Unknown2011-06-10 01:23:41
As nice as some of the features are on the new Lusternia website, the design is not nice. There were many reasons and alterations suggested in this thread. Since we haven't seen changes made, I'd like to organise an online petition (probably hosted on i-petitions.com or change.org) and send it off to the Webmaster. I'm not good at being concise, so I thought we could write this statement together.
It's a free game and we're not stockholders, but this website is one of the ways we interface with the game and show it off to new people. We can vote and vote on TMS, but after the website loads in their browser, it's hard to get a new player to stay.
You can sign the petition here.
--- Latest Draft of Statement v3---
Greetings Jeremy Saunders,
Many multiplayer games can say they are 100% free to play in their browser. Only Lusternia can claim to be a multi-planar realm whose players can both hunt and influence, take on quests in every area, fly through aetherspace, or face trials to become an Ascendant. Yet highlighting these aspects is secondary in the current layout of Lusternia's front webpage. A large number of players have commented on how to make the front page better. Many comments can be found here on the Lusternia Forums. Some of the more insightful comments and suggestions are outlined below.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
...The.Dotted.Line...
It's a free game and we're not stockholders, but this website is one of the ways we interface with the game and show it off to new people. We can vote and vote on TMS, but after the website loads in their browser, it's hard to get a new player to stay.
You can sign the petition here.
--- Latest Draft of Statement v3---
Greetings Jeremy Saunders,
Many multiplayer games can say they are 100% free to play in their browser. Only Lusternia can claim to be a multi-planar realm whose players can both hunt and influence, take on quests in every area, fly through aetherspace, or face trials to become an Ascendant. Yet highlighting these aspects is secondary in the current layout of Lusternia's front webpage. A large number of players have commented on how to make the front page better. Many comments can be found here on the Lusternia Forums. Some of the more insightful comments and suggestions are outlined below.
- The web page is too commercial and generic. Highlighting what is unique to Lusternia is more effective.
- It's not easy to navigate for old or new players. New players want to read about races, archetypes, etc. when starting a new character. "Game Info" is too broad an umbrella to put this under. Links to "Characters", "Society", and "Planes" on the front page highlight what make Lusternia unique.
- The impression people get of Lusternia from the current design conflicts with the actual features in the game and consequently the kind of people who'll enjoy them. The emphasis on Lusternia being a free game rather than a rich, complex world does not reflect well on the current playerbase that new players are considering joining.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
...The.Dotted.Line...
Casilu2011-06-10 01:41:46
Glorblock eagerly awaits to feed on this thread.
Anyway, if it gets to a done petition, I'll sign.
Anyway, if it gets to a done petition, I'll sign.
Unknown2011-06-10 02:22:07
QUOTE (casilu @ Jun 9 2011, 09:41 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Glorblock eagerly awaits to feed on this thread.
Anyway, if it gets to a done petition, I'll sign.
Anyway, if it gets to a done petition, I'll sign.
Oh you!
I LOL'ed
Mirami2011-06-12 05:03:35
QUOTE (Xikue @ Jun 9 2011, 06:23 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
As nice as some of the features are on the new Lusternia website...
--- Points to Include in the Statement? ---
--- Points to Include in the Statement? ---
- It's too commercial and generic. Telling people what Lusternia is (Prav) is more effective. Talk about what makes Lusternia great, not about how great Lusternia is (Romertien)...
Sound plan! How's this look?
--- Draft of Statement v1---
Greetings Jeremy Saunders,
Many multiplayer games can say they are 100% free to play in their browser. Only Lusternia can claim to be a multi-planar realm whose players can both hunt and influence, take on quests in every area, fly through aetherspace, or face trials to become an Ascendant. Yet these highlighting these aspects is secondary in the current layout of Lusternia's front webpage. A large number of players have commented on how to make it better. Many comments can be found Here <> on the Lusternia Forums. Some of the more insightful comments and suggestions are outlined below:
- It's too commercial and generic. Telling people what Lusternia is is more effective. Talk about what makes Lusternia great, not about how great Lusternia is.
- It's not easy to navigate for old or new players. People want to read about races, archetypes, etc. when starting a new character. "Game Info" is too broad an umbrella to put this under. (Estarra has said that she's in charge of stuff under Info, but there's nothing wrong with having the links "Characters", "Society", "Planes" on the front page. They highlight what makes Lusternia unique.)
