Feedback The new toolbar is terrible

You might want to work at keeping track of who's stuff you are quoting and what it is in relation to. This response would of been fine if it was way back on page 2 and directed at when I compared the Old hot bar to a swiss army knife, not in response to a my comment about over simplifying things because some found them confusing, and then trying to make it out like I was calling people stupid, and when you get called out on it try and deflect things back to a different poster entirely.

I'm sorry, but even though the new bar might be more intuitive for some by having multiple preset dual wielding slots, at the expense of limiting active slots in a sandbox building game with some action platforming on a the side, is not a good trade off. Now if the combat was more over the top than Terraria's and the focus of the game was an Action Platformer, with some sandbox building on the side, this kind of trade off would work, as the games focus would be on challenging combat related content. The funny thing is that, when people bring up that the game is not challenging enough, they get blasted with its a sandbox game, yet if people want the old hot bar because they might feel it is better suited for sandbox building, they get blasted that the game is an action platformer. As illustrated by this comment below.

So somewhere along the lines, people need to stop saying you can't have X because Starbound is genre Y and not Z or vis versa, or the style of game needs to be cleared up and pushed in one direction more clearly.

And also in response to the quote above, there is no reason to limit one to 6 active slots for building in a sandbox game either, part of why both bars should be in the game since there are two major play styles the game is trying to cater to currently. The Action Platformer, and the Sandbox building. And before you go saying you don't even need a hotbar to do a creative build and can just do it from the inventory instead, you also have to keep in mind there are some of us who want to build on the more dangerous planets for whatever reasons we may have, and in that situation we need to have access to both our combat and building supplies, and the current hot bar does not cut it in situations like that while the old bar was just fine.

Now this little bit that follows hits on a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

Even though some of the audience may indeed be children, that is no excuse for treating all of the audience like they are children. Even children don't deserve to be talked down to and made to feel like they are inferior just because they are children. Children are just as capable as adults in a lot of things, the only real differences are wisdom gained from experience, and physical stature. A child is just as capable as managing a complex system as an adult is, after all look at how many people's grandparents struggle to understand the internet, or any number of recent technological advances. So please, don't use the excuse that things need to be simpler and easier to use just so a child can use them, as that is insulting not only to the person you tell it to, but also to children as well. They can handle complex and difficult to understand concepts, it just might take longer to put it into terms they understand because they have had less time to build up an extensive vocabulary.

Edit: To include a reply to this instead of double posting:

Some of those suggestions you mentioned were brought up before the Hotbar changes even made it into unstable build, by people like @Sean Mirrsen, @Shaadaris and I. As we saw issues with the new Hotbar because it did not reach the basic perfomance levels of the old hotbar in a number of aspects of the game. By no means are we saying the old bar was perfect, but we do disagree with the tossing out of a lot of the features the old bar had that made it really useful as well.

On the last part of the critics of the new UI needing to be careful with the tone of rhetoric, some of it might come off as patronising to those who don't share our opinion on the new bar, however, the defenders of the new bar need to keep the same in mind as well as a number of their posts come off in the same way to the critics too. It goes both ways, and it is very easy for a reply to something that came off as patronizing to one side to end up patronizing as well.

 

While I have not been here to witness, since I purposely avoid forum drama whenever I can afford to, I am certain such things did happen. At some point there were enough "waves" off those events that I caught some of them over on Dwarf Fortress' Bay12 forums.

Which is hilarious, because, what is Starbound then? It can't be a building game, because the interface is designed around dual-wielding for combat. It can't be a farming simulator, because between food non-stacking and primitive mechanics, farming is a pain. It is barely a platformer, because of how imprecise the movement controls are and how little point there is in it. And apparently it's no longer even about the combat, despite having an interface designed now around dual-wielding for combat.

Problem with your viewpoint is, no matter what game Starbound ostensibly should be, unless it is something extremely unflattering to what it is being advertised as, the existing UI and control scheme does not suit it.

