The "Launcher" Is Located In A Very Odd And Confusing Place

[Piemanlives]

With the release of the recent patch a launcher can be seen, this launcher displays recent news, server status, patch information. All that good and useful stuff.

Bit of an issue, the launcher as it were, displays AFTER all the open videos and logos. It makes little sense to me as to why it would appear there of all places.

[Queso]

The launcher doesn't actually launch the game. It's just a convenience for when announcements need to be made or servers go down, as that section can contain more detailed information than the old "connecting..." screen could. Launcher is a bit of a misnomer in that regard.

[Squidslinger Gilder]

Then it should probably be renamed if its just a glorified load screen.

[-Anakin-]

This is how you launcher:

It's compact, helpful, and happens before the game goes full screen.



Why does pressing the play button take like 10 seconds to take me into the connecting screen?

Why is this all surrounded by grey nothing? Just have this as a window.

If the servers are down, why do I sit through the full screen logo before you tell me?

Why is the only news listed from 2005?

[Urz]

I am utterly baffled by how useless and disruptive this is.

If this is broken, it needs to be fixed. If this is working as intended, the person who planned the feature has no idea what the fuck they are doing.

[SiepeAssassina]

This is not a launcher, nor a decent pin board.
-Anakin_ posted a great example of what a launcher should be: an external application, sleek, elegant and more importantly good loking.

If you don't know how to make a launcher THEN DON'T DO IT. I couldn't care less that this is "not a launcher", this is junk.
Either REMOVE IT, or create an external (still unwanted) app that acts as GoIO's launcher.
Third option: embed in the main menu a box with news, in 16:9 screen there's tons of wasted space.

Muse, please, stop ruining your own game.

[Byron Cavendish]

I think the issue here is, once again, they did not give themselves time for us to fully test EVERY part of the new patch before release. This is the reoccurring issue Muse keeps performing. Putting these things on the dev app less than a week before scheduled release is not testing, it's a preview. The other issue is that they really haven't valued our feedback, which leads to the previous issue.

[Keyvias]

Hey Guys,

The reason we do testing a week in advance is it does give us enough time to remove a feature or rework parts of it in the given time.
I personally received no feedback on the launcher or I would've rushed it to Jerry (our database manager) and gotten it fixed.

If there's something you hate about the launcher or want improved. Send me an email about it at feedback@musegames.com. I seriously beg for feedback on all these features and I'm disappointed when I receive the hate after the fact. If you send in feedback and we decide not to change it feel free to bring on your hate and send me an email and I'll tell you why we did it. We've removed or vastly edited many features based off player feedback because you guys are pretty damn insightful.

The launcher can definitely be edited and changed, but here's the reasons I really really want to keep one.

1) You guys host awesome events and have very few places to show it off. Using a launcher it gives us the best way to put your awesome events right in front of the players. For too long many events have just been for the forum goers and many players don't even know about the Cogs, Blood and Brass, SCS, or any of the other events that have really defined the highest skill level of the game.

2)  When we got DDoSed it showed a major issue with our system. Tens of thousands of players turned on the game and got "can not connect to server." There are many people who didn't come back after seeing that especially new players who we would've loved to have in the game to become vets. Using this we can show emergency maintenance, scheduled downtime, DDoSing, or any server closing issues that come up without a player having to dig through our facebook or twitter.

Again, if there's something you don't like about it, let us know, tell me which parts bother you. Size, look, anything, I take every piece of feedback and weigh it heavily.
I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again. 
EMAIL ME

As for this forum thread, I'm not going to spend a lot of time here. I've got a lot of work to do and this isn't the best way to communicate with the community (We've got some better ways we're testing out right now.) I am definitely happy to talk to any of you about any of the changes, ideas you want shown off more/less/anywhere inbetween. As always:
EMAIL ME

[Byron Cavendish]

I'm actually with ya keyvias, I think the launcher is a great idea, because it can promote events better. I don't really care if it's before or after I start the game, but it seems to be a large criticism so it's worth considering the objections. I didn't see any issues so I didn't email.

