Gen progress hud bars and status icons. New player perspective.
As a new player the hud is unbelievably confusing.
There are a number of other fixes I would change, but the biggest one that by far confused me the most was the generator repair bar.
It took me so long to figure this out, and I think it could be changed in a way that promotes gen repair and teamwork.
Right now the bar remains grey if nothing is effecting it and your repairing by yoirself.
The bar remains red if something is slowing down repair speed and your repairing it yourself .
And the bar remains yellow if you use something like a toolbox to repair gens more quickly.
However, the bar remains red if you repair with someone else...despite the fact that the bar is moving faster. This took me forever to figure out and it was causing me to stop and try to figure out what what causing the slowdown.
Way later someone was nice enough to explain that you receive a debuff when you repair with other people, and the red color is your personal bar showing a slowdown despite the bar still moving faster.
This is even more annoying when there are perks in play, prove thyself cancels out he debuff...but still shows red for some reason. And if you're repairing with other people, you the bar doesn't tell you if that slowdown is making it worse normal or better versus baseline speed.
The proposed change should be as follows. Tie the color of the bar to baseline speeds only. Grey if the bar is moving normal speed, red if bar is moving lower than normal speed, yellow if bar is moving faster than normal speed.
Put all the debuffs to the right. If there is a 15% penalty to gen repair speed for repairing with other players then just make a little gen icon in red or something and stick to the right with the others like dying light and and thano.
Overall the bar should be telling me:
"hey, you got a yellow bar so this gen is repairing faster than normal, but over here to the right are a few penalties and if those were not there it could be even faster!"
Or:
"hey, the bar is red, the gen is repairing slower than baseline speed, see the things to the right to see why, get rid of those things and gens will get back to normal or faster."
It would be informative and interesting to see if doing gens with teammates or using items/perks overpowers the current debuffs.
It's also a visual mental reward as well. Right now in its current state it's demoralizing, the bar is constantly red most of the game. When it is yellow players get excited, it's a visual stimulation that makes players feel they are really burning through a gen, and they are inclined to keep going or stick with that teammate to keep it going.
Anyway, that's just my two cents, I know most veterans already know all the inns and outs of the game, so this doesn't affect them. But as a new player this could make so much more sense and would be less confusing overall.
P.S, forgot to add, why the heck does the red bar have arrows pointing this way >>>. If it's slower then the arrows should be this way <<<. Took me so long to figure out if red was bad or not, especially when the bar sometimes moves faster than normal with multiple people but it's still red.
Comments
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Thank you for your helpful feedback.
It's always good to hear feedback from newer players, a lot of us have many years playing the game so it's very interesting and informative to see the game through the eyes of a newer players just starting out.
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