Hello all. I don't post too much (mostly because everybody has already answered the questions that I log on to ask) but I have a small list of a few suggestions that I think are fairly reasonable (nothing like "Oh man, I should be able to turn my metal planets into death stars and be able to use them to attack other players with!"), and mostly pertain to the user interface. Most are simply based on the grounds of convenience, and are probably being posted more because I'm a little bit lazy rather than anything else. But then again, the fact that I'm bothering to type this up proves that I'm not entirely lazy.

Anyway, here goes:

The research lists have always bugged me a little bit. For some reason, they don't scroll all the way to the right when you click the right arrow. At least, they did, but now that I'm on to researching my Singularity Launchers, I'm finding it a bit odd that the list stops scrolling two sets of modules short. I can't really think of any reason why this is the case. I think they should scroll all the way, because previously researched research trees are almost completely useless to look at. In fact, why do we even have to scroll at all? Why not make the research trees start at your most recently researched module?

I also wonder why we can't permanently lock a certain kind of mineral. When the quantity of a certain locked mineral hits 0, the lock disappears, and I find this a little frustrating. What if I wanted to catch all the Kurenites that I received while managing my mineral units, but didn't get them frequently enough that I'd always notice when I received them? I think it would be very nice to place a permanent lock on any mineral that I wanted.

What about the left and right buttons when you scroll through your artifacts in your cargo hold? Each time you click, the button moves up or down (from what I can tell, this is because of the varying size of the artifact's images). I think either the image size should be standardized or the left and right buttons should be moved to a table that doesn't fluctuate in length.

I'd really like to be able to see how much energy I have left while I'm attacking an enemy (either NPC or player). Perhaps it's just my computer, or my screen resolution, but the battle pane that pops up when you target an enemy obscures the energy panel. Sometimes I plan on having a little bit of energy left at the end of my NPC farming to, say, colonize a new planet or message a friend. I mean, maybe these are things that I should be doing before I start farming, but I still think it would be a nice convenience.

I also wonder why, when you click the button to build a ship module and you're out of the required mineral, the game even bothers to prompt you to visit your Trade panel. Why not take it one step further and have a panel pop up that says "This module requires 8 more Erixion, which will cost 64,896 CR. Would you like to purchase them?". I don't want to be that guy who compares games, but Darkthrone might be a good example to look at for this. They have a similar feature which allows the player to be similarly lazy.



I've played GL on multiple computers, multiple browsers, and from multiple operating systems (not because I'm obsessively searching for bugs, but because I'm obsessively playing the game!), and from what I can tell, all of these little problems seem to stick. Otherwise, this game is fantastic (the best facebook game I've ever played) and I'd like to congratulate you guys for doing such an excellent job on it.



Oh, and one more thing which is a little bit closer to the unreasonable "Why can't really big planets use their gravitational pulls to attract smaller planets to them, creating huge explosions and increasing the size of their planets!!!??" type of post:

I'm not much of a hacker, but I'm a little sad that there is no hacking-related combat rating, or that hacking has no influence over your actual combat rating. Some people take hacking pretty seriously (I've lost many, many research points to them, gah!) but might it be nice to display a hack rating for those who have a greater number of hacks than player kills?

The research lists -- these should START at the last tech you have when you load this page. Agree.

Minerals -- I'm not completely sure but yeah I noticed it unlocks it if you sell all of it at some point. I don't know if it can recover the lock when you get some more or not, might be only a display issue.

Cargo buttons -- known issue, I heard Dan was working on that improvement. Also, scrapping anything that is not recoverable (ie, not an AP drop) should show "are you sure?". I haven't done this yet, but some people have by accident due to the page shifting like that.

See energy/header while on a mission/enemy -- most browsers will show the frame behind as black; on my home system it's semi-transparent so I can kind of see my energy % if not the number. I think it's a good idea to show the full header while doing other stuff, and this shouldn't be obscured.

Buy module/building materials if short -- yeah, I think that's a good thing to do, why move out of the window you're in to do this ?

pvp hack rating -- might be interesting to display it somewhere, obviously separate from "combat" rating (which raiding is closely tied to anyway).

It automatically reapplies the lock if you get more of the mineral.

Really? I guess I never noticed. Thanks!

Not to be a stick in the mud here, but all of the things you mentioned have been suggested/discussed in other threads and the devs are (hopefully) aware of the public feelings on those issues and planning to make some tweaking.

Well, that's fantastic. Like I said, I'm not a frequent forum-goer, so I'm not all that up-to-date on what people are and are not complaining about. I suppose I could have searched for each one of the points that I made on the forum to make sure that I wasn't being redundant, but I also don't think it's an enormous crime to let my voice be heard.

Anyway, thanks for letting me know. I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed these things.

You know what I think would be really awesome? A "Date Added" category on artifacts so you can immediately find the ones that you just got.

I can answer the question about the research panel. When you click on the arrow, it scrolls over to a new page of options. It moves 4 at a time, or to the final part on the tree that you have unlocked. Eg if you are researching singularity launchers, then you will click the arrow twice and it will put you at sing launchers.

I prefer how the research panel works. I can keep track of how far I am on my research. Going 4 at a time helps me keep count and I can research the way I want to. But maybe it should be an option to either go 4 at a time, or go straight to the end. I would prefer to keep going 4 at a time.

The planet idea needs some tweaking. I don't like the idea of planets crashing into others. What if I have my eye on a planet, but then it is destroyed because it crashed into a planet.

They could be caught in orbit of a planet, then you have a 100% chance of scanning the new parent planet, and a higher success rate of scanning other moon planets.

But you can't scan any moon planets of a gas giant without first scanning the gas giant.