Got a request to revisit the last poll from the standpoint of dark mode users. So, this poll is for people who need* or prefer dark mode, generally or whenever possible when browsing the web.
*For the purposes of this poll, need can refer to some kind of disability, or be as simple as standard colors/contrast being too much and wanting something gentler on the eyes.
New FR dark mode for dark mode users: Yay or Nay?
Prefer DARK mode, and it works great!
Prefer SLATE mode, and it works great!
DARK mode preference, but it falls short (color/contrast/etc.)
SLATE mode preference, but it falls short (color/contrast/etc.)
I need some kind of dark mode and NONE of these options are ok.
I usually need some kind of dark mode, but DEFAULT is actually fine for me.
Mmm popcorn/vanilla extract/clicky clicky
Voting ended onMay 9
PSA: FR now offers "Dark" mode, "Slate" mode, and "Default." Only a handful of pages on the site offer official support for the new Dark/Slade modes, but you can force the rest of the site to display Dark/Slate. To do this, go to Settings, find the Display box and check the box for "Experimental." Results may vary.
If you have specifics for how Dark or Slate modes fall short, feel free to drop some comments/replies/tags about it!
You cant even check dom at a glance at the top of the screen
You're so right. That little news ticker is totally gone. I didn't often pay attention to it, but I remember learning about restoring progens from that! Such a shame.
If you've logged in since yesterday, you've become an unpaid beta tester for the new FR UI "update." It's all everyone is talking about.
Literally.
The first three pages and growing of Suggestions is nothing but everything that's currently broken.
There's too much to quote. Many people were hit by the glaring levels of whiteness ... only to be gaslit by the devs:
(It is, quite obviously, more white overall than before, and coupled with the newly greyed player status box in the upper right corner, the difference is stark. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that it's more white, whatever technicalities you want to quote to ignore the simple experience of looking at the site.)
People are also hit by eye strain and difficulty in reading, recognizing icons, in addition to the site missing the warmth it once had. Popup boxes, especially dragon tooltips, have changed for the worse:
For most people, the new version (right side) is much harder to read. It's also almost twice the size, so it gets cut off completely if you're at the bottom of the screen. There's so much wasted space, and it's no longer neatly compact, which is the point of at-a-glance tooltips.
Not only is the feel of the site very different, the actual informational content has changed.
If you overlook the dead corporate grayness of the new status box (right side), you notice:
No more notification numbers.
No more bestiary.
No more achievements.
Commas (yay!) but now the treasure amount is truncated to show thousands (K). But it also has decimals for some reason? Which means that presuming the purpose was to save space (unnecessary), you're only saving a single character's worth of space.
They have intentionally withheld information from you. Weirdly. In a weird way.
Not only is combining commas and decimals and the K indicator a supremely bizarre way to display a number, you now no longer have any idea how much treasure you actually have. Which is a MAJOR issue when you stop to think about it. Not only do you deserve to know, at a glance, on every screen, exactly how much you have at any moment, when you are juggling treasure for Dom or for custodianship purposes, or simply recording progress toward a goal, exact treasure matters.
It matters so obviously that it's legitimately insane that this is now hidden from you. Oh, I suppose you could just hover your mouse over it and it'll show the full amount ...
If you had one. On mobile. On this extremely mobile-friendly new interface. (sarcasm)
You've also lost the ability to directly view your treasure in the vault too, for it also, for some reason, uses the K. In fact, this information was originally completely obscured, because there was no hover workaround and no screen at all that would show you your accurate treasure amount. That only changed today and only if you try to add or withdraw funds.
So you need to employ a non-intuitive workaround just to see how much treasure you have, the most basic stat in the entire game.
On to the continued lack of information! In addition to no longer having notification numbers, if you were to click on your notifications (the bell icon) you also helpfully get ... no indication of which notifications are new. So this is permanently ambiguous, unless you memorize the time stamps.
It didn't used to be this way. Previously, you were allowed information about your own account.
Also, feedback on this exact status box concept was provided months ago; summarily ignored.
Now, keep in mind that the only update to the new format (bigger nav buttons on mobile) occurred on a bare handful of least-impactful pages. This means that the pages you most use (lair, dragons, forums, etc.) are NOT updated.
Except ... they were made worse. Because now the forums viewed on mobile have extremely tiny text. You have to zoom in and pan all over the place in ways you didn't have to before. Or ... the forum text is actually extremely oversized, and you can't actually zoom out enough to read it. People are experiencing both extremes! The one singular part of the site that could have benefited from an improvement on mobile was made distinctly less mobile friendly on this mobile-friendly update.
There are many other QOL and just user-friendliness issues across the site, from used buttons (like Bond) being almost indistinguishable from unused buttons or the background, to Waystone placement, to weird choices in text color or boldness de-emphasizing important info. Just take a read through the entire Suggestions forum, or many of the Forum Discussion posts ... helpfully earmarked by a series of padlocks:
(I guess the Discussion forum isn't for discussions.)
It doesn't help that many users seem to expect people to be totally chill with everything, as if there aren't a handful of actual real issues with the update that could have been easily avoided. They seem to think that because they personally see nothing wrong that no one else could have a different experience.
It also doesn't help that we're going into a fest Dom weekend, and the update is abandoned as-is. Good luck if you needed your treasure amounts. Good luck if you wanted to participate in Dom/fest activities but find the update too unpleasant to play. The timing is terrible.