- It makes current players question who the target audience (incoming novices) is; likewise, it makes first-time visitors question the maturity of the current playerbase.
- <
>
Overall, we feel that the front page should focus on telling people what is unique about Lusternia instead of giving generic lines that other MUDs, even other online games, can claim.
Thanks for your time,
-The Players of Lusternia
Ilyssa2011-06-12 05:28:15
Everiine2011-06-12 06:47:10
I sent an email to the Webmaster a while ago, but received no response. Here's a copy of it, which details my thoughts on the website:
QUOTE
To the webmaster of the Lusternia website,
I've been browsing around the new Lusternia website for a few months now, trying to get a feel for it. Following the advice originally posted in the Lusternia forum thread, I wanted to send my feedback on the new site design.
I'll first acknowledge my biases: I'm not particularly a fan of Drupal, nor of the blog/news style of website layout. However, I've tried to look past that when looking at the Lusternia website.
It is inevitable that, when looking at the new website, one would compare it to the old website. So, I've decided to run with it.
What I liked about the old website:
-It felt like Lusternia: the textured backgrounds, the colors, the font, and the artwork all made the website feel like I was about to enter a new world.
-The sidebar: everything I needed to know was instantly available from the sidebar and dropdown menus. I didn't need to look very far, no matter what I needed.
-The front page information: The front page cleanly laid out what Lusternia was: an introduction to the lore/setting, an extensive list of uniquely Lusternian features, and a number of news items. When I first started playing Lusternia, it was because of what I read on the front page.
Now, to be fair, there were some things that I did not like about the old website:
-Text size: some things were just too darn small. Links were sometimes difficult to click correctly.
-Speed: the old website could be cumbersome, with longer load times than normal.
What the new website does well:
-Clean: The new website is not nearly as cumbersome as the old. It loads much more quickly.
-News and Messages: THANK YOU for getting the in-game news boards on to the website. It makes things much, MUCH easier to track. It is also easier to get to my in-game messages. This whole section of the website is quite useful.
-Artwork: that opening image of the Portal of Fate is EXACTLY the kind of lore material that drew me in to the old website. The artwork from the old site is also displayed more prominently in the new design.
-The flash and nexus clients are integrated well into the website design.
-While I didn't like it at first, I have gotten used to the Bottom of the Page, where a live feed is. It's enough out of the way that it doesn't displace anything.
Unfortunately, I find much more that the new website does not do well:
-On the front page, there are six separate places to Play/Create a character. I have a 1024x768 monitor, and five of the Play/Create character buttons are visible when the page loads. That is half of all the clickable links visible on the front page for me when it loads (I have to scroll down to see the others): Lusternia Home, Don't have a login?, Create a Character, Create a Character, Play Now, News and More, Game Info, Credits, Sign Up by Creating a Character. This is overkill at its most egregious. It reminds me of Facebook PLAY THIS GAME NOW ads. It makes Lusternia and IRE look desperate for players. It feels far too sloppy.
Related to this, on every single other page of the website, there is a Make a Character form, while the top bar does not change. This means that every page has five of these Play Now buttons/forms.
-No information: on the front page, the largest info box tells me nothing about what makes Lusternia different than other text games. "100% free", "Play in your browser", "Thousands of skills", "Get Started in minutes", "tons of quests", "interact with hundreds of players" tells me that this text game is just like any other. Yes, a bit further down the page, there is a small box that mentions Power, Feat, Aetherships, and Trades, but this is a far, far cry from the information that is present on the front page of the old website. While the old website may have overloaded visitors, the new one is way, way too sparse.
-Game Info: The game info section is a mix between clean and mess. It does not appear to be arranged in any fashion. Half of its subpages follow this same pattern: the Gods page is just one long, unorganized list of Gods, with no way of navigating it. The guilds page feels, quite honestly, cheap: the guilds are simply thrown into an amateur-looking HTML chart (the individual guild pages are okay, though).
The Elder Wars Pages are all broken (except for the Book of Bollikin)! They give me a "requested page could not be found" error.
ALL of the Chronicles of the Holy Celestine Empire are broken!
