I am happy to see that new content and improvements are coming over time.
However there is still substantial need for improvement in the game’s unranked browser.
The browser in legacy Age 3 was far from perfect but it had the fundamental functions working. In the following I compiled a list of issues for the DE ingame unranked game browser.
These issues really touch the base functionality and should have been fixed or avoided from the beginning IMO.
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communication with other players
obviously a vital part of the user experience is the possibilty to communicate with others. However the current system does make it quite hard to do so:
- the friends list is hidden in the top right corner while in legacy Age 3 you always had the “currently online” list in the field of view.
- the “friends” symbol is easily mistaken with the “clan” symbol, both show small play figures
- the chat window obstructs the view of the rest of the game browser and even dominats game invites. You will not see an invitation of the friend you’re currently chatting with - which is unlogical. The invitation notification should have priority.
- the chat lags 2-3 seconds after each message making fluid conversations hardly possible
- many player names consist of only #### ###### symbols (I guess certain graphic characters of their steam names cause this bug)
-
viewing hosted games
In order to find a game you’d like to participate in, you need to be able to have a complete overview about the games that are currently open. Unfortunately, this does not work completely by now:
- the list shows only the “closest region” games on default settings and leaves many other of the internationally hosted games out. One needs to manually adjust the region to find out, that there are acutally games hosted.
- sorting the games as you wish does need improvement too e.g. the “sort by the number of players” option will sort the games by the number of players that joined a game. In the legacy Age 3 however this option sorted the games by the maximum amount of players to join a hosted game. This allowed the player to quickly get an overview about the current options of 1v1s 2v2s 3v3s and so on … which makes more sense IMO.
Example: Now you will get a list with a “1/8” at the top, “2/4” in the middle and “4/4” at the bottom. Idealy it should show “2/4” > “4/4” > “1/8”. - saving your sorting preferences for when you play thr nexttime needs to be added. It is uncomfortable to adjust the filter settings each time you open the game.
- same order after refresh. Currently after a refresh of the browser view, the order of the games does not stay the same. You always get scrolled up in the list after each refresh, making it hard to find the game you had clicked on again.
Example:you try to join a game that has 4/4 players and you hope that one of them leaves the hosted game > you refresh the browser and try again. However after the refresh, the “clicked-at-game” will not be activated any more. And if many games are hosted, you will also be scrolled to the top of the browser again. This is quite inconvenient and did work fine in legacy Age 3.
I may add my observations in the following time. Please support this post and reply in order to get some resonance from the developers and the community.