I’ve been playing for about 8 months now, and over the last 6 weeks, the intro movie has really started getting on my nerves. I’ve researched a few methods to suppress it, and for a while I was doing that, but every time there’s a game update, I have to go through the whole process again. It feels like I’m back in 1997 turning on my work PC, then going to the bathroom, grabbing a smoke and getting coffee while it boots up. The damn thing is too long to watch twice every time I want to play (once when I first start the game, then AGAIN when I select a server to play on). It seems like it’s streaming it from somewhere, because hitting spacebar, ESC, and mouse clicking doesn’t seem to do anything until the last few seconds of the movie. It’s driving me insane! Please fix this!
My other major concern is the way the server selection screen currently operates. There is a Favorites option from the server drop-down menu, and a History option as well. Neither one works consistently. In fact, most of the time, in the last two weeks, I’ve had to use the Direct Connect to find the server I actually host, as no amount of time seems sufficient to get it to show up in the default list. It’s not just my server either, I also occasionally play on another server, and it’s one of the more populated servers, but it hardly ever shows up in the default list for me.
In NO case do either of these servers show up in my favorites from one session to another. In fact, if I exit to the menu and try to switch to the other server, I’ve gotten in the habit of clicking the “Add to favorites” button every single time (provided the server actually shows up in the list, which is rare now). I can change the view to History or Favorites, and NOTHING shows up in those lists, no matter how much time passes. Seriously, I’ve loaded the game, gone to do other things for 20 minutes, then come back to find the History menu STILL BLANK even though I connected to at least one of the two servers I play on within the last 12 hours.
As a software development team manager myself, I am fully aware of the prioritization of backlog issues, and perhaps these are way down the list, if they’re even on the list. However, it’s such a small thing to fix that I can’t find any reason why it couldn’t go into the next update with very little time spent on it. I’ll even write the user stories for you below, so all you have to do is copy / paste them into your backlog and hand them to your team for development:
New User Story
As a user, I want to be able to skip the opening advertisements and movie by pressing spacebar, ESC or clicking with my mouse so that I can avoid loss of sanity and valuable time.
Acceptance Criteria
- Presence of movies in the correct folder is checked once per game synch (i.e. when the user runs the synchronization tool to start the game).
- Movies are pushed to (i.e. downloaded by) the client once per game update (i.e. when an update is published by Funcom) to ensure they are current, unless no movie is detected during the game synch, then the movie is pushed to the client.
- The user is able to skip the entire opening sequence by pressing spacebar.
- The user is able to skip the entire opening sequence by pressing ESC.
- The user is able to skip the entire opening sequence by pressing LMB.
Bug 1
Add to Favorites does not work consistently on server selection screen. From one session to another, the Favorites list does not consistently stay populated by the servers the user has added to it. Also, the Add to Favorites button is clickable on servers that the user has already added to favorites in the past. Servers indicated as Favorites should rapidly load to help the user get to their favorite servers quickly. Perhaps connection info should be stored on and loaded from the client? (provided there is a check performed to make sure that server still exists)
Bug 2
Server History does not properly and consistently capture and display actual server history for the user from one user session to the next. Again, the connection info should be populated rapidly so the user can get back to previous servers quickly without having to search for them.