I'm a little confused when I read in the Gameplay Guide that Piercing damage is 100% effective against Heavy, 75% against Normal, and 50% against Light. That suggests that 20 Piercing damage is never worth more than 20 Normal damage. But the modifier "piercing" sounds to me like it ought to be at least situationally a bonus, not always a penalty.
I would be less surprised if the damage numbers were given in terms of their effectiveness against Normal, so that Piercing damage was 133% effective against Heavy, 100% against Normal, and 67% against Light.
I searched around a little for a fullscreen mode, and didn't manage to track anything down. Decided to just resize the window by dragging the corner of the client around (standard Windows 7 window resizing), and it looks like it takes the client quite a while to react to the change. I'll get very strange visual effects, like seeing an invisible window tracking behind and a significant delay before the client actually changes.
Ultimately it isn't a huge impact on the experience - just looks sloppy for a few moments while things calibrate. That said, a fullscreen mode would be really nice.
When watching replays the timer in the top center will shift when trying to increase the speed of the replays making it difficult to select the buttons.
When Client window is resized, it changes the scaling of all the elements instead of making the work area larger
As a result of this, the client's work area is always the same and it is rather small. On a regular 1080 monitor, re-sizing the Client to full screen makes everything in it uncomfortably large.
Suggestion. Make scaling of the Client and setting in Options. Make resizing of the Client window enlarge the working area (all border-bound controls move away from center, where player, match info is shown). This will allow to read the chat and look at replay info at the same time.
Not sure if feedback for hero/unit selection part of the game belongs here.
Client
Some text in the Client Window tells windows to use the text cursor, but then the text is not selectable. All the data in "My Profile" is this way.
If you are not in a party, I think the "Leave party" button should be hidden, not just disabled.
The chat window is too similar to the Client background, if you are on the "Learn" section it looks like the chat is "Game Info"
Hero/unit selection
Spell text is super tiny. The whole point of this menu is to read these to make decisions.
No stats? If anywhere there should be all the stats in the Atlaspedia it is here, maybe on hover?
The descriptions of the units are nice, but I think the icons for the abilities should be a bit bigger and thus less space for these descriptions.
The overall design for this screen I think is not the best. It's not easy to tell which units belong to which tier. This should be apparent with some kind of grouping or at least different colors/number in the bottom right.
It's not immediately obvious that there are units that are available to all heroes, maybe they should have their own section somehow?
When I clicked on the play button then on the background of the client I felt the burning rage of a thousand suns (kidding) when the find match dialog didn't close. I would have expected it to close on blur because it doesn't have an "X" button, it took a second to realize that it required clicking on the play button again.
Maybe a change in color or text of the play button would make it more obvious.
It feels very strange that hero kills are not listed after a game. This is the first stat I'd normally look at to get an idea of if I'm focus firing the right targets.
Spell text is super tiny. The whole point of this menu is to read these to make decisions.
No stats? If anywhere there should be all the stats in the Atlaspedia it is here, maybe on hover?
The descriptions of the units are nice, but I think the icons for the abilities should be a bit bigger and thus less space for these descriptions.
The overall design for this screen I think is not the best. It's not easy to tell which units belong to which tier. This should be apparent with some kind of grouping or at least different colors/number in the bottom right.
It's not immediately obvious that there are units that are available to all heroes, maybe they should have their own section somehow?
I agree with everything you're saying about the unit selection screen. The little unit cards are really hard to read. The small size of the text made it really tedious for me to read through all the units. Besides, why minimize the cool art? About half the unit card is entirely empty!
Here's a suggestion to improve it: Make the art take up the entire "card" rectangle with a small frame at the bottom containing its name and some symbols showing its basic info (aka, cost, range, type of attack, etc.). When you click on it, have its info card take up a big chunk of the screen so you can comfortably show its description and abilities..
A little thing, but during the hero picking stage, the chat is active (which is great!), but when loading starts, the chat is abruptly cut off without warning and disappears. Even if we can't chat during loading (which I would understand), it might be nice if at least the chat window would persist so we could still see the conversation. Instead of disappearing entirely during loading. Just an idea.
When chat is open, users are unable to see behind the chat.
