interface community?
 

WHERE'D EVERYONE GO?

man, I leave for a sec. and there's no more ui design discussion/debate, or "look at my shiny ui" threads anymore. I mean, yes everything is still here and i recognize some of the old hats (still doing cool stuff guys) but it feels like some creepy deserted town where theres no more community.

my spider senses are telling me the ui community is just fu**ed- lich king/2nd half of bc were the golden days.

is it just me though? help lol

I've sensed similar, things seemed to start quieting down towards the end of LK and into Cata. Hell, the same thing happened to my friends list (was 20+ in LK, now 3 in Cata) :p

I think the most active people here got their heads in the beta right now, trying to be one step ahead so that some addons will work when the expansion hits :) It's not a tiny piece of work.

And yeah, while cataclysm has been going on blizzard have lost a big number of subscribers, and the community too for sure, even if it's not as many.

And I'd like to say the community is rolling on good, it's been competitions and forum posts and updated/new compilations like always, there's just not as many posts in the 'here's my UI'-threads :) Which got their own part of the forums now btw! :)

I think the re-organization of this forum kinda killed the mood. Before everyone could just throw some shots in the thread and get feedback, now it's all complicated and one has to provide a proper thread etc. and of course the fact that world of warcraft is slowly dying.

No, that would be you. I'm still having fun twisting the knife, though. ;)

I put up a poll for everyone to vote on.

...put a poll up. :D

/me pokes the dolby

How many polls do you plan on putting up? :p

I'm gonna put YOU up - right upside the head! :p

Admin fight! *grabs popcorn*

*Joins in with 3D-glasses*

I feel what you're saying in this thread, OP. I've seen the same with my realm on WoW for the past few months - nothing lasts forever, as much as you'd wish you could go back to the good old days.

Some have left, some just lost motivation but are still around. Perhaps the surge of ideas is simply over.

However, there'll always be new people, as times moves on. Things won't be the same, but that doesn't mean that everything is gone. On WoW as of the past few weeks, I've seen activity rising again, with new people joining in and a few of the old ones coming back. The same can apply to the UI community.

MoP is sure to draw the attention of addon authors at least, because they'll need to fix everything once again. :p

Unnecessarily lengthy reply perhaps, but the "good old days" are always something that matter to me. :)

I really wish Blizz would drop the subscription cost to $10/mo, I'm sure they'd stop losing as many subscribers each quarter. It'd definitely revive the game, but they'd have to hold the load of more people joining again.

A few years ago (nearly) every ui posted looked different ... today there are just two or three directions.

But I have the feeling that uploads are rising again :)

Back before I quit (right before Cata came out) I was so fed up with WoW that the only reason I even played anymore was to fiddle with my UI. I know a few people who were in the same boat, or who only farmed achievements/rare mounts etc.

People aren't bored of UIs, they're bored of WoW.

/obligatory rant about how every UI looks the same, the good old days, etc.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

The UI community isn't even close to what it used to be back in late TBC/early WotLK.

I feel that TukUI, while a great UI, shot the creative UI community in the face and now we have a horribly disfigured abomination instead of the amazing community we used to have.
If the shot to the face wasn't bad enough, Cataclysm decided to burn the abomination, further destroying it.

I'm hoping Mists of Pandaria brings it back. I miss the days when there were new quality posts daily on several boards instead of the "1 good UI posted per month" **** we have going on now.

Rant over. :D

Also, as for the poll question, why not do both? Let us have our "Post your UI" thread in this very forum and see how that works out. I feel as if you're doing it "the blizzard way" where there have to be one or the other, and never the middle ground. Try it out and see how it feels! :)

That has always been an option. If people choose to do that, we aren't going to stop them. The poll was just to see if everyone just wants to get rid of the forum entirely. :)

In my opinion, the fact that nowadays all-in-one UIs are almost too good has done its part to the "quieter time" of the UI design community. Not that that is bad or anything, I rather have my friends use TukUI than their own bottompanel-stasheverythingthere-notevenviewport-setups ;)

There are all-in-one user interfaces for pretty much everyone's taste, but it's a lot harder to personalize them if you compare them to the old "create your own perfect UI just by picking the best AddOns and WTF files from your favourite UIs" method which works (relatively) effortlessly only with standalone AddOns.

/justmy2cents

Sounds so goody goody but i really wonder what would happen if the community as a whole just started feeling (hypothetically) how they felt in those "good old days" (allowing for subjective relativity err perception) ... Then would the UI design, not to mention the greater wow community just spring back to life with the influx of good vibes and general sense of novelty? I mean to ask; was it the way you felt more than the stuff you did that got you to enjoy and innovate user experience?

I'm no guru- I can't tell you how to be positive but fu**ing try hard to do it, wow needs it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm_-sW4Vktw

Cool thread- thanks

*rides off into sunset*

All I can say. Players leave and some come back later. They try new things, get bored and may eventually come back. All in all WoW delivers pretty good entertainment. The LFR/LFG is good and evil in person. You loose personality but you can gear up faster. Thus making it possible for re-entering players to catch up faster thus they do not get the feeling of being cut-off.