And for reference, MegaMan is a run-and-jump platformer with simplistic combat. So are Metroid, Ninja Gaiden, even flippin' Super Mario. Starbound... is a little bit more than that, wouldn't you agree?
(and yes those are all NES games. I'm honestly not sure if I should even bother mentioning the reasonably complex platformers, like Assault Suits Valken)

 

looking at each hotbar and what is good and what is bad about it
old one
+ versatility, it allowed you to have a very large combination of items and the ability to switch between them quickly (I didnt use they hotkeys, so not easily reaching 7-0 isnt a factor for me)
= items would automatically be placed on the hotbar because they were inventory slots, some items I liked being put there automatically (torches) some items I didnt (crafting stations)
- wasnt explained anywhere and could easily be confusing to people who didnt take the time to figure it out (you would only do that if you thought there was more going on)

new one
+ simple, you can easily see whats going on and easily switch between multiple preset weapon/item combinations
- the second set of hotbar slots isnt explained anywhere (I only know about because I was digging through the hotkeys window)

on its own, the new hotbar is fine, and if the new one was released first and the old one released later I think there would be much less complaint
the issue I have with the new one is that it isnt as versatile as the old one (I would gladly take something that can do more but is harder to use anyday)


I may be biased against the new one because it and the delay between switching items and being able to use them exists and that is the worst thing to ever exist

 

Since I'm not a dev, I can't answer this. I imagine it would be, but I have no idea how much work it would entail.

 

For what it's worth: I liked the old hotbar a lot for its flexibility, particularly with what could and couldn't be dual-wielded, as well as keeping key items out of my general population inventory. I have fairly fast hands for high-number hotbars (lots of practice from MMOs, more or less), so it worked for me pretty well.

The new hotbar immediately felt clunky and hobbled by limited slot space, and almost nothing seemed to want to be 1-handed so combination options felt extremely constricted. Not a great feeling. I got used to it, but it made me wish the old hotbar was still the setup.

Why, you might ask, did it feel so very restrictive?

Well, I just beat the game today...and only just now, after browsing the forums to figure out what caused some other bugs I'm experiencing (none of my farms have advanced in time since I beat the game, for instance), did I find out there's a second hotbar behind the X key.

I was thinking about the old hotbar, where everything pertinent was immediately visible on the screen at all times. Since it was dumbed down so much, I'd simply assumed they decided to go with six slots instead of the previous 10. I hadn't even really thought to go investigating for a swap hotbar.

I'd say calling the new hotbar "more intuitive," as its proponents have suggested several times in this thread, is...subjective, at best. To me, it definitely isn't.

 

I don't believe you or @Spiderslay3r at all about this "all we said was the emperor had no clothes on, we're being persecuted for speaking truth to power " nonsense. If you've got proof of Chucklefish whipping up a frenzied mob to pick on you for "constructive criticism", then I'd like to see it because I think you're both liars. I also haven't seen any constructive criticism? Just a bunch of clowns howling about how ruined everything is. Protip: phrases like "ascended brainfart" are not constructive.

I got the two of you confused, so I apologise for that. For the record though, I think you're both insulting people - him by banging on about "dumbing down" and you by using phrases like "so simple a rock could understand them (no offense intended here)" and I don't think either of you genuinely care about the changes to the action bar because they barely affected gameplay at all. I think you just like shouting about how the sky is falling and if it wasn't over this it would be something else equally innocuous.

As for the arguments about the new action bar being bad for building, it's no worse than the old one? You can't use those skills that only the brightest and most determined of you mastered to dual wield blocks with anything, so the only difference is you'd probably have to hit x to switch to your weapons mid-build. But surely that's no challenge to someone so bright and determined?

 

I wasn't here for the torches and pitchforks, but I'm fairly well aware of how often they were raised, through second-hand accounts. You'll have to go looking through the archived devblogs from a while back, if they even still exist. And for what little it's worth, Chucklefish did not whip up any mobs themselves, from what I gather - but they angrily pushed back at any resistance to the changes they make, regardless of how inane the changes or how constructive the criticisms, and the crowd of rabid supporters - dare I say, people like yourself? - followed through with the backlash to critics, raising their own T&P's to staunchly defend every decision Chucklefish made. The "horsetits" debacle alone is something noteworthy, despite being perhaps the silliest of every controversy I've ever heard surrounding this game. You'll have to ask someone else on the details of that, I hardly remember anything but the core concept behind it, and definitely don't have any links.

Oh, we got plenty. Starting here, and continuing here, here, here, and of course here in this thread. Plenty of people supplied ideas for improvement, necessarily interspersed with replies to incredulous questions of "why would you hate this hotbar" from, again, people like yourself. Increasingly frustrated replies, because, as I mentioned several times in this threat alone, this has been going on for a while now.

And trust me, "ascended brainfart" is me being generously polite about what I actually think of this development.

(quote necessarily out of order)

It is bad for building, when compared to the old hotbar. Qualitatively, objectively, it is worse, because it keeps half of itself hidden and away from mouse interaction, when building and decorating requires a supply of a large number of different items. Is it usable? Ultimately, yes.

