The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
The redesign is incredible cumbersome on an iPad.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
Overall not a very big fan of the redesign for a lot of the things mentioned above. I use a huge monitor, and I still have to scroll to get the comic on screen when the page first loads, etc.
The real thing that gets me though is now the news posts are in reverse-chronological order??? WTF. I usually catch up on PA by coming back and reading up to current, but this just makes it a giant PITA.
Just dropping by to echo the other users' opinions of it looking great on a phone/tablet, and abysmal on a desktop.
Most people won't bother to comment, and I usually wouldn't, but it's a pretty big problem you're having here.
edit: Clarification, the actual art is pretty and all that, that's not bad, it's just that you just seem to have significant problems tying it all together, and scaling it properly.
I realize you guys are trying to push people towards Club PA and all that but this ad, right in the middle? HUGE spacing around it? Come on guys...
Google Chrome Version 32.0.1700.107 m.
Windows 7 @ 2560x1400
Please note: I still get the comic for free, so I am not complaining that the site sucks or isn't tailored to my needs - I just think it's a little off-putting.
My continued gripe about the archive aside, the new site could definitely use some work, for reasons already laid out. The site lost a lot of practicality in the upgrade.
Please note: I still get the comic for free, so I am not complaining that the site sucks or isn't tailored to my needs - I just think it's a little off-putting.
It's an ad for another free thing.
+1
KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
I like the fact that there's a "Random Comic" button, although it seems to point to the same comic depending on which comic you came from? So if you go to today's comic and click it a bunch of times, you'll see a string of comics, then if you go back to today's comic and click Random a bunch again, you'll see the same string of comics.
I think I was doing this yesterday too, and the Random button linked to a different comic, i.e. different string? So maybe it rotates.
Anyway, this isn't even really a problem. Just something I noticed and decided to post about, I guess.
I like everything about ClubPA except the site. Gawkerism is very off putting and unintuitive.
The text at the very top, the one line that includes the link to the podcasts area is almost impossible to read. Darkish blue on a black background? No thank you.
I don't know if this is an issue for anyone else, but I'm having difficulty joining 'Club PA.' After attempting to "Join Club PA," if I say that "I do have a PA account" and try to log in with my forum username or email address, I'm informed that "No account with that username could be found." If I say that "I do not have a PA account" and try creating an account with my forum credentials (username and email address), I'm informed that "An account with that username already exists." While I can't imagine 'Drakeulasaurus' has already been taken, I've tried other usernames (but not other email accounts - I shouldn't have to), but to no avail. I still get the same "An account with that username already exists" warning. I've tried different browsers (Chrome and Firefox) and different computers to no avail. Thoughts? Is this a problem for anyone else?
Drakeulsaurus on
Life's rough sometimes.
0
SnicketysnickThe Greatest Hype Man inWesterosRegistered Userregular
edited February 2014
I like the new look! One thing I would change is to slow down the "tick" animation on the comic carousel at the top to maybe 1/3 - 1/2 what it is at the moment, just because the rapidish animation is pretty distracting until you scroll past/click through it.
Truncating the news posts is a good move imo, especially if it means you need to click through to the Twitch streams, as having that auto play was a bit surprising a couple of times.
I like the new look! One thing I would change is to slow down the "tick" animation on the comic carousel at the top to maybe 1/3 - 1/2 what it is at the moment, just because the rapidish animation is pretty distracting until you scroll past/click through it.
Agreed.
I think it looks better on my desktop than it does on my iPad. That said, the bottom parts, with the Club PA and new store items, is a bit... clunky, I guess? It's probably just jarring since it's a transition to a more typical, "look at all the shit we do/have done/are doing" front page than the low key, "here's Tycho's and occasionally Gabe's thoughts on stuff, some of it related to the comic" that it's been for 15 years. I mean, yeah, that's what the news page is, but it's just a bit weird that the news page is now a separate thing. Makes sense, but it'll take some time to get used to.
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
I'm gonna be honest. I do not like the new site at all. I've loved all the other new sites over the years but this one is just...ugh.
It's so floofy and animated and completely non-functional. It used to be read newspost, one click, read comic. Now it's like some gawker mobile site with giant banners at the top and the stuff I want buried at the bottom and no logical flow to the entire front page. Instead of being clearly laid out and easy to follow it's a cluttered mess of animated buttons and text, and the lack of clear borders between elements makes it even worse.
