Lineage view change

[grammydragon]

Thank you Marrionetta for your viewpoint.

Perhaps you are like the owner of this lineage who sees nothing wrong

with it because it is more based on color rows:

http://dragcave.net/lineage/jG10L

 

But most of us have lineages which contain limited quantity breeds in

the cb's gen, such as this:

http://dragcave.net/lineage/OibxP

 

Not only does the smaller size images mess with the visual concept,

but I have much more difficulty trying to get lineages to scroll left/right

than up/down.

 

Just as you can see nothing wrong with the changes, we can see nothing

right with your position.

 

I am not so ridden with Alzheimer's that I can not make changes, but

I also resent the attitude with which these changes were done. I like

most all of the site changes made since I joined DC. And I am

still suspecting there is more to the story that has been revealed so far.

Your entering the conversation with your comments indicates I may be

right....(edited, in respect to mod)

Edited August 10, 2013 by grammydragon

[rubyshoes]

Attack the topic not each other. Please make your points without insulting and belittling other members. Thank you.

[bbik]

There are two things this about this change that really get to me. Not so much as to leave, persay, because I recognize that it doesn't break the game, but it certainly does do damage to many even gen lineages, and I just generally do not like how it looks.

 

For one, there is this idea that less white space is always, absolutely better. And while yes, "less is more", that refers as much to less cramming of content as it does to less whitespace. Not wasting space is good, but right now, it results in the CB generation feeling very cluttered, because suddenly there is no whitespace. Perhaps that could be fixed by something as simple as making all of the generations consistently CB-like (at least all generations would have equally little whitespace that way, rather than one being so far below the rest), but it certainly does not look good with the mixed layout.

 

The other reason the change bothers me is less about what was changed as it is about the thinking behind it. Back when lineages were first released (because yes, I remember when they were a fancy new thing originally available only on one certain fansite), there was an explicit statement that the lineages would be male/female, but the view pages would remain the original female/male -- because that's what users started with and that is what they had used to determine which dragon would get which name for the correct line to appear on top, and TJ didn't want to mess that up on lots of people. Yet now, that messing up is exactly what has happened. Why couldn't the same consideration that was shown way back then have been extended again this time?

 

As for what to do about it now... I still think the various ideas about having options are the best route. And there are plenty of ideas of what options should be available. But I think I saw there's a suggestion thread now, so I'll leave that discussion over there.

[skauble]

For those asking about the differences in the lineages now or how people feel it's been ruined, I can see where it might not be something that's as glaring to people not creating these lineages type.

 

TJ mentioned that the only thing removed was whitespace. The importance of this might be easier to see if you think of something like a quilt.

 

If you look at the pictures below, you can see that in the quilt patterns that empty space is actually integral to the design. It may simply look like a place where there is no pattern, but it not only lends shape and structure to the design, it also provides spaces of visual calm that allow the areas that are filled to pop.

 

 

 

 

 

It's understandable why people building websites seek to minimize whitespace, but in the case of even gens it wasn't random, unused space.

 

So, like the quilt, imagine that all the blocks are this:

 

 

and then the very last row is this:

 

 

Because the lineages in question were about pattern and designs, the elemination of negative space from the overall picture significantly alters things. And while it can certainly be argued by someone that the new version is as good or better, it can't really be said that it's not different. And while different, as a general concept, is neither good nor bad, when you've put your time in effort into creating a specific result, different can be a rather large problem.

[Earth Gurl]

I, of course, will not be as furious as those who spent many hours creating beautiful checkerboard lineages because I basically only collect them, I am very unhappy with the change.

The one lineage I spend a great deal of time making was this: [x]

 

And I really wish someone had an example of what the old lineages used to look like (I forget rather easily), because I remember being VERY upset about it at first. It now looks like a rocketship to me. I feel like the only thing I want from the change back would be the names on the bottom for the first gen. That is all. I kind of avoid looking at long even-gens now...

 

Okay thank you vv, yes, I would definitely like the old view back.

Edited August 10, 2013 by Earth Gurl

[Windy]

They used to look like this.

[Sycamore]

They used to look like this.

With the sprites in the first gen still full sized, as well.

 

Not true, apparently! Just after the change, I thought I remembered the CB gen of this dragon being particularly tiny, but now they seem to be the full size in the last 5 gens, and the same small size in the rest of the generations, instead of the variable sizes that I seem to recall...

