Archived Post
09-01-2009, 04:12 PM
Since the old posts have all been archived, I figured I would repost this here in the hopes of inspiring all the new people to get the discussion going. For anyone tired of the spamming, this will be the last time I post it. If you have an opinion on the topic please feel free to discuss it here. I'm sure any bit of info can help the developers and other players.
Some updates from the previous thread: There were a few posts that mentioned that Cryptic was planning a number of UI customization features, though less than I was hoping for. There is a WoW UI developer working on something UI related for CO and STO.
Previous Thread: http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?t=41301
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Sorry for the wordy post, but this issue is not simple to present. I would certainly love a response from someone on the development team, as I believe this is a very important question for the community. The potential benefits of the topic of this discussion could have far reaching effects, and may make the difference between Champions netting no more than a few hundred thousand players, and many, many millions.
I'm sure this question has been asked before, though I could not find it with a basic search. However, I noticed that Champions does not have a very robust user interface customization system. After a bit of time in one of the mil city instance chats, I found that the general consensus was that it would not be happening. I was wondering if that was the case, and if so I am extremely interested as to why this decision was made.
I believe, with plenty of evidence to support my view, that one of the reasons that WoW became so popular with the online community is their Lua UI API. This allowed for the existance of entire open source development communities, all focused entirely on improving the WoW experience, often despite Blizzard's best efforts to the contrary. Forcing users to utilize the same UI, no matter how polished, is likely to turn off a lot of players coming from WoW, which would be unfortunate, because this game has enormous potential. Additionally, the more advanced power user crowd will lose interest once they have progressed through enough of the content. If champions was to export an even more robust UI API than WoW, this fraction of the market would remain, and would be an amazing driving force that could recruit hundreds of thousands, if not millions of players, either through recruitment (Never under-estimate the power of a friend of a friend of a friend that is a computer guru), or by designing an add-on that provides amazing functionality.
To support my case, I bring forward a few of the usual suspects that were driven to new highs by addons; First thing that comes to mind is Firefox, which I, and many others, are using to post on these forums (How many addons do you have installed?), Half-Life (Counter-Strike, TF, and so many others. Some of these have developed into games in their own right), ******** 3 (DotA has spawned an entirely new genre), and of course WoW.
Of course the time investment on something of this scale would be quite significant. By personal experience, such a project will likely take on the order of hundreds of developer hours. However, as explained earlier, the benefits would not only outweigh, but flat out decimate the costs. Since the technical challenge is not likely to be as complex as many other features of the game, this is something that could even be contracted out. Of course if I'm blind and such a system is in the works, then feel free to ignore this post, or even call me stupid and correct me. I would be that much happier for it . However, if there are no plans then I would love to discuss the idea, and present more arguments in support of it.
If you have more questions, or want to discuss anything, please reply, message me, or contact me by email or gtalk at TikiTDO@gmail.com
Some updates from the previous thread: There were a few posts that mentioned that Cryptic was planning a number of UI customization features, though less than I was hoping for. There is a WoW UI developer working on something UI related for CO and STO.
Previous Thread: http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?t=41301
---
Sorry for the wordy post, but this issue is not simple to present. I would certainly love a response from someone on the development team, as I believe this is a very important question for the community. The potential benefits of the topic of this discussion could have far reaching effects, and may make the difference between Champions netting no more than a few hundred thousand players, and many, many millions.
I'm sure this question has been asked before, though I could not find it with a basic search. However, I noticed that Champions does not have a very robust user interface customization system. After a bit of time in one of the mil city instance chats, I found that the general consensus was that it would not be happening. I was wondering if that was the case, and if so I am extremely interested as to why this decision was made.
I believe, with plenty of evidence to support my view, that one of the reasons that WoW became so popular with the online community is their Lua UI API. This allowed for the existance of entire open source development communities, all focused entirely on improving the WoW experience, often despite Blizzard's best efforts to the contrary. Forcing users to utilize the same UI, no matter how polished, is likely to turn off a lot of players coming from WoW, which would be unfortunate, because this game has enormous potential. Additionally, the more advanced power user crowd will lose interest once they have progressed through enough of the content. If champions was to export an even more robust UI API than WoW, this fraction of the market would remain, and would be an amazing driving force that could recruit hundreds of thousands, if not millions of players, either through recruitment (Never under-estimate the power of a friend of a friend of a friend that is a computer guru), or by designing an add-on that provides amazing functionality.
To support my case, I bring forward a few of the usual suspects that were driven to new highs by addons; First thing that comes to mind is Firefox, which I, and many others, are using to post on these forums (How many addons do you have installed?), Half-Life (Counter-Strike, TF, and so many others. Some of these have developed into games in their own right), ******** 3 (DotA has spawned an entirely new genre), and of course WoW.
Of course the time investment on something of this scale would be quite significant. By personal experience, such a project will likely take on the order of hundreds of developer hours. However, as explained earlier, the benefits would not only outweigh, but flat out decimate the costs. Since the technical challenge is not likely to be as complex as many other features of the game, this is something that could even be contracted out. Of course if I'm blind and such a system is in the works, then feel free to ignore this post, or even call me stupid and correct me. I would be that much happier for it . However, if there are no plans then I would love to discuss the idea, and present more arguments in support of it.
If you have more questions, or want to discuss anything, please reply, message me, or contact me by email or gtalk at TikiTDO@gmail.com