Thank you so much, Melaka. I was able to change everything.

Just to comment on 's brainstorming, I would dig a "quick fight" and "detailed fight" option.

The code I used sadly only works for the old UI. With the new UI, it doesn't work anymore and has confirmed that the old layout won't be back :(

I'll have to wait until the UI is finalised before figuring out what is possible with CustomCSS and what is within my limited skills as well.

I don't like the pre-selection either, for the reasons you've mentioned. Playing around with different weapons against opponents is pets progressing onto higher tiers often do (and I very much enjoy doing it). I'd prefer the freedom of the old UI, but I think 's visual suggestion might have some applications here. What if we've got two separate transparent boxes positioned vertically perhaps on top of the challenger's image. One has two slots for two weapons, the other is for a scroll. These boxes would work like our weapon selection box before the battle. If we drag two weapons into the first box, and one scroll for the second, those will remain our "default" attacking options until whenever we want to swap weapons. If we don't want pre-selection, or auto-selection, we can leave those boxes alone and manually select weapons like we usually do.

I don't know how feasible this is in terms of coding, but anyway, an option to choose between pre-selection and manual selection is nice.

I've been reading everyone's feedback, and rest assured I have a better understanding now of how important the visual aspect is and being able to have the images there to see the items at a glance. I'm definitely going to take this into account.

And when Jason mentioned to me about things like eyestrain, I definitely take that very seriously. I know Subeta's current layout is pretty shitty as far as accessibility goes, but I really never meant to make that worse.

Yes - there is always a reason. :) The entire battle codebase is, well, very old and very messy. As a fellow developer I guess you can understand the horror that legacy code is sometimes. For the battle interface alone, we're talking a mess of PHP, inline JS, and inline styles, some parts of which have probably been untouched for a decade or more. The codebase is also a bit of a frankenstein's monster of coding paradigms from Subeta's various life stages. There are some places where it uses an MVC-like model with decent separation of interface and functionality, there's parts that use nice template files, then there are parts where there's no separation at all and you have PHP echoing HTML and whatnot. The current battle UI is.. in a nutshell, it's complicated, and put together in such a way that it's very hard to make even small changes and know how those changes will propagate. The interface you see when you're battling is actually generated in the same file that does things like apply your weapons and pick your opponent's move.

Tl;dr - It's complex, very large, and inconsistent. I can understand, as a fellow coder, wanting to know why things gotta be the way they are. I have to ask that you put a bit of trust in me, that I at least somewhat know what I'm doing with it all :) I cannot go into detail about every decision or how the code works, but if something seems like it should be easy and yet I'm not doing it, it's probably cuz it isn't actually that easy (rip)

I do understand and I feel the same way about the battle community. Hence wanting to give it some attention. The battle UI will probably go through a lot of changes in the next... however many months... and I'll have to ask for your patience as we develop it. I can see we missed the mark on a lot of things this time, but I'm learning from the feedback I'm getting. I definitely want you to keep chiming in as we keep going. I value your thoughts. I just get a bit stressed myself when I'm reading a lot of feedback that sounds... unfriendly hahaha. It's not personal (for either of us), it's just human.

As a long long time battler, I just want to say thank you to all of you(and the others in the past) who have tirelessly worked to make battling more fun and worthwhile. Subeta has been my home for over ten years now, and you guys just never cease to impress me with your dedication.

Thank you so much.

Just here to chime in with people who aren't happy with the change. I could probably make preselected weapons work for me, but the dreaded dropdowns for scrolls make me wanna take a huge break from battling.

I think about everything I want to say has been said already in regards to not quite liking the changes so I'm probably repeating here. ;) I'm not really a battler but I do dabble and try to do BQs everyday.

When I did my BQs, this has kind of the not really involved feeling to it. Almost like there's no thought process anymore to battling thanks to the auto select, at least for those lower level challengers. While I liked it good enough for BQs I can see getting annoyed with it outside of there. I don't always use the same two weapons each turn.

I play with my browser at half screen. Everything is way too compacted. Text is running over other text making it hard for me to read. I'm another who hates seeing my pets shrunk down everywhere onsite. At a certain point it's like, why bother with the images if they're going to be scaled down to ant size?