Edited August 11, 2013 by Sycamore

[bbik]

With the sprites in the first gen still full sized, as well.

No, at some point they still shrunk down like that. I don't remember if it was 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th gen, but it's worked that way for a long time now. The only size change during all this was the midget size that didn't last for very long, but which was 10 or 12 pixels wide -- half the size of the small sprite right now.

[Amaterasu-sama]

Not sure where to post this, but I saw mobile users and need for gif mentioned multiple times here http://forums.dragcave.net/index.php?act=S...=0#entry7585536 I'm not aware of the entire history behind lineage change, so I don't know how this is relevant but I'm a mobile user, have always been and the new lineage view still looks hideous to me on mobile. Earlier it was much better. First it was deadlines, now this, so many new disappointing changes are being brought forward concerning lineages I'm not even sure I want to invest my time into complicated lineages anymore. I think I'm just going to stick to lowgens. I agree with what someone posted the new highgen EGs look like a rocket or a bullet train, only today I picked a very nice high gen pb EG crimson from AP but the base view put me off so much I left it back to AP.

[TheAkatsuki]

I don't have any really big checkers but they used to look like this with the names of the CB dragons below the pictures

http://dragcave.net/lineage/du4Qg

 

compare that with how they currently

http://dragcave.net/lineage/3VjR0

 

For checkers the change affects 5th gen and above

Ah, I see. Thanks for clearing that up.

In my honest opinion, it certainly would have been better off if it had stayed the way it was. But alas, I haven't got the power to change that, so I'll just hope that, in the future it's brought back to where it used to be.

[Oriolous]

Eh. I've kinda gotten used to it. Mostly cause it's all I know.

[Confused Cat]

I'm writing the following in bigger font and color because I think it is important to make everybody aware of it. If we "accuse" TJ of having changed something that has, in fact, NOT changed, I wouldn't blame him for taking our other input less seriously.

 

The sprite images of the CB generation in a 5th gen lineage are now NOT SMALLER than before.

 

Starting with 5th gen lineages, the CB images have always (or at least for a very long time) been smaller, exactly like they are now. This was also pointed out by bbik and others, I just think it has not been seen by everybody because this thread has become quite long.

 

If we keep complaining about "smaller CB images", when they are not really smaller, the discussion about the actual change will be impaired.

(Of course, the placement of the names might make the images look smaller because of the missing space around them.)

 

Screenshots for comparison:

Screenshot of a 5th gen taken in April 2012.

The same dragon now.

 

 

 

ETA:

Wow, just saw TJ's reply over in the suggestion thread. I'm really not sure how to feel about the idea that the end result might be even more different from the classic view. I can't imagine a good solution that does not include returning to the classic view (because of what I said earlier), but I hope somebody else can.

Edited August 11, 2013 by Confused Cat

[grammydragon]

Google Doodle Celebrates Physicist Erwin Schrödinger … and Cats!

Today's Google Doodle celebrates the life of Austrian physicist and Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger (August 12, 1887 — January 4, 1961 ...

 

I hope everyone gets to see the wonderful Google search page doodle

for today!

 

here is more of the article:

However, it was not until his late 30s that he was to change forever the face of physics by producing a series of papers that were all written and published over the course of a six-month period of theoretical research.

 

By 1925, then a professor of physics at the University of Zurich and holidaying in the Alps, Schrödinger formulated a wave-equation that accurately gave the energy levels of atoms. It formed the basis of the work that would earn him the Nobel prize in physics in 1933.

 

In subsequent years, he repeatedly criticised conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics by using the paradox of what would become known as Schrödinger's cat. This thought experiment was designed to illustrate what he saw as the problems surrounding application of the conventional, so-called "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics to everyday objects.

Edited August 12, 2013 by grammydragon

[LibbyLishly]

Google Doodle Celebrates Physicist Erwin Schrödinger … and Cats!

 

I hope everyone gets to see the wonderful Google search page doodle

for today!

Haha, I saw that yesterday and thought of this thread!

 

That reminds me. Should we continue to link to this thread with the badges in our signatures, or should we link to the new suggestion thread? Any opinions?

Edited August 13, 2013 by LibbyLishly

[Kelkelen]

Still feeling so disheartened. I had a bunch of lineages in progress, but they're all at a standstill now. It's a combination of feeling down over the new view, and feeling down over how the players have been treated, I think.

