I’m gonna drop my post from another thread in here for my thoughts on the new character select screen. Honestly, there’s enough issues with it where people need to keep making noise. Blizzard needs to do better.
We currently have all of our characters thrown out in front of us and then told we can’t use x service, y feature, or change z setting because the realm selection is incorrect.
Blizzard literally has an article out to explain how to manually change realms to be able to use character services. This is insane. They KNOW it doesn’t make sense. If they feel the need to have to explain their UI in a blog post, it should have never gone live.
They have multiple features that do NOT work cleanly with a consolidated character list, so why did they push it forward? Yes, everything technically works, but it’s wildly unintuitive (again, they have an article out to guide people, because it’s not intuitive and they KNOW it’s not intuitive).
Addon Settings:
This is still managed on a per-server basis. You have to manually choose your active server, change the settings, choose the next server, and so on. This doesn’t affect a ton of people as I’d imagine most people run with all of their addons enabled regardless of server, but I noticed it come up a few times last night and this morning when talking about the updated Character Select screen. The new screen implies it’s a global setting - but it is not.
Gear Update:
Similarly, this feature does not function unless you manually go in and change your realm to match the character you want to use the feature on, despite the character being listed right in front of you with a big colored “GEAR UPDATE” flag on it.
Character Services:
Much like Gear update, but worse, since these are paid services. These should be the MOST intuitive and they aren’t. If they have to put out on article explaining how to switch your active realm because the UI isn’t functioning in a way that handles this for you when selecting a character, there is an obvious design flaw.
In addition to all of this, the new consolidated character list is HORRIBLE for general organizational purposes.
Many people, myself included, organize their characters by server for a reason. It’s SO much less cluttered to have, say, My Alliance on one realm, my Horde on another, and my Twinks on another.
This is by far the largest issue for me. I HATE my character select screen now. I spent hundreds of dollars on transfers to get it how I wanted it. Now everything is forced back together, which is what I spent money to fix.
If Blizzard want to have a singular global list, fine, but…
Fix the features that don't work with it, and give us organizational tools to replace the ones we've just had taken away.
If that means letting us make our own groups (ala favorites), awesome. If that just means sorting our characters by Realm with collapsible Realm Headers, that’s fine too. Just something to let us maintain the organization we USED to have. Moving characters up and down a massive list is not good enough.
I want to be very clear that “sort by realm” without collapsible headers is also not good enough. I paid something like $200 specifically to transfer several characters to another realm so I wouldn’t have them cluttering my normal endgame characters. They’re their own thing and I wanted them to be visually separated. Having them just clustered but not visually separated is not enough.
I really hope they do something. Warbands are great. Account Wide QoL is great. Favorites and the little Camp thing are… neat flavor, at least. That’s why I never posted about Warbands before. It all seemed totally fine.
Until I logged in last night and saw how they handled it.
They didn’t have to do this, but now that they have, they need to make it work.
Hopefully quickly.