It's a lot harder to follow and distinguish between elements now and I find looking at it just makes me frustrated with how much unnecessary clutter and animation there is now. I don't like it. Here's hoping it's a short lived change.
Also the sheer number of Club PA links is a little weird. There's one up top, one on the side, and if you scroll down there's a giant banner about it too.
It's different but I think I'll manage to adjust to hitting the news page or clicking twice. PA has grown to encompass more than the non-sequitur adventures of Gabe and Tycho, and the new layout does a great job of reflecting that. So good job there; while I don't read it, I always though Camp Weedonwantcha deserved some better promotion.
That said, I would love it if Tycho's comic news posts were better identified. The new continuous news feed method has its merits, but it tends to bury these gems and it would be helpful for scanning back in the news archive if they were marked in some way (other than the lyrics at the bottom).
+1
El SkidThe frozen white northRegistered Userregular
edited February 2014
Edit: Never mind. There's a text "Read News Post" that I was missing to read the news post related to the comic I'm viewing. Problem solved!
To everyone who would like to not see truncated newsposts: you totally can! You can also bypass the whole header if you like. Just bookmark http://penny-arcade.com/news. Very similar in function to the old site, full newsposts, still one click away from the comics.
The problem with this, as @MumboJumbo pointed out, is that the news posts are ordered by time now. One of the draws of the site for me is that the main post for the most recent comic was always the first thing I could read when I came to the site.
I feel like PA.com has become a portal, rather than the site to go to for the PA comic itself.
EDIT: Also, in regards to @Tycho 's post about how people don't really care about ads, he's right, but it's a different story when the ad creates a 182 pixel space between the top menu and the page content. THAT is annoying.
The previous system had some pretty big downsides. In some cases a post would be buried underneath four different posts about other issues, that users frequently didn't bother to scroll past. A lot of important stuff got lost in the mix. This is actually a pretty elegant solution to that problem, even if it requires an extra click.
The previous system had some pretty big downsides. In some cases a post would be buried underneath four different posts about other issues, that users frequently didn't bother to scroll past. A lot of important stuff got lost in the mix. This is actually a pretty elegant solution to that problem, even if it requires an extra click.
If that's what they were trying to fix, then there are better ways to do that, and leave the main post at the top for the given amount of time. And now, if they do posts that reply to an earlier post, like they have done many times in the past, they will read out of order, and be confusing.
0
Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
Is the comment system creating a forum topic a bug, or working as intended? Cause it's gonna get pretty cluttered with people commenting on old PATV and ancient comics and stuff. :P
but the Club PA page where they list the benefits of the two different payment amounts? Yeah I cant read the top two items because they are entirely blocked by the "Sign up" bubbles and I cant seem to get the bubbles to move. Is this a bug?
Is the comment system creating a forum topic a bug, or working as intended? Cause it's gonna get pretty cluttered with people commenting on old PATV and ancient comics and stuff. :P
Working as intended, but we're aware that ancient comic bumping is going to suck and are working on a solution.
"Tell us what is wrong with this site." Was one of the questions Ku asks the new hires... and I guess the answer was "It is too functional."
I'm running at a fairly high resolution and the comic page barely shows the comic. I see the huge header, the buy a print button, tons of bluespace (because it's not whitespace) and then the comic with the last 5% cut off. Yes, I can scroll, but I don't want to.
I like everything about ClubPA except the site. Gawkerism is very off putting and unintuitive.
The text at the very top, the one line that includes the link to the podcasts area is almost impossible to read. Darkish blue on a black background? No thank you.
Uuh I don't know if it was changed or I was hallucinating, but the podcast link is in fact white and on a light blue background and perfectly readable. However the topmost line on the first page, which has the links to Penny Arcade, Trenches, PAX, etc is still pretty hard to read. Unless I'm looking directly at the text it doesn't even register in my vision and even then I have to focus on it for a second before it becomes readable, while everything else is perfectly visible in my peripheral vision, allowing my eye to be drawn to it naturally.
I really think the complaints about animation are overblown. There's three animations:
1. The carousel that lists/highlights the comics
2. The dropdown links in the main nav (and only on mouse over)
3. The new items in the store (also only on mouse over), which is the same as the comic comments animation
That's it. The rest are merely text color changes on a slight delay.
Now, I do think the dropdown submenus could be shrunk between 25% and 50%, because right now they're OMG huge, and the carousel could be a touch slower, but let's not exaggerate what's going on with the animation. It's three things, and only one automated.
I think a bigger issue is the amount of padding around the current crop of banner ads at the top. There's just too much space wasted around the ads. The vertical padding could/should be cut by half, IMO.
