Quite some time ago, we discussed how we deal with your feedback in a general sense, determining what the request entails, whether it needs immediate fixing, whether it will be implemented as part of a bigger project, or even that it should be covered later, and so on.
This week I wanted to look at a few specific pieces of feedback we received from you recently. Notably, all of this feedback has been processed and added to today’s update.
The first report we looked at was a report that a player lost Skills in their Pathfinder character sheet, because they accidentally removed them, and requested a confirmation dialogue. The issue with the proposed solution here is that confirmation dialogues take focus away from the screen so it is not ideal from a user experience perspective, so they should be used sparingly — especially in lists where you may want to remove a lot of items that would each require their own confirmation.
Upon closer investigation, we found the remove button and the expander button that opens the skill details were very close together — which is very likely to be the underlying cause of the problem. To resolve the issue, we’ve changed the remove button to be inside the details view. This makes it far less likely it is clicked by accident and should resolve the problem without requiring a dialogue.
The next reports we looked at concerned the initiative tool we introduced last week. Here, we heard it was unclear for storytellers how NPCs could be added to the initiative order.
To help with this, we added an initiative roll to the freeform rolls. This required us to add attribution to freeform rolls (which also benefits some of the other rolls) and you can now roll initiative for an NPC (or a familiar, summoned creature, etc) directly using a freeform roll. You can also still manually add entries with the + button in the initiative toolbar, which has been moved to be at a more obvious location.
Finally, we got a bug report about private conversations in the chat. On the left of the chat under the room list, all previous private conversations were listed, even if they were closed. Players had to remove them from that list manually. This was actually working as intended, to quickly allow you to switch back to private conversations you closed. Even so, it was clear from your feedback this was unexpected (and maybe a bit odd), so we’ve synchronized it in a more natural manner, also adding an empty marker if you have no active conversations.
In each of these cases, we did sort out the bug, but with a solution that is not exactly as was suggested. However, that does not mean the bug report was useless — quite the contrary in fact! The report let us know what area of the site was facing issues, and allowed us to do a second take on the situation with a different perspective. As you can see from the fixes, it has helped us figure out better solutions in each case!
So please do keep reporting issues to us! We love hearing what works and what does not, so be sure to tell us via a bug report or through the community forum. For a full list of this weeks updates (there’s a lot more than the three I mentioned!), see our changelog as always, and for those who celebrate it, have a very spooky Halloween!