn’t much of an issue. Perhaps I’d feel differently if I was in a really active clan that actually chatted in game vs using Discord or something, but I"m not sure such a thing even exists.
dc with no win terrible patch
no dc many win great patch
OK, great is more than pushing it (less crap is closer)… but still, aint the game’s fault you’re DC’ing. There is that silly bug with team games but even then, if you “no win” then well… you need to get gud. Most people have some wins even in spite of the ranked bugs.
i think the current chat discourages more chatting, especially since people can hide it.
I know you’d say not being able to hide it is awful but i mean, really ? please scroll up and take a look at the redesigns i posted, it doesn’t matter if you like the one where i personally designed or the one that looks more like the original game. (The one i designed technically suggests allowing both chats to be minimized)
Because there is another important aspect, the map info tab is far cleaner on the right. DMs and other trivia can still be hidden in the current chat, and the lobby chat is visible and always there.
Clan chat and system being requested by people to come back had others opposing it saying there is no point we now have discord, i’m 50/50 on that subject, yet blizzard brought it back. i dont know how you feel, maybe not chatting is going to be the new norm, but if you ask me i’ll say this chat discourages the chatting that we used to have by its very nature.
Its messy, and you can just ignore it. i get that its not that much of a social game as wow is but man its not an anti social game, custom games lobby chat can be hot af.
Issues with the Patch…
Player Reporting
Abusive Players aren’t being dealt with.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
Team Games sometimes still counts wins as losses.
Leaderboard fails to update and shows the wrong stats.
Team Games sometimes still counts wins as losses.
The reporting system is automated, and this basically means reports must be made from numerous people citing the same issue over multiple sessions.
I think most people these days use external services for communication and thus it is far less necessary for games to have this functionality built in. Especially in cross platform games, since PC players can’t join playstation party chats for example.