EDIT:
Here's what I'm looking at with the comics page -
The comic itself fits the layout fine (I'm running 1920 x 1080), but the Strip Search ad just looks weird surrounded by all that dark blue, and it pushes the bottom of the comic below the fold. I dunno if that's intentional, in order to make people scroll down and then see the Club PA stuff, but I'm not a fan of all that wasted space between the ad and the top of the comic.
I like Club PA, I've signed up for the $30 for 6 months and I'm pretty happy about what I'm going to be getting for that $30.
The new site. Overall I like it.
My critiques would be:
You've lost the link between news posts (note, plural) and the comic of the day.
We're all used to the format where we had the day's comic, and then you guys would post news under that comic (news posts grouped together under one comic). The home page now just shows the latest 5 news posts (none of which seem to even be linked to a comic), and the news section also just shows posts in increments of 5 without any kind of grouping - you have one post that is linked to the comic, but the rest are not. Also, if I'm browsing through comics and click "read news post" I only get the single post associated to that comic, I don't get the rest of them.
Why is this a problem? Two reasons:
1) Often enough Mike might share his own thoughts about the comic, this connection between his post and the comic is now lost.
2) The flow is now completely broken. I think it's safe to say that most people would come to the site and read the first news post where Jerry might have a "set up" or elude to something that Mike might comment on in his follow up post, but now with the posts being in chronological order, I'm going to be reading Mike's response before I've read the setup or the comic.
Possible solutions:
1) Keep to your old format. Don't order your news in chronological order, group them by comic like you used to and display them in reverse chronological order.
2) Instead of having a relationship between one news post and one comic, allow them to have a relationship between multiple news posts and one comic. Let Jerry and Mike decide if their post relates to what was in the comic (or the previous news post). That way when I click "read news post" from the comic page you can show all of the news posts related to that comic, and not just one. This solution would probably see me bookmarking the "comic" page however, and I'd probably never read unassociated news.
My other critique is that I don't like having to go to another page to get the full news story. Could it either all be shown on that front page, or instead of linking to another page could it just slide down to reveal the rest of the text?
I think one reason I dislike this redesign is the amount of heterogenous content that I hit as I scroll down. I scroll past the huge block of comic links (all of which are already in the floating header), the truncated news posts, some other truncated news posts in a different format, the ClubPA banner, the twitter links, ads for stuff in the store, and the footer. Look at the way that Facebook, Instagram, twitter, or any other top site arranges content: as you scroll down, the information (per column) stays homogenous. You know what you’re going to see as you scroll. This is not the case in this design, and it's pretty jarring.
Is the comment system creating a forum topic a bug, or working as intended? Cause it's gonna get pretty cluttered with people commenting on old PATV and ancient comics and stuff. :P
Working as intended, but we're aware that ancient comic bumping is going to suck and are working on a solution.
So Dog creates a thread in the Hub whenever someone comments on a comic for the first time?
Makes a lot more sense than what I initially thought: You guys were just unlocking comics for comments at random and seemed to be picking the more controversial ones to start with.
Is obnoxious. Why does it a) have to be so damn large as to block almost 50% of the screen? b) Follow you down while you scroll? We're already on the signup page. We aren't going to forget what we were clicking on it for, without these giant balloons to guide us.
So Dog creates a thread in the Hub whenever someone comments on a comic for the first time?
Makes a lot more sense than what I initially thought: You guys were just unlocking comics for comments at random and seemed to be picking the more controversial ones to start with.
This is actually a pretty elegant solution to that problem, even if it requires an extra click.
I get why you would say that BUT it now means if Gabe and Tycho have a conversation through newsposts, which is always fun, they will be out of order, confusing, and not necessarily reference the current comic.
Overall, I think I'll like the new site once the "This is different and thus terrible" natural human reaction fades.
I do have a few things (that have mostly already been mentioned in this thread) that I think do need to be changed :
1. There are a few places on the site, notably the very top navigation bar and the age of the posts in the /news/ section that are extremely hard to read. The top navigation bar is dark blue on black, and it's almost impossible for me to read without squinting or getting very close to my monitor. The age of the news posts is similarly hard to read for me being medium blue on dark blue.
