One pet peeve of mine whether its browsing on the web (such as typing this very post) or using computer software is seeing annoying pop ups, especially the kind that require user interaction in order to continue such as message of the day, what’s new?, and other news messages on startup. These types of startup messages in game design are very redundant and low IQ because if you were to measure the amount of time these pop ups last before being dismissed, you would find that the average duration of these messages are less than a second, proof that nobody cares about what you are telling us. There are better ways of delivering these kinds of messages to players that aren’t intrusive, like Steam’s built in way of pushing release notes.
I also find the “Choose your weekly profile picture reward” pop up to be annoying since I don’t care about what my profile picture is, and don’t want to be nagged to pick a new profile picture every week when my current one is fine. This is another low IQ design that could have had a “do not show again” button, or another way to select the “weekly profile picture reward” that doesn’t disturb the player at startup. It literally requires like 3 mouse buttons to make it close permanently (as in it wont nag you again at startup until “next week”). There is actually an option in the profile pictures menu that lets you claim the new “weekly profile picture reward”, making this weekly nag a totally unnecessary UI nuisance.
Ads and pop ups are annoying on the web, which is why millions of people use adblocker extensions and even dedicated browsers for that purpose. I hope its not far fetched to believe that unwanted pop ups in computer games can be perceived as equally as annoying. The only way to get these pop ups to not display is to block the game in Windows firewall. It’s a shame that you have to forfeit being able to play multiplayer to enjoy being able to cleanly launch the game without UI bloat being spammed in your face.
