The thing about design is that in practice it doesn't matter what the math says. In practice, the only thing that matters is psychology. How it changes the way the experience feels to people. I think people like having a choice, it feels good to not be forced into it if you find it visually confusing or whatever else. Visually and functionally the dropdowns did not feel that sophisticated, they didn't feel easy to use so this update feels nicer to a lot of people because of this and because they can see the pictures again. I guess what I'm saying is that I judged it to be worth it despite that math, to give people the choice and as a compromise for those who really hated the dropdown, really hated preselection, really hated not having images, etc. Because I wanted everyone to feel and know that they were being taken into account, so it was worth the work for me.

Yeah those would be great changes, but I don't foresee myself getting to them for a while unfortunately. When I revamp the entire battle backend, maybe :P

Listen...

As part of the update for today, I wanted to move the total damage/total healing section to the top. That was all I wanted to do. What I discovered was that the code that generates the battle commentary is very convoluted, difficult to understand, difficult to change - so much so that even the simple task of moving the total damage/healing to the top rather than bottom was not feasible to accomplish by the timeline we wanted for this update.

I definitely want to address this, but I would need to sit down for a while probably and figure out how the battle backend code works. But right now I am concentrating mostly on changes to the front-end, and the battle back-end is enough of a behemoth that I don't really want to touch it just yet...

Battling feels 1000% more tedious today than it did yesterday. I'm not sure you realize the subtle perfection you had created in the first iteration, and I mean that as the highest form of a compliment towards the design. I battled more in the last week than I had the previous 5 months.

It feels so much more tedious because I either don't use a scroll and increase my DPS significantly. Or I drop my DPS significantly and add a bunch of tedious mouse clicks in by clicking a scroll. The math behind the changes explains why it feels so much crappier.

I understand , and while it's not immediate necessary, it could probably be worth it in the end. If you take it into consideration during the revamp of the battle back-end, I'll be happy :)

Since I am totally out of the loop with how even the simplest of code works, I take your word for it, so all updates you've made on the front-end are really appreciated, and I feel like the current way the battle UI is at the moment is great (for me at least)!

Possible bug: Auto-selection was listed as off by default for me the first time I tried it out, but it still auto-selected weapons in my first battle. I had to toggle it on and off again to get it to actually turn off for real. Did this happen for anyone else?

It's nice to have the scroll images back, but I find the super narrow/tall scroll box awkward. I still think the best solution is to acknowledge that you can't compactly fit everything on the page as is, and to use a pop-up to display scroll and potion choices. Yes, it's an extra click because you'd have to start by opening the pop-up, but then you see everything laid out clearly. I'd find that so much faster than trying to scroll through the list we have now, where you only see ~2 options at a time and you have to be careful not to overshoot your target if you've got a lot of stuff equipped.

Well I have some good news for you (cuz it sounds like the lack of scroll preselection is the number one thing you're complaining about?) I had a sort of epiphany about implementing it back, like I honestly did think it would take me hours, but actually I think I just did it. I'm still testing it out but if it's all good then I can push that change very soon. Ngl I'm a bit embarrassed that I made such a big deal out of it.

Finally, I already explained I won't be removing the images. However, you can still hide the images for yourself. Here's some customCSS that should do the trick:

.spell-choice>img{display:none!important;}

Without the images, many more of your scrolls should fit in the box. If you need my help with any other customCSS, like to make the font-size bigger, make it change background-color on hover or anything just let me know. I gave these their own classes (.spell-choice) so it should be very easy to give them custom styles to suit your needs, while other people can still have their needs taken into account :)

I'm definitely going to take it into account when I get to that part of the code, don't worry ^^

Thank you , and for everything you've done ❤️

Thank you, ! ❤

Just took a quick look at the change and it turned out the way I feared what it meant.

This is even worse than the drop down, in which I at least could see all the equipped scrolls in one glance (potions as well, but I hardly use any of those)

You and Bug mentioned you would consider full width layout again, with a normal horizontal row for scrolls. I think it is necessary to see all options at once, not need to keep scrolling up and down, to see, what you (still) have and choose.

The other day I had 20 or so scrolls equipped - potions always are over 30 different ones.

I repeat, with the old UI I had to do a single scroll down, or if I didn't care about the text, just use the end key, this new way requires far more "work" and time scrolling and clicking and is less clearly arranged. Having all three attack options underneath each other without the text inbetween would make sense, though.

