[S1914] Mobile UI Rework - Release Notes

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    Release Notes - 2020-10-06


    Attention, Generals!


    Today’s release brings the reworked army and province bars to all mobile devices! All radial menus have been removed and the most important buttons and information are in convenient thumb reach now.

    Another great feature that is available to all mobile generals now, is the quick-actions bar that is implemented in the profile area of the resource bar on mobile devices. You can access this new bar by simply tapping on the profile area of the resource bar. This new bar gives you direct access to the coalition menu and your messages, but also allows you to move the map directly to your capital.


    There are many more updates and bug fixes in today’s release. For a complete overview, please check the list below.

    New Features:

    • The army and province info popups were improved to better highlight important information and increase user experience on iOS and Android.
    • A new quick-actions bar was implemented in the player profile area of the resource bar on mobile devices which provides quick access to account-related information and panels.

    General:

    • Tapping the game end timer now opens the newspaper with the current ranking of the game round on mobile devices.
    • Improvements were made in the way the game is rendered to increase overall performance.
    • Advisor avatars now display clearly when you unlocked a reward that you can claim.
    • Several report buttons have been removed. You can still report content by creating a general support ticket and selecting "Player Report" as the ticket category.
    • Advanced map filters are now available on mobile devices (previously only available on desktop) allowing you to show or hide certain types of units, switch to morale view, nation colors etc.

    Bug Fixes:

    • A bug was fixed that caused a Fire at Will icon to be displayed for unknown armies that were located at the edge of the fog of war on the map.
    • An issue was resolved that prevented the uprising chance and garrison strength values for conquered and owned provinces from being displayed correctly.
    • An issue was resolved that prevented players from being informed why the construction of factories was unavailable and just displayed a greyed out construction button. Players are now informed that the construction is only available from day 8 in a game round.
    • A bug was fixed that caused the units kill/death ratio and province capture/loss ratios to be displayed as zero. Both ratios are now displayed with correct numbers again.
    • A bug was fixed that caused a magnifying glass to be displayed as the cursor icon when playing in Legacy Mode.

    We hope you like today’s update and wish you all the best on the battlefield.


    Your Bytro Team

  • The bugfixes for Legacy were quite honestly very unexpected and are very much appreciated.



    In the new UI, notably not in Legacy, the province morale factors now include "Province order" and it reads absolutely insane boosts. The further away from the capital, the higher it is. I'm looking at numbers like +36, +38, +20... What the hell is going on here? Since nothing changed in legacy I am still fairly sure this is just an old number being presented in a new way and there is no actual change involving it to the morale calculations but the way it's presented would suggest that every single province in every single game will be at 100% morale after the next calculation because those +X lines normally mean "Plus X morale points" and they all get incredible numbers for "Province Order". So what gives? Why isn't this mentioned in the patch notes?


    Edit: So thanks to some helpful people in the chat I managed to narrow down that the number for "Province order" is always that province morale's difference to 102% for whatever reason or especially for whatever benefit, as if I couldn't do that math myself. Apparently the mobile version and only the mobile versoin, for whatever reason, is nice enough to tell you that at 102% a province is considered "stable", which is an unachievable number, making this apparently new gameplay dynamic all the more intricate.

    What is "stability"?

    Why is the difference of a province's morale from a seemingly arbitrary, fixed number output with the name "Province order"?

    Why is this "province order" displayed as if it was a factor that influences the province's morale trend?


    Why isn't any of this mentioned in the patch notes?

  • The way it is presented is really the biggest issue I think. You have tons of people in the help chat asking why they're getting 40 point morale boosts now because that's just what it looks like the way it's simply added to the morale factors list. It makes no sense for this to be there since it clearly doesn't mean what its placement in the morale factors list suggests it does, even when I don't yet even know what sense it makes for it to be anywhere. It's very confusing at first sight alright but it doesn't get much less so on second or third with very close to zero documentation existing of it.



    I'd also like to open another front here about this:


    "Several report buttons have been removed. You can still report content by creating a general support ticket and selecting "Player Report" as the ticket category."


    What's the point of that? Discourage reports? That's how it scans. It's apparently no longer possible to report players, messages or DE articles directly. So if I wanted to report an article for instance, now I have to make a general support ticket, paste the game number, the date and timestamp and probably even the contents of the article that I consider in breach of the ToS or community guidelines as opposed to before where I could report a specific article directly and none of that was neccessary for GOs to see the cause of the report - at least that's how you'd assume a button labeled "Report post" would work. How does this help anyone? It's a major hassle for both players and, I have to imagine, GOs as well. That's not even to mention that removing these buttons will make it far less likely that newer players will report verbal abuse or cheating as they can no longer find the means to do so nearly as easily as before.

