The pursuits tab is bad (Destiny)

by Vortech , A Fourth Wheel, Wednesday, June 05, 2019, 08:55 (2017 days ago) @ bluerunner

Too many button presses to get to it. Everything is clumped together. Multiple pages. I just want to find those gambit bounties I picked up yesterday but they are split between two pages. The sorting buttons aren't useful. Why is catnip in my pursuits page? Why is the chalice and reckoning mote oven on the pursuits tab? Every time I open the tab I have to go hunting them. And why can't I delete the mysterious box quest after I have already finished it on another character?! Ugh.

So I'm clearly in the minority in that I'm on the whole positive about the pursuits change. (not just on this forum but in talking with people while I play and looking around the web at large) I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think it is better and the problems with it for me are all the same problems it had before (and almost certainly stem from underlying systems, which is why they carried over through the UI change). Not to tell anyone they are wrong. You feel how you feel, and UI can be an individual thing with no right answer for everyone, but I do think there at least reasons why for the examples where people are asking why, and I think there are major upgrades going uncommented upon.

## Too many button presses:
It's 2, right? Same as before? You sometimes need to hold the button down, so that slows me down sometimes comparatively, but it's not a big change for me. At the same time, Consumables are now one step more accessible. The thing that slows me down is that I have never once not gone to the old location first. I assume that will change after a couple months of me failing to remember the change, though. I do sometimes need to press extra buttons to find a specific pursuit, because they spread to multiple pages, though…

## Multiple pages:
I see this as a cost, but how is the cost of multiple pages not overwhelmed by the benefit of MULTIPLE PAGES?! no more running out of space for bounties and pursuits. No more trips back to the tower just to pick up the bounties that would not fit. When they created on-demand bounty turn in it was often canceled out by the fact that you needed to go mack to the tower to replace them. And that has been more and more common as they added more and more things to pursuits category:

## Why are things there?
Because they were there before. Because they are pursuits. I understand and agree with the argument that things like cookie ovens and gambit node recombinators and chalices and other things* should not be pursuits, and that it was a MacGuyvering of the existing game engine to do a thing that didn't fit within the scope of the live team/season pass release. This is a biz/dev and software strategy questions that you can think they got wrong (I probably agree, but also know that I don't have all the information to really understand the decision) but it's not a problem created by this particular UI change. I can appreciate the upgraded condiments on the burger even though it didn't change the meat.

## Everything blends together:
This seems like a similar thing to the one above — the complaint is that it made things better, but not better-er enough — EXCEPT, this is purely about UI/UX. I think that makes it more reasonable as a complaint. After all, if you're going to tear stuff up and move it around, how you move it around is more likely to be about what you chose to do than what you were able to do. The good news is by moving pursuits to a separate tab, rather than a page shared with shaders and consumables, etc. there's some room for them to keep working on this. Even better, now that there is a filter button in addition to a sort, it would be even easier than making a second vertical page to add a filter for the doodads. it's not check a box and hit build easy, but it feels like its within reach as an imperfect refinement to an imperfect solution that would — for all of its fundamental flaws — make people have a better time with the game. Better sort and filter options could improve a lot of this stuff.

## dedicated spaces for crafting doodads:
I pretty much addressed this above, but the problem with getting too specialized for these things are that they were kludgy already. and, apparently, it's a kluge they intend to keep using as each release seems to have a new one. Requiring an UI change to add them involves a lot of different departments getting added in and the whole point was they didn't have the resources to make a big change for it already, so…. I di think a separate vertical page would be simple and expandable enough that it's worth serious thought.

## no text:
I understand how it's cluttered and a lot of information all at once, but I just can't see how it's not better then requiring a mouse-over to even identify among a string of identical icons. And further, how - other then text - can you solve that problem? I can't keep all the names of gear straight, I'm not going to be able to memorize a different icon for every possible bounty and quest. This might be an area for improving readability through font/layout, but text on display has to be the right answer, yeah?

There are a lot of places where I see room for improvement, and AND, yeah, there's a LOT of things that we should be able to delete. (I didn't know about the mysterious box quest, and that's a problem. There are a lot of consumables that can only be consumed not deleted, and they have cool down timers so it makes it even more onerous.) but this seems like an improvement over all with groundwork laid to make it bearer more easily. I'm not trying to make anyone not complain, but hopefully give some perspective that lets those who want to, to focus on more actionable stuff rather than complaining about things that the UI folks probably are already annoyed by themselves.

Wow, all of that and I didn't even get to the new quests that are not tied to triumphs anymore, but still account-wide so totally UX expectation breaking but HEY! that means they allow you to track them in the HUD which you could not do with triumphs, so probably another imperfect UI improvement solving a pain point but held back by game system stuff…

* when I was talking with one of the DIM devs about this last night he called them the "doodads" that should be on the doodad page. I liked that and probably will adopt it as a term.