Like all the worst parts of the update, it was all easily avoidable. It's not like they're overburdened either, as the admins like to frequently remind us. The dragon art teams are different from the QOL teams which are presumably different from the teams dealing with bot traffic. Yet the new Vigil dragon breed was released during a bot attack and now we have a UI update on the heels of that on top of a fest. It's not like these aren't very deliberate choices which foreseeably impact gameplay.
It's like a train wreck, except the trains were on different tracks entirely.
When it comes to new ancients are the gene problems are especially egregious because what else is there to do to them but gene them!! It takes a while for new skins to come on the market and even longer for any a newer or F2P-no-AH-selling player to be able to find affordable ones. Ancients are so about the genes in fact that its the reason they've got so many linebreaking ones!!
Still a bit miffed about no stained too. Many of the terts are just so large and there aren't too many of the simpler ones.
Yes, extremely good points! There's no other way to enjoy these brand new dragons.
And, to be fair, some of the new Vigil-exclusive terts are really great! But we're being expected to pay out of pocket to test drive these things FOR the devs ... without safety nets or airbags. You are wholly at risk if you want to play with the new dragons.
It would be a complete non-issue if there was a proper refund policy. Gene issues would be a fun recurring joke, no consequences, instead of something closer to taking deliberate advantage of players.
They are also in desperate need of simpler terts, but also simpler (yet compelling) primaries & secondaries that can showcase the complex terts. The simple ones they have now feel too simple at current price points and don't feel worth it, especially for a G1. But anything else is too busy. Gene balance needs serious work.
FR Popcorn Time: We don't review so YOU have to! (sincerely, FR devs)
Leading with a PSA: Don't gene up your new Vigil dragons.
It's that lovely time of year again. The sun is shining. The birds are singing. New dragons are getting released. Genes immediately have massive errors. Players lose out on money. Devs are unapologetic and fix nothing ...
Patina/Oxidize, a comparison (Before on left, After on right):
These are massive changes. The original dragons were darker, often with more contrast and compelling colors. The dragons after the change are muddy, dull, and sometimes introduce unwelcome accent colors for many players.
These are real scries and real dragons. These are dragons people invested treasure into. These are dragons people genuinely loved and were excited about, and it's only natural to want to gene up your brand new dragon right away! Why wouldn't you? You're celebrating a whole new breed, and that's how it's done!
Well, I guess, that's not how you should be doing it on FR.
This kind of "mistake" is embarrassingly routine. It happens religiously. All the time. Every breed release. It's not just a minor change but a major one that heavily impacts dragons. It's the rule for FR to do this every single time ... so much so that the position to avoid new breeds for over 40 days keeps spreading.
It's clear that FR is employing the players as unpaid labor to do their quality control for them. Which isn't great, but there's a (narrow) window for acceptability ... only if players aren't literally paying for losing out. Which they are: Newly gened dragons. Booned and sold hatchlings, and now those buyers have lost out too.
It's gotten to the point that you're almost a laughingstock for being excited enough about a new release to gene a dragon immediately, because the problems are that predictable:
Blaming users for normal and expected gameplay is not okay. You're supposed to be excited enough to buy and use genes and race to sell new hatchlings! The devs are selling this product to you! That is absolutely their intent!
Then they retcon the product after you buy it. With no apology. There's an "explanation" presented in a way that sounds understanding and reasonable, with (yet another!) promise that they've heard you, and they understand, and they will make a note! <3 <3 <3
Is this enough?
Have you ever noticed the blatant lack of apology? Every time something like this happens? There is a chronic refusal by the devs to accept actual responsibility or admit fault. It's just empty promises. And it's particularly jarring when you realize a couple of things:
These massive errors keep happening. There is no effort to change things despite lip service, and it's the players who get screwed by it and are expected to constantly pay for it.
This is a product the site is selling you. It's a defective product. When defective products are sold, you're owed a refund and/or replacement. And yet, they refuse to offer refunds. They very obviously avoid mentioning compensating you for your losses.
They always claim to "fix" the gene, but that isn't what's broken. What's broken is the dragon you thought you had, but now you don't, and the funds you lost. The real fix is to restore that dragon or deliver you a refund. If you are not paid to be FR's guinea pig (free labor), then you are a customer. You're paying them, and they need to deliver.
FR wants you to pay money into their site, and they get you to do that by releasing new breeds. But they refuse to accept responsibility and return your funds when they inevitably screw up the release. They refuse to have a trial period for you to preview and test out the genes for their self-imposed 40-day "things might or might not change" limbo. The 40-day human trials they currently conduct are literally at your expense ... and they refuse to communicate about it. They delete real concerns without telling you. They won't respond to repeated requests for information. And then they release changes at the exact end of the 40-day human trials so that the clock is run out and you have no more opportunity to comment on the new changes.
Exactly. It's about time players are catching on. It goes without saying that the window for this should be a generous 60 days. FR must accommodate the entirety of the 40+ days they allow for error reporting, plus the inevitable extra time they tack onto it, plus time for people to be away from the game and learn about changes later.
Until then, it's buyer beware.
(And that's on top of other ultra weird gene issues like Belfry, and choosing to release this new breed in the middle of a bot attack, instead of something sensible like delaying the release. So the "fix" to the bots (unprecedented!) was to break the scrying workshop right when people really want to use the scrying workshop and the devs would (presumably) want to make money off of people using the scrying workshop. Even though the breed released in the middle of the week and the bot numbers are down, the devs decided to leave scrying broken through the weekend. Way to hamper enthusiasm, I suppose. Or perhaps a subtle way to communicate that they don't actually have their gene act together and you should probably not even be scrying anything for a while!)