  • Arcorian What is the new procedure to file reports against players,messages, articles, coalitions names flags, photo's etc...? Can you please give us step by step directions for both mobile app and for pc users to accomplish submitting a report?


    I object to this last UPDATE, why remove ability for players to report players or newspaper articles or to make community to jump thru flaming hoops to make any reports > Bytro already has a 'predefined response" policy in place

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  • Player generated content can be reported through the general support ticket system on PC or the bug report feature on mobile. Unfortunately, it is indeed less convenient than it was before, but the convenience of the previous system lead to players often report user generated content that was not violating anything for whatever reason.

    When there is a violation and players need help, we are still there for you and the rules and terms of service still apply, but we try to allow the team to focus on the cases where help is needed.

  • but we try to allow the team to focus on the cases where help is needed.


    By making it much more cumbersome for them to assess whether help is needed or not and determine such cases.



    Anything about "province order" yet, no? I know how I would feel about my coworkers if they gave me information to spread to customers on their behalf and then it turned out that information was faulty and I was left unable to answer glaring questions about it. I also know how my bosses would feel about that.

  • Guys, seriously, the removal of the report buttons I have a hard time finding a word for that you're not gonna at least warn me for. It smacks of clearly subpar intellect, let's say it that way.

    If I have to read "How do u report a message" one more time in Help chat, I swear to god. So clearly, you didn't just remove those buttons to the main effect that making justified reports is now much harder both on me but also on the GO who picks them up, you also did an amazingly awful job at communicating this to players and more importantly communicating to them what the procedure is to report content now. Yeah, I know, there's a thread explaining it on the Forums here that nobody uses anymore - extremely helpful. Clearly it's not helping a lot of players. What you did is take a feature that was very accessible, obvious, hard to miss and easy to understand and you hid it within menues or at the bottom of the homepage and added several steps of work to it, then you're not showing any credible effort (no, a single forum thread by a volunteer is not a credible effort by a company with six-digit revenues) to explain to your customers how to at least be able to still use the feature at all, albeit in a much worse way than before anyway. If anyone thought it wasn't exceedingly transparent where you're headed with that, they're very wrong. At this point I seriously have to wonder why there still is a report function at all after this kind of change and this kind of handling of it. You very obviously don't wanna bother with it.


    There at least would have to be a prominent note about it to every player, a prominent mention of how to access the feature in the tutorial probably wouldn't hurt either. I'm not gonna let you guys try to tell me you have no idea what kind of people post what kind of content in what kind of numbers around here. You know full well that the likelihood that any random player will encounter fascist imagery, racist remarks, excessive verbal abuse, antisemitic content, multi-account cheaters, wolfpackers and other fun things while playing this game approaches 100% over time. Hell, even the oh-so-dreaded denunciation of Goldmark players is at a drastically increased risk of going unreported now. Maybe a sign that it's indeed less sinister motives and more good old incompetence at work here. The point is that making it harder to report those things is a decision that is inherently going to lead to an increase in that kind of content by a drop in reports and thus measures taken against it. It is in stark contrast to the actual reality of how needed the feature is. Does having fewer baseless reports really mean that much to you? Or is this just a decision mimicking what the other Big Players on the mobile gaming market are doing? Not bothering with a "community"?


    If there was a way to still report content directly, for example by linking DE articles or private messages in that report, I certainly wouldn't be so mad about the button being moved into a menue. It would just go down as one more of those features that were made worse along the way or just straight up disappeared altogether for no acceptable reason at all. At least then one could give Bytro the benefit of the doubt here about "Most reports are baseless, we need to add another layer of involvment to deter those". But you didn't only make it a little more demanding on players to file them, you shafted your own volunteers who are going through those reports now that the content that is being reported isn't filed along with the report automatically anymore. This is the other, no less problematic side to this change: You made life harder on your own guys. That's not what somebody would do who wants reports to be handled well and efficiently. I'm going to venture the guess here that while completely unreasonable reports have probably been going down, the number of reports with basis in fact that were not or could not be investigated because details were lacking from the report (that the player would not have had to add themselves a few weeks ago) rises. Is that good for anyone now?

  • Giving this one yet another bump because: Province order, anyone? Did Bytro not program this feature or why do they apparently find it so hard to give anyone information about it? If it's the broken shell of something you wanted to do but didn't, just say so, if it's supposed to be filled with some actual functionality in the future, just say so, jeez.

  • Giving this one yet another bump because: Province order, anyone?

    I have done some inquiries about this province order, and it seems to be consensus that it is of ZERO use in s1914, and is somehow a 'bleed-over' from other bytro games which somehow found its way into the s1914 code...


    It will likely vanish without a word in next couple updates / patchnote releases

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