 

Has anyone heard anything new, since 2 weeks ago?

[whitebaron]

Still feeling so disheartened. I had a bunch of lineages in progress, but they're all at a standstill now. It's a combination of feeling down over the new view, and feeling down over how the players have been treated, I think.

 

Has anyone heard anything new, since 2 weeks ago?

no,

tj posted one alibi - post in the suggestion thread, and silence, ever since.

 

[sh20000sh]

I think it's not bad...

...because I registered after lineage view change?

[LibbyLishly]

I think it's not bad...

...because I registered after lineage view change?

Probably. If you go back and read this whole thread, you'll see what people's objections are to the change. The big problem is that a lot of people have spent years carefully building lineages to look a certain way, and this change royally screws it up from an aesthetic standpoint.

[Kelkelen]

I'm doing the same thing...stockpiling and hoping. I really haven't wanted to continue with my EG lineages, the way things are now.

 

Is there any more "official" way to request some kind of feedback from TJ?

 

It would be really nice to have a genuine dialogue on this subject. When he posted earlier in this thread, and in the Suggestions thread, I thought he was going to be following us and responding at some point, but it's been a very long time. By now, I feel that everyone has gone largely unheard. Plus, despite overwhelming interest in retaining the old lineage view, it seems the vast majority of players are being ignored in favor of a lineage-view experiment that isn't even taking place at present. I would also like the know the concrete goals of instituting a new lineage view. If the main purpose is to make long, uneven lineages look less messy and fit better on the screen, then perhaps there's a way to apply changes only to those lineages, and not to Even-Gens.

 

I don't see why the game creator would ignore the roughly 70% of actively-involved players who are so unhappy over the change; it feels as though he's looking to make a change for his personal interest alone, at the expense of a large portion of his consumer base, and when it would not actually interfere with anything to continue including the classic lineage view. Is there some significant drawback to having the classic view, or multiple view options, that I'm just not aware of?

[LibbyLishly]

It would be really nice to have a genuine dialogue on this subject. When he posted earlier in this thread, and in the Suggestions thread, I thought he was going to be following us and responding at some point, but it's been a very long time. By now, I feel that everyone has gone largely unheard. Plus, despite overwhelming interest in retaining the old lineage view, it seems the vast majority of players are being ignored in favor of a lineage-view experiment that isn't even taking place at present. I would also like the know the concrete goals of instituting a new lineage view. If the main purpose is to make long, uneven lineages look less messy and fit better on the screen, then perhaps there's a way to apply changes only to those lineages, and not to Even-Gens.

 

I don't see why the game creator would ignore the roughly 70% of actively-involved players who are so unhappy over the change; it feels as though he's looking to make a change for his personal interest alone, at the expense of a large portion of his consumer base, and when it would not actually interfere with anything to continue including the classic lineage view. Is there some significant drawback to having the classic view, or multiple view options, that I'm just not aware of?

Agreed. I know TJ's lack of response is often an issue in suggestions and other questions, but the outcry on this one seems to have been so loud and widespread that it puzzles me that he hasn't actually adjusted it. Far be it from me to attribute motives to someone, since I can't possibly know what they're thinking, but it's just felt like he's just assumed that we'd all get used to it eventually, gave us a cute little spot in the Suggestions thread to toss ideas around, and is planning to let it go the way of tons of other suggestions - to rot in Suggestion Purgatory for the next three or four years.

 

Frankly, I'm frustrated and now I'm bound and determined to NOT get used to it, even though I probably could have before certain attitudes were displayed toward the players. I'm ready for this issue to be put to rest and I don't see why it hasn't. TJ could have very easily switched us back to classic view a long time ago and THEN let us play with all manner of suggestions for improvement. Instead, he's opted to keep the very unpopular change and, for all we know, is completely ignoring the suggestions.

 

What the heck gives? And how hard is it to civilly explain to your very unhappy customers just what was wrong with the old system in the first place?

[Confused Cat]

According to TJ, we are looking for a lineage view that is better than the old one and better than the new one. This means a lineage view that is acceptable for him will have to be different from both, since "but... the old one was perfectly fine?" (which is still the only response I can think of) doesn't seem to be an option.

 

Therefore I'm not even sure I want to start new 4th gen projects, because who knows what they will look like after the next change?

 

We live in the age of the "Great Lineage Uncertainty"; I wonder how long it will last.