I'll try out the pet battles again this afternoon to get the hang of the new layout.
I've been reading through all the responses on this forum to understand all the changes better.
There is a lot of useful information here to take in and understand. It will be interesting to see what this new system will lead to :).

I think what confused me the most was everything use to be displayed in the middle of the screen nice and large. Now everything is scrunched to the right of the screen and there is still a scroll bar to navigate with where it lists the battle attacks. Plus I didn't understand what the little blue arrow means over one of the battle items selected. Does it still use 2 battle weapons per turn or only one?

Training time per session is super long and not worth the +1 for a single stat in the end, and his level is still behind because I've been raising his other 4 stats, so I'd have to train level.

Okay after thinking and playing with this, I have a suggestion.

Instead of just the words in the drop box for the scrolls and potions, could it be the image of the scrolls with the words either below or hover over? Same with the potions? the image plus words?

The layout does rock, and the auto select is beautiful. Just a thought. ^_^I Love the work you both have done with the new page. It doesn't hang up as much now. Maybe once in every five battles rather than every time it calculates a win. <3

I used the UI for two sets of Battle Quests and I think that and are correct that most battles are pretty grindy and this new UI solves that. Not only that but some other battles that I was using strategy on picking and choosing each round? Bashing away with the new UI is easier and quicker even if victory takes more rounds and sometimes results in a loss and a visit to Selena.

Thanks so much for the changes!! It makes battling so much less tedious. :)

Great suggestion. Sort of like what was saying with the Neopets thing. We will definitely think this through and find a way to put the images back.

The blue arrow indicates which weapon slot of the two you have selected. You can toggle between the two slots. If you want a different weapon than the one that is pre-selected, the new weapon you choose will go in the slot with the arrow under it. If you want to unequip a weapon, you will unequip the weapon with the blue arrow over it.

Maybe once you get the level up from using all those FFs you will want to at least train health? The time doesn't really matter since it doesn't prevent you from doing anything else... and it is another stat -- even if it is a small percentage of what you add daily. Something to think about.

Meanwhile, back at the bc...

Blazed thru bqs in record time. I reordered weapons and scrolls before I went in, so it was a breeze. Even when I got to battles where I wanted to select other weapons/scrolls it was smooth and easy once I got used to the interface. It very quickly became second nature to switch weapons/scrolls. I really love the drop down menu for the scrolls because I have so many equipped. It goes much faster for me to use the menu rather than scrolling past the rows and rows and ROWS of potions and spells to hit the turn button. I am trying not to fall in love with this layout since I know it is a work in progress, but I'm really liking the ease of use.

Excited to check it out! Thanks for the updates.

okay, so i consider myself to be a fairly 'new' battler (or perhaps 'not a regular' battler would be equally as accurate), so after a cursory test all i can really do is echo what people have already covered and maybe adding in a coupla different ideas, but here goes, i'll try to be concise!

first up, jeez Bug, serious kudos for tackling such massive updates right out of the blocks! awesome work, and i can't wait to see where all this goes ❤ ok, on to those echoes... -i never really found scrolling an issue with the old UI - with any grindy battles i just zoomed out until everything i needed to click was visible on the screen at once (and it was still easy to select which weapon/scroll i needed because i had the visual cue of all the images). -i think the most frustrating thing for me is when you click the 'Fight This Opponent Again!' button and it takes you back to the page where you select the pet/weapons/scrolls. i would love it if that button actually took me straight back into a new fight, seeing as i never change pets/weapons/scroll sets (at least not at the moment, even though i just started training a secondary battle pet so this may change for me in the future). or add a new button to do this? perhaps if the selected pet is hungry/no hp then it would redirect to that selection page it goes to now? but yeah getting me back in there quicksticks without that intermediate page would pretty much guarantee my eternal devotion XD -i'm still also at the stage where i find seeing the total damage i've dealt each round hugely helpful at developing my strategies (and knowledge) so having to scroll through the commentary box is a little bothersome - maybe having just the 'Oh no! this weapon has done this!' text minimised below but keeping the total weapon stats/results visible directly under where the health bars are could be nice idk. or even just switching the 'Total damage/healing' stats from the bottom to the tops of those panels with the weapon details underneath would be fine (jeez i hope that makes sense). -i quite like how the weapon/scroll/potions selection area has been reduced in size, and i like that top box showing the weapons - perhaps we could have similar boxes/sections underneath for the scrolls and potions instead of the drop-downs? i personally don't mind the faded/greyed out images (although seeing your selected weapons again underneath seems a little pointless when they're already highlighted unless i'm missing some crucial reason why they're there?), but i love the idea of the hover for weapon stats feature! that would be super helpful mid-battle if i'm trying to figure out how i could be dealing/receiving more/less damage on someone i'm attempting to beat for the five-hundredth first time. -having the 'game over' button at the bottom feels a bit clunky to me? like, if i'm half asleep (like now) i will go through the motions of selecting all my weapons before realising what a dummy i am when i get to the bottom and remember oh yeah i KOd my opponent with my Morosbane last round farkit =.= -maybe there just needs to be a check-box for the auto-selection on the screen where you select pet/weapon/scrolls? so the overall layout could be the same for both auto/manual styles, but you can opt in/out before starting the battle so it only auto-selects stuffs when you've got that box checked. i have no idea about coding tho so i don't know if it could even work like that :P

