[2023] POI and Biome difficulty HUD pop-ups should be optional

Has it occurred to you that "spending so much time on adding this" might be the prelude to opening up the option for choice down the road? Like, You need groundwork to accomplish being able to toggle things individually- And we now have a basic groundwork of 'everything is off or everything is on'. instead of just 'everything is on'. Specifically what that means is that we do now have the groundwork to turn things Off, even if it isn't on an element by element basis.

Originally posted by James:

Originally posted by Shurenai: Specifically what that means is that we do now have the groundwork to turn things Off, even if it isn't on an element by element basis.

I see you edited this part in, several minutes later after I posted (8-9 minutes after), so I'll respond to it.

We have had the groundwork and I explained it. Two, we should have menu options that we can change before we start the game. Using F keys while in-game is a weird way of changing game options.

Actually my edit came about 6 minutes before you posted; My initial post was 55mins ago, edit was 51 minutes ago, your post was 45 minutes ago. Ish. But it likely was edited in while you were writing your reply. (Times at the time of writing this message)

The 'Why' of there not being a whole slew of endless options for every little nitpicky thing any player could possibly want an option for is that every additional option is that much more work when testing every new build. The devs decided awhile back that they already had a good amount of options and that adding more was off the table till the game was nearing completion- Because a lot of the options people want can either be served by Mods, By the existing options, or are just QoL stuff that while nice aren't strictly necessary at this point.

I disagree with the Options Menu vs F keys thing, though; Personally I think either way is fine.. And that accessible shortcuts available while playing are preferable because it enables hotswapping a setting instead of having to stop what you're doing, enter a menu and all that- EG, Diablo 2's hotkey to change between old-D2 and new-D2 graphics; This function would really lose it's benefit if you had to stop and menu every time you want to change it- And it would lose the visual impact of getting to see one, then the other seamlessly and without a menu.

Originally posted by James: TFP showcased the new difficulty hud about 6 months ago and the majority of fans were not happy about it. Some fans were fine with it, as long as there was an option to turn it off and there isn't.

TFP had 6 months to gauge fan responses and react accordingly and they did nothing. They don't care or read feedback.

Or the feedback you see as "majority" was not in fact. From where I'm sitting speaking purely of the Steam forum with no consideration of the main forum, There was easily as much pushback for it being fine as there was saying it was awful, So at worst I'd call it 50/50- Definitely not a majority. But, How we perceive the situation is naturally subjective.

The reason I bring it up is that I think it's unfair to levy the accusation that they don't care or read feedback just because they didn't take what you perceive to have been a better path. They do read it, and often interact back over on the main forum as far as I'm aware.. At least in the dev discussion thread.

They also have access to a lot more avenues of feedback than you do. But, reading feedback does not intrinsically mean something will change because of it. Just to pose an example, It's highly likely that, in seeing the opinions on the forums, that they decided there wasn't an appreciable enough amount of pushback to change their plans; But they might have in mind that a quick fix to add a toggle might be warranted depending on how the full scale Public launch goes; After all, It's one thing to armchair lobby over a change you THINK will be this huge annoyance/problem; It's another entirely to get a lot of feedback from players actually interacting with the system.

Originally posted by James:

Originally posted by Shurenai: The 'Why' of there not being a whole slew of endless options for every little nitpicky thing any player could possibly want an option for is that every additional option is that much more work when testing every new build.

I'm not talking about a slew of options. I'm simply talking about disabling 2 NEW options they added to the game and giving users a chance to disable them or not. We're not talking about redesigning the entire game or something, We're talking about adding menu options. How hard is that? I can do it myself is in a matter of minutes with a simple modlest and I'm not a game dev. So again, I ask, why can't they add the options to the game?

Correct. You are not asking for some huge slew of new options- But my point is rather not about you, and more about everyone else... Why should the devs listen to you, Specifically You, Over everyone else who also want's a specific option? Why does Your option get to be special? Why not someone elses? If they add this QOL thing why not That QOL thing or the other QOL thing?

Yes- You're absolutely right, Adding the option probably isn't terribly difficult. But, Every new option is again, More work. Put it this way....

Let's take a Hypothetical game.. It has no options at all- You play it EXACTLY the way the devs decide.

Now add a loot chance option with 5 selections, 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100. Now there are 5 different cases that they have to test for on top of normal development.

Now add a loot respawn rate option with 5 selections- Now you have not just 10, but more than 10 because these options interact with eachother.

Now add another, and another- Every new option is more work to test; You need to make sure they all work, that they function as intended, that they properly interact with every other option that they could conceivably work with.

That was the devs first few years- Regularly adding in new options and gradually expanding the list of options and save settings and making their workload larger and larger.

Originally posted by James:

Originally posted by Shurenai: The devs decided awhile back that they already had a good amount of options and that adding more was off the table till the game was nearing completion- Because a lot of the options people want can either be served by Mods, By the existing options, or are just QoL stuff that while nice aren't strictly necessary at this point.

Okay, for one. Do you have any proof of this? Or is this your own personal opinion?

I'm only asking because if they did feel like they already had enough options then why spend more time adding the F7 option to everyone?

There WAS proof of it, but I think it got eaten with the database migration when they updated the main forum. I'm afraid I wouldn't know where to find it if it still exists at this point. In any case, It's not personal opinion- But I can understand if you'd prefer to mistrust that since I can't readily provide proof.

To the latter bit, I'm speaking speculatively but, I'd say it's because we're now just about to be exiting the long push for more development with no new options.. Almost all intended features are in at this point, the most notable outstanding ones being Bandits, now slated for A22 which is supposed to have a much quicker turnaround time than A21 did.. And story.

So we're kindof out of the woods now- Or nearly, and they can more safely provide new options without fearing that it's going to bog down the development of the game- Indeed, we're pretty close to hitting beta at which point the sole focus is basically going to be bug fixing and optimizing and making sure everything works right while searching for the right version candidate for release- The perfect environment to be building in long requested QOL things.