New HUD Update Feedback / Issues
Firstly, I'm not sure this is the right place to post this, but this was the best place I could find. I've had a few different issues in terms of clarity, readability, and usability with the new HUD, and though it looks a lot nicer, it's a bit harder to use and a bit less clear in places. The new update has solved a lot of the problems, but there are still a few things lingering that bother me, and I'm assuming others as well.
Scoreboard - MIA Enemies When playing on red/purple/top side, it's VERY hard to read which enemies are MIA/in fog of war. Even with decent contrast settings, myself and many of my friends are having issues reading this from the scoreboard which is VERY important. Quickly tabbing to check MIAs has become an important part of the game to me, so this is a big disadvantage to me on red side. Try to tell who is missing in this screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/ZxfWp7V.jpg The answer? Jax and Tristana. But both are extremely difficult to notice. There seems to be a faint fading, but it's clearly missing fading on some elements. It's nothing like this from blue side: http://i.imgur.com/5FBvucv.jpg It seems that from red side, enemy champion portraits and the backgrounds aren't being faded properly though items are?
Player Stats There appears to be no way to view the full character sheet/stats unless you open the shop. There used to be a way to pull up a separate page that contained the full stats, but this doesn't seem to exist anymore (as far as I can tell). If you open the shop you see this: http://i.imgur.com/RxuxMPY.jpg But clicking the character sheet button without the shop open just pulls up the bottom half. This makes it inherently more "dangerous" to view the full stats as the shop obscures a lot of the screen, and it is generally inconvenient. If I'm bothering to open the current small panel anyway, I probably don't mind the space to see them all...or at least give an extra button to roll out the additional stats.
Fonts The new font looks nice, but it is MUCH harder to read. This is probably the subjective and subtle issue in this post, but I find this to be the most annoying from a usability point of view and I feel this greatly impacts my gameplay. The new fonts are much rounder and stylized and are therefore harder to read, especially at a quick glance. The old ones were very straight and "rigid"/"mechanical" and made it extremely easy to read cooldown times and health at a quick glance. I now find it harder to read all of these things with the rounded and more ambiguous fonts - 2's and 3's look very similar, 8's look mushy in some places and look like 3's, 5's and 6's look very similar. Sure they look nice, but the extra confusion is a big deal and noticeable to me during fights.
The worst offenders are:
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places where the numbers are smaller due to small icons or long numbers, such as Blitz passive, trinkets, items, and summoner spells
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places where the numbers are on top of color instead of black such as health bars and mana. The ENEMY health bar text becomes very hard to read around 25-50% because the bar is so much smaller and the font is on top of red, and often simultaneously green as they take damage. It appears the old font may have had a slightly larger drop shadow, but I don't think fixing this would totally solve the issue because of the rounding of this font. (There are other font scaling issues in this update, which may be part of this)
Look at all cooldowns, health bars and the legibility in both of the following screenshots. The first (Blitz) being in the most recent patch and the second (Maokai) in the previous patch before the font update: http://i.imgur.com/y6xgeqD.jpg http://i.imgur.com/9DwdWUh.jpg The crisp and clean fonts in the previous update (Maokai) are SOOO much easier to read and significantly reduce cognitive load, making them easy to glance at during a fight. I can't do the same thing anymore and I find it very frustrating. I've heard comments from friends who agree with me on this matter. And if you look at this from a UX/Usability perspective, it's undeniable that the first is easier to use.
This font is fine for things where speed of parsing isn't as important, such as the scoreboard (kills, cs, etc), the overall score, dragon counts, etc, but for things like timers and health that need to be readily available during a fight, this is non-optimal. I agree the new font looks much nicer, but it's significantly impacting legibility in the important aspects of your interface.