Edited September 16, 2013 by Confused Cat

[danegrrrl]

I still hate it, and still have lost most of the incentive to work on lineages since once they get to 5th gen, they just look wrong to me.

 

For me, it's not something I'm going to just "get used to". It looks bad, and the way it's been handled has been appalling, IMO.

 

 

[Kelkelen]

According to TJ, we are looking for a lineage view that is better than the old one and better than the new one. This means a lineage view that is acceptable for him will have to be different from both, since "but... the old one was perfectly fine?" (which is still the only response I can think of) doesn't seem to be an option.

What's odd to me is that the two "purposes" of lineage view he came up with (which did not include making visual patterns, although that is what many people love to use it for) were to show off the ancestors of an egg you'd caught, or to show off the ancestors of an egg you'd bred. If those were his goals, surely the old view was better than the new one, in that regard?

 

The main questions he posed were "what do you want to get from a lineage view?" and "what do you want other people to see when you link them to your awesome dragon?" Again...mostly, it seems the players want what we've had so far: what we've specifically designed our lineages to look like.

 

He was also unhappy that lineages looked "messy," which makes me think that his main goal was to tidy up messy lineages -- in which case, why mess with even-gen lineages at all? He even mentioned a "non-intuitive mess of boxes," and that a "more traditional tree structure" would make it look "more structured." But why is it affecting ONLY even-gens, and NOT messy lineages?

 

I personally don't see how the box structure is non-intuitive, aside from having to read it right-to-left instead of left-to-right. A dragon's parents are the two dragons attached to it. Dragons in the same column of boxes are the same generation. It's the same format as animal breeding charts. Where the idea that it's so confusing even come from?

[skauble]

He was also unhappy that lineages looked "messy," which makes me think that his main goal was to tidy up messy lineages -- in which case, why mess with even-gen lineages at all?  He even mentioned a "non-intuitive mess of boxes," and that a "more traditional tree structure" would make it look "more structured."  But why is it affecting ONLY even-gens, and NOT messy lineages?

I can't say for certain, but I'm not sure that TJ was using "messy" in the way that we commonly do in regard to lineages, wherein we usually mean a large, unstructured lineage. He mentioned removing the whitespace in the even-gens, which leads me to believe that he was probably using "messy" in terms of web development, since "whitespace" or blank, unused spaces, is often the target of elimination in web design.

 

To a web designer, having a given set of information (the lineage in this case) show on one page with no scrolling is much more likely to be considered to be less messy than a page where the information is more spread out, even if the spreading out may reflect an artistic intent.

 

This is actually the crux of the problem with this change. "Whitespace" in a web page layout can be a hurdle to easy navigation. However, in other forms of design, "whitespace", also known as negative space, is an intentional element. It's not necessarily removable. It's like eliminating blue.

 

Which is why people would like the option to access the original view. Because it sounds like new options are all going to have an eye towards streamlining, which isn't necessarily bad, but I'm not sure it's being fully appreciated here that all of that space, all of that cell padding, all of the things that were removed because they were seen as reclaimable real estate, were being used to create the final product. And for a new view to work in the same way, it would still have to present in a way that reflected that.

 

What I don't get is this - TJ doesn't think the old view works and, agree or disagree, I get the point he's making. However, he also doesn't think that the new view works. So if we have two options, neither of which he feels works, why can't we have back the one that was at least working for far, far more players? If both options are considered not great, can we at least have the best of the two while we wait for this new view that will satisfy all of the other issues?

 

I understand there's a feeling that the user base is too change resistant. But I fail to see how sticking with a change that everyone agrees isn't working is even remotely going to help with that issue. Because if there's one thing that's going to make people fear change even more it's having a history of clinging to changes that are acknowledged to not be working.

[dragongrrl]

I still hate it, and still have lost most of the incentive to work on lineages since once they get to 5th gen, they just look wrong to me.

 

For me, it's not something I'm going to just "get used to". It looks bad, and the way it's been handled has been appalling, IMO.

I'm not getting used to it, either.

 

It seems like there is no movement on this. It is so annoying that stairs were restored almost immediately, but those of us with even-gens have just been left hanging.

 

Please, TJ, with whatever other options you are looking at, allow us to retain the classic lineage view until another is designed, then retain it as an selectable option.

 

It should be obvious by now that the Classic View is what we want for our even-gens.