If in full width you gave every field its own box someone could definitely (like on other choice scroll boxes)come up with custom CSS for each single one to be closed or hidden to everybody's liking. So if someone wants to see everything fully displayed, they could just as others, who want to hide/close one or all options bare the weapons.

I don't know, if you only put this there for initial clarification now or if it was intended to stay: The whole Preselection Settings text shouldn't be there on the page, just one row with the checking option. Maybe make the explanation text a hover (or a dropdown :-) )

Woot!

I loved my Hewlett Packard reverse polish calculator and would program that puppy to do all sortsa things. So my "feels" for the pre-select kinda battling is all warm 'n' fuzzy 'n' stuff.

Thank you for the changes to the UI! I understand you're still making changes here and there to it, but the ability to turn pre-selection off helps me a ton! Thank you so much for that.

I'm not sure if the battle UI would stay this way (two-column layout) or you're still thinking about a full-width layout, however I can live happily with this one in the meantime. Thank you so much for going through all the trouble to make things work for us.

From my discussions with (who has the final say in all decisions, and whose judgment I trust more than my own for battle-related things tbh) it sounds like we're not planning to return to a full-width single-column layout.

A few posts up I posted a customCSS you can use to hide the images that might make the scroll selection nicer for you because you'll see more options at once in the box. We are probably not going to return to a single-column full-width layout, from what I understand. In any case, we are not returning to a dropdown menu for scrolls or anything that doesn't include the images. Please use the customCSS I provided if you want to hide the images.

I was just thinking maybe put the preselection text in a hover, but I'm going to just put it off for now because that page isn't a focus right now. It will get its own revamp in the near future and we can talk about it more now. For now the preselection text is there for all the people who do not read these forum posts and thus can use the explanation. I don't want people to be confused.

I am sooo grateful, whenever I find someone, who shares my views.

Then I feel less like a derp, who seems to be complaining most of the time :-)

I was more thinking along the line for the pet choice CSS, where Maskros made a CSS, so we won't have to scroll, to see all eligible pets on the choose your sets page. The box layout would of course have to be horizontal to work, not vertical.

And it's a crying shame, you are most probably not reverting to full width. Which I cannot understand - the way I see it, it would be a ton more space and time efficient. Also like reading left to right better than up to down ;-)

Yes, I had that happen in the very first battle that I tried too, but I thought it was because I selected to battle with defaults and it therefore skipped the page where the option is displayed.

Edit: Bug, you are too fast! Your fixing stuff faster than I can post them.

Thank you for letting us turn auto select on and off. This makes me very happy. I look forward to scroll and potion stacking and damage/healing being at the top.

Only addition I'd like to see is for the scroll selection to be sticky. So it remembers the scroll I picked on the last move and stays on that until I click a different scroll or run out of single use scrolls of that kind.

I actually have less scrolling with this version. The See Result button is bit higher up so I don't have to scroll down to it. Could you remove the Game Over part? It's redundant since you have to click See Result and that takes you to the result of the battle. I think people can figure out that the game is over without that lol.

I'm really enjoying seeing new posts on important battle threads and updates to the BC. It makes me login and appreciate the site more.

Popping back in to reiterate that I love scrolls and weapons being auto-selected. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's a billion times better than not having it! Will test out the changes shortly.

They already added it back in. You can now toggle it on or off on the challenger page. Preselection Settings If preselection is turned on, the battle interface will preselect the first two weapons and first scroll in your set on each turn. This setting will be remembered by your browser (so be aware that it may be reset if you change browsers or clear your cache.) Preselection is currently ON. Click here to turn it OFF.

So I tried the CSS For the dumb pets it works better with the spells than the drop down, because I don't have to open anything. Tiny text size, though. I bet that could be enlarged, but then they again wouldn't fit. Maybe, when you introduce stacking, even long lists of scrolls will fit into that box, but of course it will still be missing the "colour code" easy overview.

Why are you so against displaying everything openly and fullsize in a proper box like the weapons and like it used to be? Why are you so intent on making it harder and less clearly visible? I don't understand that. Scrolls are enormously important. Even more for weaker pets, who can't one-shoot most everything. Just imagine you would treat the weapons like the spells. Would you like that? Having to scroll for your weapons on every turn? Or remove their images?

Heh, I edited my post ASAP when I realised I hadn't read through all the posts. XD My bad. Thanks though!