Feedback and Suggestions - Quality of Experience in PoE - Forum

I am playing PoE for more than two years now and still having a lot of fun.
However there is and was always a grain of salt, when it comes to Quality of Experience.
My impression is that GGG is always open to new ideas, so my idea is to increase investments on Quality of Experience to improve the overall satisfaction of all users. I know that GGG is always interested in users' feedback, which is a good start, but maybe you want to be more proactive and structured on this topic. In the best case, you already use some form of Quality of Experience assurance. In any case, there is room for improvement. Please let me explain how and why.

What is Quality of Experience?

Spoiler

Quality of Experience (QoE, less frequently QoX or QX) is a measure of the delight or annoyance of a customer's experiences with a service (e.g., web browsing, phone call, TV broadcast). Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_experience

Please let me give some examples, why Quality of Experience is relevant to PoE.

Usage of the Bestiary in the Bestiary League.

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There are many things to mention. First of all, the numbers of beast caught and recipes using this beast on different pages are located on difference pages. The release didn't contain searching. There is a page showing all captured beast in a semi-ordered listing looking like a dump of the object storing all beast originally used by the coders for debugging. All these have in common that there was little to no understanding on how users would actually interact with this and for what reasons.

usage of the Chat.

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I know that the chat already is an improved version of what it was originally, but still, it does not feature much of what nay basic chat client features. Choosing channels by using exceptional characters in the beginning of every message was great in the early days of the Internet. To anyone not being an engineer of that age, it feels way out of place, and even being one of those, it feels unnecessary and outdated. Rotating between different chats could be done in many ways but not using initial sequencing for the parser. Also copying stuff from the chat and managing chats is quite difficult. Most games today have fully functional chat frames that can be sized and moved around freely on UI. Might be hard to add without rewriting the UI but replacing the manual encoding of chat channels in messages should be possible without full rewrite (and if not, full rewrite is highly recommended to introduce better modular design.

Interaction with inventory and stashes.

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Right click = Pick up
Left click = Use
Right click + Shift = Pick up a selected number
Right click + Ctrl = Transfer between inventory and stash
Right click + Ctrl + Alt = Post in open chat
I always wonder why this is designed such complicated. How about contextualising right click? at least with open inventory and stash the option with Ctrl could be avioded and instead could be used for posting in chat. Also I wonder why there is a timeout when entering the number for "pick up a selected number". This timeout maybe considered to be smart in a technical way but it is not very intuitive nor comfortable when entering number not quick enough.

Loot assignment options.

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I am pretty sure that PoE was initially designed without this feature and that it was added later. The option "permanent" only works if loot drops on screen and no member of the party leaves the map. This is fare from being permanent. I don't know if it is by design or due to technical limitations, but this is not, what people expect from being permanent. Maybe you should rename it or implement it to be permanent. UI should be follow common understanding of language and not the terms developer invent to describe there ideas more briefly. The term "permanent" creates an user expectation that cannot be satisfied since there is no permanent loot assignment. On the other hand, the term "permanent" reminds the user on this concept and let her think about how it will be if there would be permanent loot assignment. Using the term "long" in conjunction with the already used term "short" would be a better naming

And there are much more examples to find in the forums.

Actually it is scientifically well understood that Quality of Experience makes a hugh difference if users accept technical designs or not. Many great ideas were rejected because nobody thinks that it feels comfortable/useful to use it in reality.
This happened with Bestiary League. The whole league felt like an attached feature not fitting with the rest of the game. Usage of the Bestiary described above is a good example to explain why it didn't work out well. I still think that Bestiary was a great idea but its execution lacked of considering Quality of Experience so it got rejected quickly.

The bad thing about rejection due to bad Quality of Experience is that the users start to ask themselves if the developer every tried it herself before releasing it. This is because it feels so bad to use that the user can't imaging that someone else consider it to be feeling good. In such a case, it doesn't matter whether it was tested by the developer or not. Actually the developer usually thinks that it feels great to use because he designed it the way he likes it.

There is a big difference between why a developer likes a design and why a user likes a design. A developer is much more connected to the technical concept behind the UI. She maybe like it, if the design is technically responsive and coded efficiently. The user maybe likes it more if the design is intuitive to use and responsive in the gameplay-wise way.

Often it is about the convergence of the actions taken by the user with the responses given to the user.
For example, a user want to do beast crafting requiring a specific combination of beast. Then it is for sure important so see if he has the required beast. However, beast crafting is usually done multiple times in a row due to random outcome. In this case, it is also important to see how often a recipe can be used. Current design obviously supports to show if crafting is possible but fails on showing how often. Even if the complexity of required resources (i.e. beasts) would be pretty simple (e.g. only a single type of resource) the user feels uncomfortable with not showing the number of available applications. It can be compared with removing all numbers from currency stash and let the play guess how many of each item is left. obviously nobody would like that. But why should anybody like that there are no numbers next to the recipes in the Bestiary? I think you get the idea. :)

I really like the way, GGG try out new things and evolve PoE over the years. Maybe improving the Quality of Experience can make the difference for futures releases. I would love to see more visible actions on improving the Quality of Experience making PoE even more enjoyable and helping new ideas to get a better exceptance rate.

Thank you for reading and having fun developing/playing the game. :)

Let's explore new playstyles - Play it your own way, not just like the others.
Quality management is one of the most underrated success factors in every business...

Last bumped on May 8, 2018, 12:14:12 PM

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