31 signatures is not enough... come on people!

The front page has been made worse again. What little information about the game itself has been removed, replaced with "PLAY ME PLAY ME PLAY ME PLAY ME". How do you expect anyone to play a game that you aren't telling them anything about? I counted again, and logged into the website, there are SIX places to click to create a new character on the front page. Unacceptable. It's piss poor website design, plain and simple, regardless of what the website is for. If you presented this website to a big corporation and it had six identical links on the front page with different names, you would be laughed out of the board room and your contract terminated.

This website should have never been released. It's barely out of alpha design testing. There are typos everywhere (some have been reported). Somehow, the color of the border of the blog comments is important enough to be changed and fiddled with endlessly, but the absolutely GLARING design flaws, broken links, and incomplete pages are never addressed. Whoever designed and approved this to come out of beta and fully replace the previous website should be ashamed of themselves.

It's a crap excuse for a website with crap management. Lusternia admins, I am really sorry if you are the ones who are currently in charge of managing the website. If so, this may be the only time I've ever not respected your work even when I don't agree with it. I can be pretty volatile at times, but it's because I care way too much to see Lusternia suffer because some hoighty toighty big researcher said that this new website is the shizz.

The concept and "feel" of the website is not bad. The colors, that awesome front page image, the integrated news and messages--these all indicate that there is some hope for the new design. But it needs MAJOR, MAJOR, MAJOR attention and overhauls before it is even acceptable by modern website standards and expectations, let alone the expectations of the players.

As I am stuck on Moon Bubble lagging my ass off (piffle you, server!) with a novice doing the Planes Quest, I have decided to add a post to this thread.

Now, I'm not the quickest person in the world, but when the new website first premiered, it probably took me around an hour (okay, fine, half an hour) to find out where the maps were hidden. I am still constantly being redirected (sometimes to the same page) and having to fight my way through multiple pages in order to get to what I want (i.e. maps or history). Every few days, the website seems to change and I need to re-familiarize myself with the layout and annoying navigation. I too miss the days where there were those magical buttons of "World" "Organizations", etc. on the side, perfectly allowing me to find what I wished to view.

Even while writing this post, I have come to realize that navigation to Game News / Messages (or whatever it was) has become more complicated, discouraging me of checking Haven's blogposts for stuff from my favorite Lord Hoaracle. Now, that's a section I do love. Talking with and reading about the people who are so wonderful to us and commit their time to our roleplaying.

Hey, 'Need Help?' No problem! There's a heading on the main page with that exact question! Look, you can go to the 'Help Files' ... oh wait, that takes me to 'Game Info'. Under which is a link to 'Help Files'.... The FAQ works. Which is good. Because I like the FAQ. It allows me to tell you how you should structure the website. Under the third roman numeral: 'Our game is different'. The stuff there is why I joined Lusternia. Honestly, that's the sort of info I saw on the original webpage and that's why I play.

On the plus side, it's now easier for me to whimsically spend money on credits. Why, look! A 'CREDITS' button at the top of the page! Funny...I thought Lusternia was free. Why provide only three links at the top? One of which is 'Play Now' (because I'm incompetent and cannot press 'Create A Character' in the three or so other places. It's hard being me.). Another is 'Game Info', into which the previously mentioned histories and messages and everything have been dumped. Seriously, they're dumped there. No offense, I do love the pictures with them!

Speaking of pictures, this is a text game. Shiny shiny shiny beautiful pictures are on the webpage. For a text game. Alright, I love how their laid out -- the pictures that annoy me are in the Live Feed. Every time I navigate onto that page, BLAM! Spam. Streaming pictures and words flashing by. Flashy.

I am no website designer. I am a player of Lusternia. So are the other people posting here. We are telling you what needs to be done.

I was talking to my friend about Lusternia and he looked up the website, told me it looked retarded, and laughed at me for playing it. And this is someone who plays and enjoys MUDs! Why do you do this to me, Lusternia website.

Because market research is infallible.

I gave up on navigating the new website. I have resorted to using google to search for specific pages I'm after, as well as using old.lusternia.com for finding stuff via browsing. I will venture to say that people who are attracted to MUDs aren't exactly the kind of people who are going to be pulled in by flashy graphics on an extremely hard-to-navigate website :/ (unless, of course, you are using it to 'play now!' or buy credits. Which is is full of links to. It loads slower than the old one too)

But... but... market research!