I feel that Atlaspedia is important, but if chat is opened, it's difficult to find because it's directly behind the chat client.
Change the opacity of the chat to 75-90% to allow people to see what's going on behind the chat. I think that will encourage people to snoop around tabs more and find useful info such as Atlaspedia!
I love the client, the big chat room feels alive with ~300 users in there chatting. The @ callouts are awesome. The graphs/stats at the end of the game are very nice, and the replay system puts anything else I've seen to shame.
Atlaspedia doesn't use the entire right side of the client. Maybe don't hide stats by default, and just place them next to the unit instead of having people click to open that instead of the overview?
When looking at match history, can you show win/loss directly on each match (where it shows heroes, game time, etc)? I wanted to calculate win/loss quickly for my ego, and quickly realized that I was far too lazy to click into each individual game. Also, I'd like a 'return to match history' button on each individual match so I can do the aforementioned ego-inflation more quickly.
Whenever I am in-game and receive a skype message using default settings, or various other system messages in Windows 7, they pop up directly in front of my minimap and make play suddenly impossible. I imagine playing in full-screen mode fixes this but as windowed mode seems to be the default this really made gameplay difficult without quitting other applications of futzing with the settings.
Time stamps would be nice in the client, at least optional time stamps.
If I let my client sit for a while and come back to it then the chat log is "sheared" but I don't have a screenshot of it. Essentially it would be split along the vertical and the left side would have messages from one set of time and the right would have messages from another time.
I'm going to list the stuff I came across in the first 2 minutes of being in the test. Acer Aspire 5755G was the machine with Windows 10.
The thing that shows the splash-video, the chat etc. im calling "launcher".
When the launcher loses focus during the initial splash play (starts fullscreen, download bar on top, esc - exit notification on bottom) for example by alt-tabbing or another window getting focus the video turns black (notifications/download bar remain/progress)
On a laptop the initial window placement (1366x786) was too far up top and I wasn't really able to grab the top to pull it down
Resizing the launcher takes a long while. At first the content appears to cut off, then the window freezes and a second, less corrupted version is displayd. Finally the correct view is displayed. Resizing takes about 4-6 seconds.
In the tab "Splash Video" tab skipping forward results in akward behaviour. It turns black, seemingly continues to load but won't continue playing (light grey area expands to the right of current position). I was unable to get it to run again without restarting the launcher.
Clicking on a friends name in the list results in the profile being opened. I'd expect a chat to open rather than their profile to show. I'd argue its the more common usecase to talk to your friends instead of checking their profile (compare Starcraft 2)
At the moment the launcher overwhelms with a lot of information. Maybe put the news into a tab of their own and have the start page focus on the global chat and list of friends. Or have a newsscreen you have to pass through (compare Heroes of the Storm) - there should be no shortage of options.
Switching through chat channels feels sluggish
I'm aware most of the issues are because this is a very early version that has a different focus. I thought it worth mentioning nonetheless.
Thanks so much for having me, I'll go play the tutorial now
celphy
€: I'd expect the accept button to always be on the left of cancel (refer to windows [OK] [Cancel])
€2: The intro tutorial ends VERY abruptly and at first I thought it crashed. Focus did not return to the launcher. Once I found the launcher again I realized the win screen is only in the launcher. Smoother transition would be great.
€3: The windows feature where you drag stuff to the edges doesn't seem to work as well. Didn't know I'm using it at all until it didn't work with the launcher xD.
€4: I really like the persistent global chat. I can read up on what happened after I left and can access it from both the website and the client. Really great. Blizzard take note :P.
Hey, just wanted to bump something I wrote about progression systems before.
@TokOwa wrote:
One of the reasons I'm skeptical to a 'hard' lock on mechanics is that every player might learn things in a different order. There isn't necessarily a correct learning progression to the game, and as a result, some players might feel handicapped in a PvP game, because they were locked out of a mechanic that they otherwise were ready to tackle. Heroes of the Storm struggled with this when they level locked Talents. People who improved rapidly were unable to use optimal talent builds because they were locked out.
Progression systems are kinda like this. HotS would lock people out of good talents, likewise, Atlas locks people out of good units, and therefore they might learn quickly that they need a certain unit to counter another unit, but be locked out by the progression system. This is not fun in my opinion. I think making bad choices when you have options is alright, but making bad choices because that's the only choice you have feels really bad.