However, I did raise concerns about the minotaur buff on the feedback forums. And no, I still don't think less than a week is the proper amount of time for public testing and feedback gathering. And no, I didn't email my concerns. I'll be blunt as to why; I think emailing is fine as a choice, but not as a requirement. I think if you have a test server, and a test server forum, it's the dev's responsibility to read the feedback there, and measure their response from that feedback as strongly as they would from an email. I don't like emailing you guys. Partially because in general I hate emailing. I also think that the emails can be disregarded easier, I know this probably isn't true 95% of the time, but that's the general view I have of emailing any customer service ever over my lifetime. And I do believe that over the course of this game's life, the devs have gone from a place of attentively listening to forum feedback to outright ignoring it, because of the negative criticisms they have seen. I think that's a bad stance, a bad behaviour, and I would prefer to see you guys gauging our feedback here as strongly as from emails. So basically, I can't be bothered to email, because I don't think it matters or would make a difference, and I know you guys don't care to make decisions based off of forum feedback, so my desire to even give feedback at all is quite limited.

Just my personal stance so you guys know why at least I don't email feedback very often.

[Byron Cavendish]

Oh one other thing Matt. You mentioned that we didn't give any feedback during the week of testing. I think the issue there is that you guys never give us any test server patch notes! So we tend to look at whatever big change or addition is being hyped, because the only details we get are from you tell us to look at. I didn't hear anything on the fireside about the launcher, and we have no patch notes to know any better! I bet a lot of guys who went on the dev app didn't think anything of it, because they either didn't know it was going in, or forgot about it.

[Piemanlives]

I second this, though I haven't been involved in the testing for a while what few times I have all I know is added is what had been discussed previously. Adding extensive test server patch notes will certainly assist us in our endeavor to help test things and provide feedback. If we don't what's been changed we can't test and examine it, and that doesn't help anyone once we realize what has and hasn't been changed the moment it hits public release.

[DJ Logicalia]

Agreed with the necessity of notes. It's really hard to give feedback on changes if we don't know exactly what those changes are

[Dev Bubbles]

@Anakin
- Press play as in press play from Steam?  Or press play from that screen?  If from the screen, it is an extra security thing we're doing. Given what happened, felt like the trade off of a little bit more wait vs extra security is acceptable.  But we can try to audit the process to see if we can make it more efficient. 
- Gray nothing is a good point.  We'll note it. 
- The full screen logo resides client side. If that is a bother, we can try to adjust it. 
- News from 2005 is a typo.  We'll fix that asap. 
- Personally I think War Thunder's UI here is a tad busy, but that's subjective on my part.  Yeah we can try to add more info and adjust layout in the next rev of design. 

It would be great if you could give us feedback earlier.  With this screen, we would have had time to make adjustments during testing. 
Thanks so much!  Howard

[Dev Bubbles]

Sure, we'll do better with test notes I agree.  But, in this case, there would have been no way you guys could have missed this.  If this is say AI commands, I get it.  But this is a screen that you could not have avoided, and you know it's new.  So not sure what to do there.  Also, of the times when you guys give us feedback, it's been usually independent of whether something is releasing or not.  It's usually the case where we get feedback on things that are not releasing as well.  So, my point is, let's do try to give feedback earlier if the goal is to help us make things better.  Thanks guys.

[DrTentacles]

And here, we see muse experiencing a psychotic break, tired of not getting feedback.

(I kid. And deeply sympathize. I'd like to do more dev-app stuff, but it's hard to find people on, and I tend to be busy Saturdays. But the lack of feedback has to be frustrating.)

So, having said that, here's my suggestions:

The launcher's not a bad idea, but traditionally, launchers happen in a "pre-game" pop-up window that doesn't fill the full boarder of the screen. If there's a way to make sure it's in a window much like


or

,

 it'll look more familiar to most players. On the familiarity note, the "play" button being on the left side is counter to every launcher linked above.


The launcher should contain recent patch notes, community events, a link to the forums, and most importantly-probably on a "splash panel," with STUFF ABOUT ALLIANCE. I've met so many players in-game who don't know the details about Alliance, and this would work as a good advertising tool, and a way to get the word out. Have a link to the bundle store, as well.

Anyway, that's my quick feedback. Again, not a bad idea, just needs improvement. Right now, it looks very unpolished, and jars the flow between launch, and game.