2. You can break the comic navigation graphic on the main site. (The one that has PA, Trenches, Camp W, etc as the large graphical band that auto-switches every few seconds [minor completely subjective quibble : that should be slower please]).
a. Step 1 : Mouse over Penny Arcade on the left. This selects that image and makes it large. So far no problem.
b. Step 2 : move your mouse just barely into Trenches (the next one to the right) and stop moving the mouse once you see movement.
c. Step 3 : On Firefox, it flips back and forth as the PA section expands and contracts. This seems like an issue to me. On IE it sort of wiggles for a second, and then goes to Trenches.
d. Step 4 : Do Step 1 & 2 again, but this time when you see movement, start moving your mouse to the right of the screen somewhat slowly. Keep it just to the right of the orange PA part. You'll see the orange bar with the PA image in it take up more and more real estate and eventually fill the screen if you get the timing of the mouse movement correctly. Eventually the PA image flies off the right side and you're left with just an orange bar.
3. I agree that the news posts being reverse chronological ruins the flow of a bunch of the earlier comics' news posts. I am mostly okay with the work around of going to the comic first and then clicking on "Read News Post" to get to the main post about the comic. Using that method, though, misses any follow up posts, or other posts that have been added for that day. It is still head and shoulders above reading backwards through the news posts, though.
+1
That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
That top header needs to be a LOT smaller or have a way to hide it.
I like the new club PA, but my one suggestion would be to put all of the special benefits on one easy page (in addition to them being spread out across the site). I had to track down where all the RSS feeds were and all the bonuses within the site and it would've been handy to just have a single point to get all the bonuses.
Posts
The real thing that gets me though is now the news posts are in reverse-chronological order??? WTF. I usually catch up on PA by coming back and reading up to current, but this just makes it a giant PITA.
Don't want to get involved with the pins because I'm afraid of where that could lead me, but the 1st tier of Club PA is value.
Will sign up soon.
Most people won't bother to comment, and I usually wouldn't, but it's a pretty big problem you're having here.
edit: Clarification, the actual art is pretty and all that, that's not bad, it's just that you just seem to have significant problems tying it all together, and scaling it properly.
Google Chrome Version 32.0.1700.107 m.
Windows 7 @ 2560x1400
Please note: I still get the comic for free, so I am not complaining that the site sucks or isn't tailored to my needs - I just think it's a little off-putting.
Steam: TimIsOnSteam
Battle.net: TimIsOnBnet#1745
Switch: SW-7012-4788-7410
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It's an ad for another free thing.
I think I was doing this yesterday too, and the Random button linked to a different comic, i.e. different string? So maybe it rotates.
Anyway, this isn't even really a problem. Just something I noticed and decided to post about, I guess.
The text at the very top, the one line that includes the link to the podcasts area is almost impossible to read. Darkish blue on a black background? No thank you.
STEAM
Truncating the news posts is a good move imo, especially if it means you need to click through to the Twitch streams, as having that auto play was a bit surprising a couple of times.
Agreed.
I think it looks better on my desktop than it does on my iPad. That said, the bottom parts, with the Club PA and new store items, is a bit... clunky, I guess? It's probably just jarring since it's a transition to a more typical, "look at all the shit we do/have done/are doing" front page than the low key, "here's Tycho's and occasionally Gabe's thoughts on stuff, some of it related to the comic" that it's been for 15 years. I mean, yeah, that's what the news page is, but it's just a bit weird that the news page is now a separate thing. Makes sense, but it'll take some time to get used to.
Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
It's so floofy and animated and completely non-functional. It used to be read newspost, one click, read comic. Now it's like some gawker mobile site with giant banners at the top and the stuff I want buried at the bottom and no logical flow to the entire front page. Instead of being clearly laid out and easy to follow it's a cluttered mess of animated buttons and text, and the lack of clear borders between elements makes it even worse.
It's a lot harder to follow and distinguish between elements now and I find looking at it just makes me frustrated with how much unnecessary clutter and animation there is now. I don't like it. Here's hoping it's a short lived change.
Also the sheer number of Club PA links is a little weird. There's one up top, one on the side, and if you scroll down there's a giant banner about it too.
That said, I would love it if Tycho's comic news posts were better identified. The new continuous news feed method has its merits, but it tends to bury these gems and it would be helpful for scanning back in the news archive if they were marked in some way (other than the lyrics at the bottom).
The problem with this, as @MumboJumbo pointed out, is that the news posts are ordered by time now. One of the draws of the site for me is that the main post for the most recent comic was always the first thing I could read when I came to the site.
I feel like PA.com has become a portal, rather than the site to go to for the PA comic itself.