Still dislike the front page, but the menu is in need of an overhaul. Break up Game Info please? The current set up is inefficient and requires too much scrolling to reach what we check the most often. (I've Game Messages and Artisanal/Bardic bookmarked.) Have Society, History, Help, IG News Room, OOC News Room, and Extensions (names need fixing but you get the idea) between Play Now and Credits. Give them dropdown boxes, grouping what's curently in Game Info like so.

Society
----
Races
Cities and Nature Communes
Guilds
Gods
Skill List
Player Info

History
----
Cosmogenesis
Elder Wars
Vernal Wars
Aftermath
Chronicles of the Holy Empire
Coming of Estarra

Help
----
Maps
Help Files
Fourms
Lusternia Wiki

IG News Room
----
Game Messages
Game News

OOC News Room
----
Artisanal and Bardic Contest
Newsletters
Havens Hideout

Extensions
---
Android Client
Firefox Toolbar
Chrome Extension

All of these ideas are good. However, I must point out that its a bit comical and ironic that we are all complaining about the "looks". I mean, we are playing text games....

This comment is not to discredit anything above, just to point out that I LOL'd.

How a website (which functions as the first impression for new customers) looks isn't in any way related to the face that it is a text game. I don't really find it comical or ironic at all.

I, on the other hand, find it exceedingly comical and ironic. Healthy debate grows from two sides,

I see your point, however, the look of the new website was specifically designed to attract new players, and instead, it is doing the opposite.

I always preferred the old-timey look of the previous layout. It was pretty fitting, and you could read the histories on it without a feeling on incongruity. I also think the organization could be better on this new site. Everything just seems to be thrown onto one page as opposed to the logical dropdown (drop-side?) menus we had before.

I also think the purple footer is way too big. If it was a third of its current size, it would look a lot better.

Naturally, access to WHO is something that keeps people going back to old.lusternia.com as well.

Jeremy addressed some of this in the UStream today. They are listening, but apparently the home page is actually bringing (I think he said) 5 times the traffic from Search Engines and has been a boon to recruiting new players. If the UStream gets recorded I can quote it exactly--but they are listening and fixing what they can.

All the IRE sites will be converted to Lusternia's format soon.

I like how listening means "I'll change the font again, that will fix it." I don't buy it.

Achaea just moved over to Lusternia's format.

http://www.achaea.com/

I think when it comes to criticism, we should stick to bugs and the like. I think we can make suggestions, but it's pretty obvious to me that (a) this is the direction IRE is going to go in, regardless of our own personal feelings and ( they likely have the metrics to back this up--they see the logs and know if it's successful in recruiting players, for instance, while we can only guess and make subjective views. So I personally am going to just indicate bugs in content, rather than suggest how the site "should be". That's why I'm not singing the petition, since it's not likely to change anything and I'd rather try to make nuanced criticism.

Wow. Identical websites. How original.

No matter, I'll still continue to point people to http://old.lusternia.com when they need to find any, you know, information about the game.

And when they finally get rid of old.lusternia.com and shut it down/point it to the new site? (I suspect that will be gone when the final bugs are gone and/or by the end of this year at the latest.)

I just wish they could fix the broken images in places like Haven's Hideout right now. Once they get the images fixed I think things will be okay.

If they wait to shut it down until all the bugs are gone on the new website, we'll have it forever. They are more concerned with changing the font than they are with fixing the site. But once the old site is gone for good, I'll just stop telling people to go to the website and have them jump right in the game, since they'll actually get information there.

How will that fix things?

Everything is lumped together in one massive pile on one page. If I want to find messages on the new site I have to actually do a ctrl-f and search for it (once I was told it was on that page in the first place) to find it.

It is so user unfriendly that it makes me angry and any attempts to say otherwise are... well, wrong.

I had to angry "lol" that they released a half built, bug ridden website out of beta. How unprofessional can IRE get? And now they've pushed the half built, bug ridden website onto another game. At least we aren't the only ones suffering.

Makes me glad I'm not in a vocation where I have to give a crap about "market research". I could, but I don't.