In the 1.09 Update named “Battle Flow” we have added a new default front page to the game client – the “Bulletin” page.
The page has three main sections from left to right – War Update, News & Friends.
War Update
War Update has three possible states:
Novice
– This is what players below player level 10 is shown.
It serves to introduce you to the war concept and show just enough information about the current progress of the war to be interesting without being overwhelming and confusing.
Join the war!
– This is what player above level 10 that has not yet chosen a faction is shown.
It is mainly designed to entice them to check out the Generals part of the game, thereby choosing a faction and participating in the war proper. The most important aspect of this view is the call to action button.
Elite – War Participant
This is the full view containing the most information about the war.
When you have joined a faction you are now a proper war participant, this view aims to feed you with information about the wins, losses, ebb and flow of the war to keep you informed.
News Area
In the center of the Bulletin page we have the News section where you will find the current news about the game as well as a link to the current Changelog/Message of the Day if there is something important we need to let you know. The idea is that you can use this section to get a quick overview of what is happening in and around the game.
Friends Area
To the right you can see a list of your friends, the faction they are playing this war and when they are online you can queue for their battle as well as start a private chat by double-clicking their name. A tooltip also explains all this so you don’t have to remember it all. And finally the friends list button now shows number of online friends in the notification instead of pending invitations.
UI changes and updates
We have also gone through the rest of the UI and added a lot of small tweaks and polishes, with a lot of it based on feedback from a lot of players, telling us what they’d like to make everything nicer and easier to read and use.
Top bar
The Top bar on screen is now less cluttered making it a lot easier to focus on the task at hand. Take a look at them side by side below.
Old 1.08 top bar
NEW 1.09 top bar
On seemingly small thing that makes it a lot easier on the eyes is the added thousand separators for improved number readability, as you can see below.
Old 1.08
New 1.09
A lot of annoyances and bugs are fixed in the UI – for example scopes where not show on all weapons even when equipped. You can press ESC to close matchmaking filters, and you can leave your squad by interacting with the quick squad area and remove members if you are squad leader, see a picture of the new Quick Squad Area below.
Generals screen
On the Generals’ side of things a number of polishes and tweaks are also added to improve the flow and make everything less cluttered and more intuitive to use.
An example is that we have added multi move for AT stack on cities for your own ATs as can be seen below here.
The location stack on cities no longer has Assault Teams behind matchmaking / action game info, you can perform AT actions from the Assault Team details area for your owned Assault Teams (Deploy, Reinforce, Retreat, Cancel Queue).
We think that you will enjoy all these updates to make the game feel more natural to use and help the overall Battle Flow.