Personally, there is some joy in trying to make the most out of a sub-optimal composition, but that joy can grow old really fast.
So I am playing this on my laptop, and one issue I am having that is frustrating me is that the client is too big and I can't see/change the chat. I tried to make it smaller, but it seems like I can't. I played on the pre-alpha in May on my desktop and was not having an issue with it at the time.
Edit: nevermind after hovering my mouse over everything I was able to make it smaller
atlasrunner is cooking my machine at 170% CPU It's only a macbook air though mid 2013 1.7 GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB memory, fairly sure that's under spec. Now it's installed it's hard for me to find the system requirements anywhere - went to atlas.artillery.com and searched "System Requirements" didn't find anything.
Not sure where to put this but the text border should be darken as it is very hard to see the text over some abilities (frostfall). This made it hard to notice what the hotkey for the ability was.
Comments
I'm a little confused when I read in the Gameplay Guide that Piercing damage is 100% effective against Heavy, 75% against Normal, and 50% against Light. That suggests that 20 Piercing damage is never worth more than 20 Normal damage. But the modifier "piercing" sounds to me like it ought to be at least situationally a bonus, not always a penalty.
I would be less surprised if the damage numbers were given in terms of their effectiveness against Normal, so that Piercing damage was 133% effective against Heavy, 100% against Normal, and 67% against Light.
I searched around a little for a fullscreen mode, and didn't manage to track anything down. Decided to just resize the window by dragging the corner of the client around (standard Windows 7 window resizing), and it looks like it takes the client quite a while to react to the change. I'll get very strange visual effects, like seeing an invisible window tracking behind and a significant delay before the client actually changes.
Ultimately it isn't a huge impact on the experience - just looks sloppy for a few moments while things calibrate. That said, a fullscreen mode would be really nice.
When watching replays the timer in the top center will shift when trying to increase the speed of the replays making it difficult to select the buttons.
Not sure if feedback for hero/unit selection part of the game belongs here.
Client
Hero/unit selection
When I clicked on the play button then on the background of the client I felt the burning rage of a thousand suns (kidding) when the find match dialog didn't close. I would have expected it to close on blur because it doesn't have an "X" button, it took a second to realize that it required clicking on the play button again.
Maybe a change in color or text of the play button would make it more obvious.
It feels very strange that hero kills are not listed after a game. This is the first stat I'd normally look at to get an idea of if I'm focus firing the right targets.
I agree with everything you're saying about the unit selection screen. The little unit cards are really hard to read. The small size of the text made it really tedious for me to read through all the units. Besides, why minimize the cool art? About half the unit card is entirely empty!
Here's a suggestion to improve it: Make the art take up the entire "card" rectangle with a small frame at the bottom containing its name and some symbols showing its basic info (aka, cost, range, type of attack, etc.). When you click on it, have its info card take up a big chunk of the screen so you can comfortably show its description and abilities..
A little thing, but during the hero picking stage, the chat is active (which is great!), but when loading starts, the chat is abruptly cut off without warning and disappears. Even if we can't chat during loading (which I would understand), it might be nice if at least the chat window would persist so we could still see the conversation. Instead of disappearing entirely during loading. Just an idea.
I love the client, the big chat room feels alive with ~300 users in there chatting. The @ callouts are awesome. The graphs/stats at the end of the game are very nice, and the replay system puts anything else I've seen to shame.
Atlaspedia doesn't use the entire right side of the client. Maybe don't hide stats by default, and just place them next to the unit instead of having people click to open that instead of the overview?
When looking at match history, can you show win/loss directly on each match (where it shows heroes, game time, etc)? I wanted to calculate win/loss quickly for my ego, and quickly realized that I was far too lazy to click into each individual game. Also, I'd like a 'return to match history' button on each individual match so I can do the aforementioned ego-inflation more quickly.
Whenever I am in-game and receive a skype message using default settings, or various other system messages in Windows 7, they pop up directly in front of my minimap and make play suddenly impossible. I imagine playing in full-screen mode fixes this but as windowed mode seems to be the default this really made gameplay difficult without quitting other applications of futzing with the settings.
