Text is stolen from Astral_Codex's post on the EN forum, but i agree with every word, so lets post this here too.
Alternative title: Gameforge Devs and the Terrible, Horrible, No good, Very Bad UI update.
Version 11.15.0 just game out, and is probably -the worst- update in terms of player experience.
We can divide the updates into several categories:
- Bugfixes. These are always welcome, I guess.
- Downgrades to previously existing standard add-on or web UI functionality. All major add-ons are broken, and their functionality is at best replaced with a second-rate imitation (though most are simply missing,). For example, the new espionage interface tries to, mimic AGR's spy table, but for some godforesaken reason removes the expanded messages component entirely (and does not even give the user the option to turn it off). But there's a ton of add-on functionality that just doesn't exist in the game version. The <meta> tags are missing a lot of information that is necessary for add-ons to function in principle. The game depends on add-on developers, but this update shows so little respect for their work that I doubt any add-on developer will feel much desire to actually work on fixing their add-ons following this update. Of the updates, "Fixed several cases in which tooltips did not look correct." is a hilariously relevant comment to include here, given that the tooltips are generally made worse in this update.
- Unnecessary graphics changes for the changes' sake. To put it simply: the new UI is terrible. Moons in galaxy look terrible. The new espionage messages obscure whether or not the target is a moon or a planet. The spy table looks terrible. The new buttons added to the game are all of ugly, unintuitive, and unreadable. Most impressively, all of these elements are downgrades to previously existing designs already in OGame, suggesting that there was an active decision to spend development effort on these graphical changes.
I'm happy that the bugs are finally being fixed. But putting the necessary bugfixes aside, every other non-bugfix change makes the game worse. I don't have time to go into too much detail on all the examples, but anyone halfway competent can notice a bunch of issues while trying to play the Game. I'd recommend the devs try fleeting using v11.15.0 as opposed to an earlier version where AGR still worked. To a give a sense of how serious these problems are, this update has basically forced me to go into vacation mode in the near term, as the game is simply unplayable.
Despite all of these issues being raised in feedback provided to Gameforge during the PTS, the update was still somehow pushed to all live servers. The natural conclusion is that this piece of feedback is also just going to be ignored.
