Today, I shyly poked my nose into MP and decided to spectate/stalk a couple players to see what it looked like. I wanted to see if spectating would feel confusing, or intuitive to me. In the end it was a little of both, so I wanted to list a couple things that made interpreting what I was watching particularly troublesome for me, as someone just looking at it for the first time. 1. First and foremost, the feature that causes the game to pause and demonstrate "new" cards for me was really distracting. The players would pause to think, then unleash a flurry of moves on each other all at once. I'd strain to keep up with what they were doing and suddenly, Whoosh: A new card! Slam on the breaks and have a look at that! As someone who's only interested in observing, the fact that I'm now forced to take action in my voluntarily passive observer state feels disruptive and demanding, like clicking away youtube commercials "click here to return to content". It also didn't feel informative, since just because I've never personally played any of these cards doesn't mean I don't own tons of them. If I really wanted to look at it, I think I'd just click on the underlined portion of the combat log. I'd suggest a default disarming of this feature for observers of MP. 2. I noticed (something that someone else already posted about) that nimbus doesn't declare the name of the target character. If I recall, it just said "... makes someone invulnerable to damage". This definitely messed up my ability to follow the action, so I wanted to harp on this just a tiny bit too. The combat log is a lot more important to an observer than a player sometimes, because during quick actions the players know what they just did, but maybe i blinked and now I've got to scroll back up and figure out who just hit what for how much damage. 3. At least for my eyesight, telling the two teams apart was much harder than I thought it would be. I didn't even notice until my second observed match that the teams had black and white figurine stands. Possibly this is because the floor was sort of a neutralizing grey. Many of the matches I watched involved four or five of the same exact figurine. When the players really get hopping along at a good pace, it becomes really confusing to tell who's who. If I may make a suggestion here, I'd suggest that just for the observers, give a more pronounced palette swap. Players probably have no problems telling their units apart, but for me the observer, 3 dwarves vs 3 dwarves was extremely frustrating to keep track of. 4. Also, to a lesser degree, it was a bit frustrating that the player on the top of the screen got the tiny cards. In a singleplayer game I can always pause and highlight what's visible up there, but as a outside observer, these cards are sometimes shifting around so fast that their tiny size makes them very hard to discriminate. I think that if I'd had the option I'd have simply closed the battle log and allowed the top player's cards to be as visible as the bottom player's. I'd probably value this much more than the ability to chat with them. Now that I'm done looking like I'm super-critical, I'd like to say that overall the experience was a pleasant one that I look forward to taking advantage of in the future. There's real entertainment value to be had here, just being an observer. The matches I watched were great! Anything that can make this even easier to watch and learn from would be appreciated!
1. Just thought about this the other day - should definitely have a third option with no pauses at all. 2.It's even worse than that since if you scroll up on the battle log and someone does something it pops back down so it can really be frustrating. you need to be quick about it... 3.Wait, what???? *mind blown*, I have played over a thousand matches (including beta) and because of you I'm just now aware that each team has different colored circles underneath, regardless of me obviously needing to get tested you might have a serious point here. great post, man.