But my problems with the hotbar do not stem from building. If the only thing the new hotbar did was splitting the row in half, I would have been able to manage. I would have still been against the change, but it would not end the game for me. Unfortunately, as you are no doubt aware (you should be, otherwise we haven't been quite verbose enough in our explanations to this point), it's not quite the only thing it did.

I believe you should know your place in the discussion, and keep it. Because everything you think as fact, is only your assumption. I hate to assume things, even though I am necessarily forced to in the course of the discussion. But even when I do, I do not arrogantly assume that, in this assumption I make, the only possible outcome is me being right.

What has barely affected the gameplay for you (did it? by the sound of it you never even used the old hotbar - though again, I am assuming), has caused me, for instance, to remove the game from the list of my Steam library. Because what for you is a natural, apparently, course of action, to me is anathema. This hotbar, to my mind, is analagous to playing IL-2 Sturmovik: 12946 with a NES controller. Analagous to playing StarCraft II with a DDR pad. To playing percussion on the piano. This interface is antithetic to the nature of gameplay I expect to see in Starbound, and it grinds on my will to play the game. I suffer none of what many other people do with the game, "technical issues" that prevent the game itself from launching, but all the same this one thing is as physical a barrier as any game could install into itself to prevent me from playing it.

I know I'm an outlier, I know my reaction to the change is extreme, and mostly unusual. But I am not the only one who has an axe to grind with it. Go look at the poll. As of the game's official launch, aside from people who don't care... supporters of the new hotbar are now a minority.

 

Except for the fact that items indeed occupy your inventory while hotbar'ed (which is kinda logical though, the hotbar is NOT an inventory extension, it's a hotbar), I prefer the new bar way over the old one.

 

My opinions are my own, not Chucklefish's. you were trying to insinuate that Chucklefish was the one that made pushback on the hotbar, which is ridiculous. And my opinions are not less valid because they support Chucklefish's new design. I liked horseboobs because I liked the hilarity of its design, not because Chucklefish made it. With the hotbar: I am able to play the game just fine, in both combat and non combat situations, so when I see "this is like playing Il Stumorvik II with my NES controller!", I'm not very convinced.

Saying that they will not be making changes or hardcoding the hotbar is not "angrily pushing back" on you.

You made a suggestion; I make suggestions all the time, in this game and others. And a lot of the time they don't get a response, sometimes I receive a token response, with no real confirmation as to what my words have done, a lot of the times my suggestion does not get implemented. That is no reason to throw a tantrum.

I never even heard of your poll until it got flaunted around with its results, so it's already questionable in its accuracy, as it does not count players that do not frequent the forum, which is a far larger amount of players.

So I'll just leave you with this: Either work with the changes or not. I'm going to make my own suggestion about the ui, without the grinding axe.

 

I guess we'll just have to wait and see then lol

 

Not a suggestion. There was never a suggestion, there was never even a hint of a suggestion. There was never a question of whether or not the developers are going to listen to this being phrased as a suggestion. I am past having any faith in Chucklefish, I am borderline past caring. All I am doing is drawing attention to an issue. I am doing this out of the shred of hope that I can put enough momentum behind it, that it will actually cause the developers to respond. If not with addressing the cause, then at least with an admission.

And contrary to what you might think, my issue is not with the hotbar. I have made peace with that, in a way. I am convinced I will no longer be able to play Starbound as a game that I would have liked to play, because if the hotbar was going to be fixed, it would have been fixed before release. The issue I want to draw attention to, is the reckless abandon with which Chucklefish are treating their game. Because a change like this? It's not a change anyone even remotely responsible rolls out one month from release, years into development, not letting there be preemptive feedback, and not listening to feedback post-fact. For me, the game is broken. It has been broken, intentionally. And I cannot see a reason for it.

Of course. It's not mine, but the point is correct, you haven't. Because us Nightly players had to make it; because Chucklefish didn't care to. In absence of an official poll, the only one we have is a sampling of people who have been exposed to the issue through our efforts - and be fair, discontent players been bringing up this issue everywhere relevant, including Reddit.