I will say, though, that the Races, Cities, Bardic/Artisanal, and Help Files pages are okay. However, the overall effect of the Game Info section is that it is sloppy, unfinished, and not as easy to find as on the new website. Which brings me to my last observation:
-The sidebar: the new sidebar is woefully inadequate compared to the new one. Except for the front page sidebar, the information that appears on every page is irrelevant to the game: another obnoxious "Create a Character" form (in addition to the other four of these buttons at the top), links to IRE articles, and a feed about recent comments. Combined with the lack of drop down menus on the top bar, this means that I have to search to find any useful information.
I hate to sound like a complainer, but I know that IRE is working really hard to try and draw more players in. However, I feel that the seemingly-incomplete new web design, combined especially with the broken history sections (really, this NEEDS to be fixed, as it is not working as it is supposed to), will not bring new players in, but cause them to gloss over the game and look for another. I've played Lusternia for 5+ years, and I'm not planning on going anywhere--I love the game (just ask my girlfriend), and want it to grow. The response from the Lusternia forums was widely negative to the new site, and I wanted to explain why.
Thank you for taking the time to read all the way through this.
I've been browsing around the new Lusternia website for a few months now, trying to get a feel for it. Following the advice originally posted in the Lusternia forum thread, I wanted to send my feedback on the new site design.
I'll first acknowledge my biases: I'm not particularly a fan of Drupal, nor of the blog/news style of website layout. However, I've tried to look past that when looking at the Lusternia website.
It is inevitable that, when looking at the new website, one would compare it to the old website. So, I've decided to run with it.
What I liked about the old website:
-It felt like Lusternia: the textured backgrounds, the colors, the font, and the artwork all made the website feel like I was about to enter a new world.
-The sidebar: everything I needed to know was instantly available from the sidebar and dropdown menus. I didn't need to look very far, no matter what I needed.
-The front page information: The front page cleanly laid out what Lusternia was: an introduction to the lore/setting, an extensive list of uniquely Lusternian features, and a number of news items. When I first started playing Lusternia, it was because of what I read on the front page.
Now, to be fair, there were some things that I did not like about the old website:
-Text size: some things were just too darn small. Links were sometimes difficult to click correctly.
-Speed: the old website could be cumbersome, with longer load times than normal.
What the new website does well:
-Clean: The new website is not nearly as cumbersome as the old. It loads much more quickly.
-News and Messages: THANK YOU for getting the in-game news boards on to the website. It makes things much, MUCH easier to track. It is also easier to get to my in-game messages. This whole section of the website is quite useful.
-Artwork: that opening image of the Portal of Fate is EXACTLY the kind of lore material that drew me in to the old website. The artwork from the old site is also displayed more prominently in the new design.
-The flash and nexus clients are integrated well into the website design.
-While I didn't like it at first, I have gotten used to the Bottom of the Page, where a live feed is. It's enough out of the way that it doesn't displace anything.
Unfortunately, I find much more that the new website does not do well:
-On the front page, there are six separate places to Play/Create a character. I have a 1024x768 monitor, and five of the Play/Create character buttons are visible when the page loads. That is half of all the clickable links visible on the front page for me when it loads (I have to scroll down to see the others): Lusternia Home, Don't have a login?, Create a Character, Create a Character, Play Now, News and More, Game Info, Credits, Sign Up by Creating a Character. This is overkill at its most egregious. It reminds me of Facebook PLAY THIS GAME NOW ads. It makes Lusternia and IRE look desperate for players. It feels far too sloppy.
Related to this, on every single other page of the website, there is a Make a Character form, while the top bar does not change. This means that every page has five of these Play Now buttons/forms.
-No information: on the front page, the largest info box tells me nothing about what makes Lusternia different than other text games. "100% free", "Play in your browser", "Thousands of skills", "Get Started in minutes", "tons of quests", "interact with hundreds of players" tells me that this text game is just like any other. Yes, a bit further down the page, there is a small box that mentions Power, Feat, Aetherships, and Trades, but this is a far, far cry from the information that is present on the front page of the old website. While the old website may have overloaded visitors, the new one is way, way too sparse.
-Game Info: The game info section is a mix between clean and mess. It does not appear to be arranged in any fashion. Half of its subpages follow this same pattern: the Gods page is just one long, unorganized list of Gods, with no way of navigating it. The guilds page feels, quite honestly, cheap: the guilds are simply thrown into an amateur-looking HTML chart (the individual guild pages are okay, though).