Time stamps would be nice in the client, at least optional time stamps.
If I let my client sit for a while and come back to it then the chat log is "sheared" but I don't have a screenshot of it. Essentially it would be split along the vertical and the left side would have messages from one set of time and the right would have messages from another time.
@Nonordon you can hover over the global or party part of the message but any whisper you can't see the time for.
I'm going to list the stuff I came across in the first 2 minutes of being in the test. Acer Aspire 5755G was the machine with Windows 10.
The thing that shows the splash-video, the chat etc. im calling "launcher".
When the launcher loses focus during the initial splash play (starts fullscreen, download bar on top, esc - exit notification on bottom) for example by alt-tabbing or another window getting focus the video turns black (notifications/download bar remain/progress)
On a laptop the initial window placement (1366x786) was too far up top and I wasn't really able to grab the top to pull it down
Resizing the launcher takes a long while. At first the content appears to cut off, then the window freezes and a second, less corrupted version is displayd. Finally the correct view is displayed. Resizing takes about 4-6 seconds.
In the tab "Splash Video" tab skipping forward results in akward behaviour. It turns black, seemingly continues to load but won't continue playing (light grey area expands to the right of current position). I was unable to get it to run again without restarting the launcher.
Clicking on a friends name in the list results in the profile being opened. I'd expect a chat to open rather than their profile to show. I'd argue its the more common usecase to talk to your friends instead of checking their profile (compare Starcraft 2)
At the moment the launcher overwhelms with a lot of information. Maybe put the news into a tab of their own and have the start page focus on the global chat and list of friends. Or have a newsscreen you have to pass through (compare Heroes of the Storm) - there should be no shortage of options.
Switching through chat channels feels sluggish
I'm aware most of the issues are because this is a very early version that has a different focus. I thought it worth mentioning nonetheless.
Thanks so much for having me, I'll go play the tutorial now
celphy
€: I'd expect the accept button to always be on the left of cancel (refer to windows [OK] [Cancel])
€2: The intro tutorial ends VERY abruptly and at first I thought it crashed. Focus did not return to the launcher. Once I found the launcher again I realized the win screen is only in the launcher. Smoother transition would be great.
€3: The windows feature where you drag stuff to the edges doesn't seem to work as well. Didn't know I'm using it at all until it didn't work with the launcher xD.
€4: I really like the persistent global chat. I can read up on what happened after I left and can access it from both the website and the client. Really great. Blizzard take note :P.
So, One of the few Mac-users here.
When opening the game for the first time. Gatekeeper will block the game because the 'developer's identity could not be confirmed'
Easy to circumvent (open with ctrl+click), but I might imagine future players to not know this trick.
Suggestion would be to register as a developer at Apple (I don't know the process for Mac Apps though).
Hey, just wanted to bump something I wrote about progression systems before.
Progression systems are kinda like this. HotS would lock people out of good talents, likewise, Atlas locks people out of good units, and therefore they might learn quickly that they need a certain unit to counter another unit, but be locked out by the progression system. This is not fun in my opinion. I think making bad choices when you have options is alright, but making bad choices because that's the only choice you have feels really bad.
Personally, there is some joy in trying to make the most out of a sub-optimal composition, but that joy can grow old really fast.
So I am playing this on my laptop, and one issue I am having that is frustrating me is that the client is too big and I can't see/change the chat. I tried to make it smaller, but it seems like I can't. I played on the pre-alpha in May on my desktop and was not having an issue with it at the time.
Edit: nevermind after hovering my mouse over everything I was able to make it smaller
on mac I couldn't move my cursor outside of the window to make it full screen, couldn't access the menu items.
when playing the intro video it seemed to be a two item playlist with the same item on it twice so repeated playing after the first watch.
atlasrunner is cooking my machine at 170% CPU It's only a macbook air though mid 2013 1.7 GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB memory, fairly sure that's under spec. Now it's installed it's hard for me to find the system requirements anywhere - went to atlas.artillery.com and searched "System Requirements" didn't find anything.
not really sure where this should go, but is the option to change your username ever going to be added?
Not sure where to put this but the text border should be darken as it is very hard to see the text over some abilities (frostfall). This made it hard to notice what the hotkey for the ability was.