I already admitted I'm an outlier, my case is more pronounced than most. What to me is akin to flying a fighter plane with a D-pad and two buttons, to a less affected player is merely limiting and inconvenient. It does not make it any less of an issue, for a significant amount of people. Even if that poll up there is just a small sampling of players, it is fairly random, not biased to the best of my knowledge, does provide intermediate and "don't care" options, and the results are statistically significant. There is, at the very least, an equal split between people who would rather the new hotbar stay, and who would rather the new hotbar go, with an even more significant amount merely discontent at the particular implementation and wanting changes. That alone, indicates that Chucklefish did something very wrong. This poll should have been created by Chucklefish, before work on the new hotbar began. This entire situation, all these pages upon pages of text, could be avoided by simply a modicum of caring.

 

My intent there was not to insult anyone, but to show that the direction the new hot bar is heading is to make it so the only way one could not understand how to dual wield is to choose to not understand how to dual wield. There are a number of other similar expressions that could have been used instead, but they can come off just as or more offensive as well.

Now on the suggestions and constructive feedback that you think are lacking. From the Dev blog post.

This was before Supernorn said in the same thread that the changes were not to help with controler support as well.

Now that the bar has gone live, I can say 1 is pretty spot on, as no tutorial and there have been people coming onto the forums admiting they thought the hotbar was only 6 total pairs because they never found out the 2nd set existed. Now for others on points 2 and 3, I can't say a whole lot on others experiances, but I never have any space to experiment with new gear or use a lot of the varied support items that are situational due to never having enough space on the active bar as I don't want to play a hotbar managemnt sim or dig in my inventory every time I want a glow stim pack or a flare. They have made some steps in helping this by changing some items to 1h. There is more in the dev blog, both earlier and after, but I quoted this one because it was after I had played around with it instead of going off of initial impressions.

And as to why I may seem to get a bit terse when criticizing the new bar, is it gets old fast after multiple attempts at trying to get some to understand the new bar isn't the best thing since sliced bread, when a lot of their initial posts come off as how dare you not like the new bar or blind love of it when other posters bring up their own valid complaints about it.

There is more I could go on about, but lack of time.

 

Another thread on this just shows that it does have major issues.

I have dubbed it the badbar, and we have a 20 page thread with a poll on it on the next page.

 

All another thread shows is that some people will take any excuse to throw a massive tantrum over nothing. If you all genuinely cared about the effect it had on the game, then you'd be asking for specific improvements, instead of uninstalling the game and then typing out thousands of words of exaggeration about how it's literally the worst thing that's ever happened. But no, it's toys out of the pram time because this is more about that weird persecution complex some gamers have - "Evil Chucklefish won't listen to PUBLIC OPINION. Seriously you guys, I have a poll here where I asked 0.6% of the playerbase what they thought, being careful to word it so that the only positive option was an extreme one and the majority of results were negative or mixed! That's as conclusive as you can get!"

There's not much point in talking about it anymore to be honest. Nothing constructive is being said.

 

Lol, its not nothing, its literally the #1 fundamental thing that connects your inventory and gameplay.

Just because you are a yes man, does not invalidate any complaints about the bar. As has been said many times, and shown by a MAJORITY of posts about it, its not intuitive, its not nearly as powerful, it does not play as well, and it was never needed. So yea, you can say ".6%" of the playerbase, (which works BOTH ways btw) but even in this echo chamber of chucklefish love people have brought valid, constructive criticism time and time again. So no, until its addressed in a way that people find acceptable, you will keep seeing the complaints.

The new threads come from new people discovering the frustration behind it and being willing enough to come and post on the forums about it, not just throwing massive tantrums over nothing.

In fact, have you ever thought you might be the one out of touch? Have you read through the dev blog thread the night it was changed? how about every post in every thread on the subject? how about all of the subreddit posts about it? Nearly ALL of it is constructive criticism, with a minority of posts made in frustration, mostly replying to people like you who come in after weeks of discussion and go OMG GUYS CHUCKLEFISH IS INFALLIBLE when you really have no idea of what has been said and how the discussion has unfolded from day one. To boot, if you dont like it, you don't have to look at or post in these threads.

 

Just off the top of my head:

 

I had no problem whatsoever with the new hotbar. I don't even imagine how the fuck you can struggle with it playing starbound, and i'm not motivated enough to read the very large posts about it. Just wanted to report my feeling because this is sort of a poll if i understand.

 

And most of us feel the same way about the old one, which was far more powerful in what it could do, and worked better in every way except dual wielding pairs, which it could do differently and better in some ways even then.

Sooooooooo we are at an impasse

 

Idk , maybe we need an option for custom hotbar , the new isnt that bad , but i think the older was better for me.

 

This is truly the answer to the whole dilemma. Have an option for the classic hotbar. If they can butcher it, they can unbutcher it and add an option.