The Elder Wars Pages are all broken (except for the Book of Bollikin)! They give me a "requested page could not be found" error.
ALL of the Chronicles of the Holy Celestine Empire are broken!
I will say, though, that the Races, Cities, Bardic/Artisanal, and Help Files pages are okay. However, the overall effect of the Game Info section is that it is sloppy, unfinished, and not as easy to find as on the new website. Which brings me to my last observation:
-The sidebar: the new sidebar is woefully inadequate compared to the new one. Except for the front page sidebar, the information that appears on every page is irrelevant to the game: another obnoxious "Create a Character" form (in addition to the other four of these buttons at the top), links to IRE articles, and a feed about recent comments. Combined with the lack of drop down menus on the top bar, this means that I have to search to find any useful information.
I hate to sound like a complainer, but I know that IRE is working really hard to try and draw more players in. However, I feel that the seemingly-incomplete new web design, combined especially with the broken history sections (really, this NEEDS to be fixed, as it is not working as it is supposed to), will not bring new players in, but cause them to gloss over the game and look for another. I've played Lusternia for 5+ years, and I'm not planning on going anywhere--I love the game (just ask my girlfriend), and want it to grow. The response from the Lusternia forums was widely negative to the new site, and I wanted to explain why.
Thank you for taking the time to read all the way through this.
Ilyarin2011-06-12 07:59:20
I could almost understand a website redux if it was done across all IRE games to create a standardised format, but as far as I can tell, none of the other games' websites have changed. Lusternia now stands out as the worst of them all, with no particularly unique style or feature. It is a disgustingly poor design that I believe has little or no regard for existing members of the community. Functionality of the website, overall, has decreased, and the layout is frankly appalling. I can't see how this design would have excelled in any feedback groups, particularly if MUD players were involved. You're advertising a text-based game as if it were graphical. My question is, why has Lusternia's website had to have this big overhaul (has this been answered already?)?
Arel2011-06-12 08:05:26
I think Achaea's new website is currently in the design stages but they mentioned they were getting a new website sometime in April. I think we were the pilot for the website changes.
Ilyarin2011-06-12 08:28:40
I hope they take heed, then. 
Unknown2011-06-12 16:36:23
*signs*
*signs with authenticity*
*signs with actual name 'cause
just got real*
*signs with authenticity*
*signs with actual name 'cause
just got real*Veyrzhul2011-06-12 16:53:22
Agreed and signed.
Unknown2011-06-12 17:40:45
Yes to Everiine's comments above, and what I miss from the old website are the maps and access to Character profiles/history/pictures. I'd posted about this artist once in a thread about new forum looks somewhere, but I'll add it again- Anton Wiklund does beautiful work with website design especially for games. I don't know how his rates are, but if IRE can hire for gorgeous race pictures and org pictures, maybe they could hire for web design? Some of his designs remind me of the old website, some of this forum, and some purely graphical, but I think his work could lend well to any genre really.
Everiine2011-06-12 17:56:49
Oh, I guess I forgot to put my stamp of approval on the petition, didn't I.
*STAMP*
*STAMP*
Rakor2011-06-13 00:04:04
Will sign this
Unknown2011-06-13 00:19:31
Updated the statement. At first I wasn't going to go with the bullet-point list, but after seeing Romertien's draft, I liked it.
I'm going to look for a online petition form with an additional Comments text field, so people can give specifics on web design details to change. Everiine and Enyalida should totally copy-paste what they have to say. And Deschain should put in his screenshot of a better design.
I'm going to look for a online petition form with an additional Comments text field, so people can give specifics on web design details to change. Everiine and Enyalida should totally copy-paste what they have to say. And Deschain should put in his screenshot of a better design.
Unknown2011-06-13 01:24:09
Signed!
Unknown2011-06-13 07:28:37
I'll sign it.
Faymar2011-06-13 07:47:39
Count me in.
It looks like one of those cartoon mmo's that seven year olds play.
It looks like one of those cartoon mmo's that seven year olds play.
Reiha2011-06-13 07:59:54
Signed. I chose Lusternia over the IRE games when I first started mudding because of its previous layout!
Placeus2011-06-13 09:37:14
Signed!