Before we had that we could do 1-2 dungeons a night max. It took hours and loot got delivered on a DKP system. Thats all gone.

Players decided they wanted 20min dungeons so they got them.

If you want personality in the game you have to create them on your own and on your own server. That is the only reliable source. Join a guild or gather up a group of people to do stuff regularly.

Regarding UI. I thought of creating some new stuff but I really like my interface at it's current point and see no point doing sth else that I'm not going to use by myself. Most of the UI's are just a bunch of compilations with unitframes put to different places. Before we had TUKUI derivates there were Pitbull UI's all over the place.

Yes, but they were mostly unique. TukUI derivates all look the same except for positioning of unitframes. Not that that's automatically a bad thing, but it gets old.

I can mention many people who might not have come up with new concepts and rather decided to follow suit, hell I'm one of them, but they still made good UIs. It looked different, even though it was about the same because there's only so much you can do when you try to cut down on everything.
But this was interesting to me, people were always trying to maximize on usefulness and cut down on uselessness. I think that's what kept most of the minimalists going, the sense of "competition".

I don't get that feeling with TukUI derivates. It's all the same plain old borders that aren't unique, the same textures, the same panels, it's just all the same.

Also regarding WoW, people change. People grow out of things, people eventually will grow out of WoW. It's not fun but it's inevitable. :(
I'm personally just holding out for MoP at this point. I really hope they succeed in making the game as fun as it once was. I believe that if the game is good, the UI community will come back. :D

IMO it's not Tuk's UI that started the "all UIs look the same" phenomenon, it's the whole minimalist craze. Sure there were minimalist UIs before, but these were rare, extreme cases adopted by a minority of people. The game was also a bit more difficult and you couldn't get away with having just 3 spells on your action bars or no buffs showing.

So people needed more information, more addons, more stuff on their screen. And with more stuff on your screen, there's more different ways you can arrange said stuff. That's why we had so many different looking UIs, because everyone had different needs, different roles, different amounts of information on their screen, and, maybe most importantly, different tastes. People weren't really worried about memory/CPU back then either (which is ironic seeing as how now we have more powerful PCs but always strive for low memory/CPU consumptions).

Then the game got easier, our action bars and raid frames got smaller, our boss warnings fewer, the default UI more efficient. Everyone cut down on useless stuff and, as a result, everyone had fewer stuff on their screen. And with less stuff came less possibilities of arranging said stuff.

Before, a raiding UI consisted of 4-5 unit frames with their own buffs and debuffs, Omen window full of bars, damage meters, boss warnings, 25 people raid frames, minimap, (large) chat tab, buff/cooldown warnings and other miscellanea for different classes and roles.

Now you can get away with just two unit frames (text replacing the rest), a select list of important buffs/debuffs, percentage number for threat, default boss warnings, 10 people raid frame (or literally just a percentage health text for each member), minuscule minimap and chat, and that's about it. With such a small and finite number of things on your screen, and the fact that people are allergic to art/panels of any kind in their UIs, there's only so much you can do to make a unique UI.

People still made good, functional UIs back in the day, and perhaps it was even more challenging, making sure all that information was presented in a coherent, clean way. But now there's really no way you can go wrong with a UI, with so few things to be mindful of.

And lastly, don't forget the fact that everyone is, in one way or another, looking for that "perfect" UI. Once they find it, they stop experimenting and throwing around good ideas/designs and settle for one layout. Which is good for the person but bad for the community as a whole.

/rantoff

I found a UI that I like (ElvUI) and have stuck with it for quite some time. Since I'm happy with the UI I use, there's no point in me visiting the UI threads. Hell, I don't even post much anymore because I'm too busy enjoying the game (after almost 5 years I still love Wow and find immense joy in it) and not worrying about my UI.

I know I'm not known here or anything, but yes I got fed up of WoW for an year now and only recently returned because of a Scroll and I'm enjoying WoW again. I left at the beginning of Cataclysm, the game wasn't fun any more for me, 6 straight years takes its toll.

I still use my lumUI based on my lumen oUF frames, although I need to fix some stuff. I think when logging in one can feel that the servers are way more empty...

I haven't made any significant changes to my UI in a long time. I guess after 6 or so years of tweaking, I finally got it right. I still fiddle a little bit with fonts and bar textures, but nothing worth posting about. Until significant changes are made to the game (eg. making the game harder again so that things like threat meters, boss timers, and detailed raid frames are worth looking at) I don't anticipate changing much in my UI. I'd guess that a lot of other people are in similar positions with their own UIs.

All the TukUI edits and such seemed mainly aimed at attracting other people to use them, rather than being designed to meet the needs of the person creating them. While there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, it does mean that the main changes are purely aesthetic (eg. different art panels, colored borders, fonts, and such) instead of driven by actual needs/wants for better functionality or usability, which greatly reduces the amount of change you're going to see between iterations.

This topic seems even more relevant now with the main stickied thread hardly being updated. Post some more guys! :D