I have 60 level 70 characters on my 1st account. 25 are on my main realm, then 11, 10, 4, 3, 3, 3, and 1 on other realms.
I have a specific realm for horde characters as I main alliance and don’t want to mix both factions together in one list.
My characters have identical names on each realm. All my rogues are named Roguinaa. All my druids Rogudruid. Some of my older characters have symbols in their names, like Rogûínàá.
The problem:
With the introduction of the new login screen, all your characters on your entire account appear in one list. All mixed together. Horde, Alliance, Realms, it’s all mixed up. Try and sort it? Good chance it resets the next time you log in. This has happened to me like 3 times, and you can only imagine how long it takes to sort 60 characters by faction and realm.
The search function is great! But, you cannot search by realm name, and if I look for my character names, 10 Rogudruids show up, and I have to hover over each one to find the one that’s on my main realm. The search function also doesn’t help if your character names have symbols, and you suck at remembering them. I basically have to scroll through my entire list to find a character like Rogûínàá.
It’s basically a mixed mess that had been organized before. And I can’t organize it like this. As someone with undiagnosed OCD, it makes logging in a horrendous experience. Sure the campfire screen is nice, but that’s only 4 out of 60. The rest of my characters are a pain to find.
Possible solutions:
Have realms be seperated again. To do anything like name changes, you have to switch realms eitherway, so why do we keep all those characters in one list then? Allow the campfire scene to be crossrealm, and have everything else be realm-based. This would be my prefered solution.
Add Folders. Let us sort characters into neat folders we can pin to the top of our character list, and let them be customizable. Some people would prefer folders based on realm, others by class, or faction. Having a folder labeled ‘‘Horde’’ and adding all my horde characters into that would already help a ton.
Add spaces between realms. Have your currently selected realm appear at the top of the list, then add a space between it with the next realms name, and continue the list with the characters from that realm. I wouldn’t prefer this option, but it is a solution.
If I were designing it I’d have the favourites at the top which can be from any server. It could be disabled/hidden at the press of a button. Below that would be the character list for your current server, same as always. Below that, or maybe even accessible via a button on screen, would be an expandable list of all your characters from other realm. All divided into collapsable groups based on server. And of course search and filter functions for all of it!
One thing I noted was that when you log onto the character screen, up top there is a menu and an option to bring up the list of realms I have characters on. Switching to one of those actively really does nothing, other than to potentially make it a little quickly to log onto characters on that realm.
So why not put an option in there at the same time? Give people the option to filter characters on the main list by one of those realm options. That at least would help if I decided, say, to play on my Horde toons, which are primarily on one server. And if there was another option - to choose the Faction, that would further refine it.
I mean, if that menu option there anymore, why not make good use of it?
Blizz needs to implement some sort of folder hierarchical creation system that we can put characters in. One giant list is beyond stupid.
Also the UI needs to actually remember the state of collapsed and expanded folders. For example the current “Favorites” folder always resets to expanded by default. For those of us who have already abandoned the new login screen due to how bad it is, It’s extremely annoying to have to scroll past a giant blank screen to get to your characters further down.
The filtering, sorting and grouping all needs to be updated. I basically only play one character but I can definitely see how much of a headache it is.
this new character screen ui is annoying. i to have a ton of characters. in fact i am just about capped on 6 accounts. i play both horde and alliance on multiple multiple realms. there are many toons that share the same name and are even of the same race that are on different realms. now they are all jumbled together on 1 list. it is horrible.
they need to fix this.
EDIT
to further elaborate. i tried to give this a chance and make it work. so on 6 of my accounts i went down the list and carefully and diligently placed all my toons in order from most played realm to least and then within that most played toons to least so i could at least grasp it to my own understanding. took around 4 hours. guess what? lol logged back into the 1st account and they were all jumbled again LOL. broken is broken. fix please!
I’m a database guy and having sort orders is just basic practice when I’m building reports or procedures (knowing full well the applications also can override and should do it) for end point applicants to pull data from with the idea of making it human-readable unless otherwise specified.
As someone who also has a massive alt army, I can only imagine it is sorting by some kind of invisible to us database key ID because otherwise the sort order makes no actual sense.
At a bare minimum, I would’ve had prebuilt buttons to sort by alphabetical order, level, and class (and if level or class, the secondary sort would be alphabetical).
For those who claim UI changes often don’t stick. I’m not 100%, but I largely think this is due to not properly logging out. A lot of things have a behind the scenes function that triggers when “gracefully” logging out vs when it abruptly logs out…so hitting log out and waiting out the timer (if not in a rested area) vs just hitting exit game or alt + f4ing can potentially make the difference.
The point of that is so you can still choose a realm to create a character on.
Really the weird pointless thing is the collapsible warband character list. You collapse it and… nothing. Why is it collapsible? Why is it not that we collapse it to hide it and just see the old standard realm character screen?
Honestly I don’t think they gave this new screen a moment of thought beyond the campfire thing. I’m surprised they even have a search bar.
I have to admit, with curiosity, not hate, I find it weird when people have the same name used for characters over several servers. Just wondering why instead of just making new names, even names with differently spelling, but why a bunch with the same exact name? What purpose?
That said, I have no major issues with the new list, EXCEPT I had one horde server and one alliance server and I don’t care for having them all in the same list. I went through and sorted them all so it’s all of my alliance first in their usual order, then all of my horde in their usual order, but still goofy to have to scroll all the way down to see all of my horde.
I was really hoping we’d keep them separate, and then I could have four alliance around the campire and four horde around their own campfire, but alas it was not meant to be. Maybe in the future we’ll get multiple campfire scenes we can set up for multiple groups of characters, I hope.
I get liking names, but why would you want a bunch of the same one on different servers? What is the benefit or how is it useful, instead of just using a different name? Just curious…I’ve never used the same name on anything I’ve ever done.
For me the cases where UI changes don’t stick don’t even have to involve logging out. I can change two or three hotkeys when changing talents, but after porting to another zone my hotkeys suddenly switch back to how they were. Making changes and zoning sometimes has to be done three or four times before the changes actually stick.
The times I don’t let the game properly log out are mostly limited to times when it locks up and the entire game becomes unresponsive. Thankfully those are rare.
The favorites/“warband” character select screen loads much slower for me than the older style of one character on the screen. I would be satisfied if I could keep favorites empty and have it remember my request to minimize the favorites box. I don’t have many characters.
Why do you think it should be useful or convenient to have to make up new names on different servers? So all your characters would have different names, many with alt characters, and you’d be staring at a completely undifferentiated list.
This is similar to my situation. I have 4 subaccounts, so I have four lists. I like it better than it was before. I have characters on four servers, with anywhere between 19 and 27 per server on each subaccount. This new update made navigating these various servers way easier, and I am even playing characters that I often forgot about (the four on the WarcraftPets guild Madoran server, two which are now level 70).
I also would love to see more options. While it works better for me, I can see how it is worse for others. Also, it would be fun to be able to create additional Warcamp scenes for different groups of characters (Horde mains, Alliance mains, leveling group, misfits, etc). I agree that there also needs to be better automatic sorting and filtering options, to include sort by level, sort by name, filter by realm, filter by level range, etc.