that's all i can really pinpoint rn after only a quick few battles, but all in all the new look wouldn't put me off battling, i quite like it so far! but i feel like i have to do more now for what i could easily see at first glance before (ie scrolling down that commentary thingo and easier selection of scrolls before). so i think for me it's just a layout/design thing...

and i'm gonna leave it at that coz my mouth hurts (stupid wisdom tooth) and it's past my bedtime and i ramble when it's past my bedtime XD shit, sorry i already wrote a novel without realising ;-; i go naow. hands Bug and Purge freshly baked yo-yo cookies for all the hard work thanks again!!

Okay now I've had a chance to use the new system with my BQs...and I'm sure I'm about to repeat thoughts but my pathetic attention span will not allow me to review every post.

So the new UI is definitely more streamlined, and my BQs definitely went much fater, which will do good things for my doing them in the first place (refer to pathetic attention span). However, the issue of no scrolling isn't 100% solved on at least my computer due to the "make your turn" and "game over" button being below the wepon selections. Technically the top part of the move button pokes up high enough I can click it without scrolling down, but the game over button, below the words "game over", forces me to scroll down to click it. For some reason, being the only scrolling I have to do makes it more aggravating. If the buttons could be moved up, or at least the game over button when you aren't really needing to look at anything else, would be nice.

As for it feeling cramped, I can see that, but imo if it feels cramped to me, it's just because I'm not used to it yet. (Other users may always feel cramped who knows.) But when the new wardrobe came out, I remember feeling...eh, "agoraphobic" isn't exactly the right word but I can't think of a different one - there was a lot of space and no borders and the space felt intimidating at first. Then I got used to it and any problems I might have with it now are specifically bugs, not features. Especially when taken off guard like this, it's easy to dislike or hate something and resist getting used to it (Facebook layout changes, anyone?) but I think ultimately this is a good move forward, or at least a way better base to start off of to change for the better than the old UI.

I dunno, I feel like that would add to the clutter of the page, to make the box appear over the opponent instead on on a blank spot. I think adding the damage and healing per turn to the top of the text box like others have mentioned would be a good idea. Not being able to see how much damage I do per turn throws off what my next turn selection will be and how many rounds I think I have left before I beat an opponent. That can make the difference in some instances as to when I use what scroll and when I use what potion or a full heal. It can also hurt for boss battles, not to be able to see how much damage you are doing per turn and overall how much damage you dealt to see if you placed high enough to win a prize.

I have absolutely no objection to moving the health bar and total damage dealt plus health healed to the top at all! That would be an excellent change and much needed IMO.

My suggestion was more like having small boxes for "default" or pre-selected weapons that would last many turns, for those who would like to use certain weapons throughout the battle. However it's just something I came up with in a whim and could use some criticism/ alternative suggestion. My whole point is, yes, I completely support the ability to switch between pre-selection and manual selection. If this can neatly be achieved during battle: fantastic! If this can only be achieved before each battle, still a great solution to me.