EDIT: Also, in regards to @Tycho 's post about how people don't really care about ads, he's right, but it's a different story when the ad creates a 182 pixel space between the top menu and the page content. THAT is annoying.
If that's what they were trying to fix, then there are better ways to do that, and leave the main post at the top for the given amount of time. And now, if they do posts that reply to an earlier post, like they have done many times in the past, they will read out of order, and be confusing.
but the Club PA page where they list the benefits of the two different payment amounts? Yeah I cant read the top two items because they are entirely blocked by the "Sign up" bubbles and I cant seem to get the bubbles to move. Is this a bug?
Working as intended, but we're aware that ancient comic bumping is going to suck and are working on a solution.
I'm running at a fairly high resolution and the comic page barely shows the comic. I see the huge header, the buy a print button, tons of bluespace (because it's not whitespace) and then the comic with the last 5% cut off. Yes, I can scroll, but I don't want to.
Uuh I don't know if it was changed or I was hallucinating, but the podcast link is in fact white and on a light blue background and perfectly readable. However the topmost line on the first page, which has the links to Penny Arcade, Trenches, PAX, etc is still pretty hard to read. Unless I'm looking directly at the text it doesn't even register in my vision and even then I have to focus on it for a second before it becomes readable, while everything else is perfectly visible in my peripheral vision, allowing my eye to be drawn to it naturally.
STEAM
1. The carousel that lists/highlights the comics
2. The dropdown links in the main nav (and only on mouse over)
3. The new items in the store (also only on mouse over), which is the same as the comic comments animation
That's it. The rest are merely text color changes on a slight delay.
Now, I do think the dropdown submenus could be shrunk between 25% and 50%, because right now they're OMG huge, and the carousel could be a touch slower, but let's not exaggerate what's going on with the animation. It's three things, and only one automated.
I think a bigger issue is the amount of padding around the current crop of banner ads at the top. There's just too much space wasted around the ads. The vertical padding could/should be cut by half, IMO.
EDIT:
Here's what I'm looking at with the comics page -
The comic itself fits the layout fine (I'm running 1920 x 1080), but the Strip Search ad just looks weird surrounded by all that dark blue, and it pushes the bottom of the comic below the fold. I dunno if that's intentional, in order to make people scroll down and then see the Club PA stuff, but I'm not a fan of all that wasted space between the ad and the top of the comic.
I like Club PA, I've signed up for the $30 for 6 months and I'm pretty happy about what I'm going to be getting for that $30.
The new site. Overall I like it.
My critiques would be:
You've lost the link between news posts (note, plural) and the comic of the day.
We're all used to the format where we had the day's comic, and then you guys would post news under that comic (news posts grouped together under one comic). The home page now just shows the latest 5 news posts (none of which seem to even be linked to a comic), and the news section also just shows posts in increments of 5 without any kind of grouping - you have one post that is linked to the comic, but the rest are not. Also, if I'm browsing through comics and click "read news post" I only get the single post associated to that comic, I don't get the rest of them.
Why is this a problem? Two reasons:
1) Often enough Mike might share his own thoughts about the comic, this connection between his post and the comic is now lost.
2) The flow is now completely broken. I think it's safe to say that most people would come to the site and read the first news post where Jerry might have a "set up" or elude to something that Mike might comment on in his follow up post, but now with the posts being in chronological order, I'm going to be reading Mike's response before I've read the setup or the comic.
Possible solutions:
1) Keep to your old format. Don't order your news in chronological order, group them by comic like you used to and display them in reverse chronological order.
2) Instead of having a relationship between one news post and one comic, allow them to have a relationship between multiple news posts and one comic. Let Jerry and Mike decide if their post relates to what was in the comic (or the previous news post). That way when I click "read news post" from the comic page you can show all of the news posts related to that comic, and not just one. This solution would probably see me bookmarking the "comic" page however, and I'd probably never read unassociated news.
My other critique is that I don't like having to go to another page to get the full news story. Could it either all be shown on that front page, or instead of linking to another page could it just slide down to reveal the rest of the text?
So Dog creates a thread in the Hub whenever someone comments on a comic for the first time?
Makes a lot more sense than what I initially thought: You guys were just unlocking comics for comments at random and seemed to be picking the more controversial ones to start with.
Where when you scroll down, this happens:
Is obnoxious. Why does it a) have to be so damn large as to block almost 50% of the screen? b) Follow you down while you scroll? We're already on the signup page. We aren't going to forget what we were clicking on it for, without these giant balloons to guide us.
STEAM
Bingo.
@Tim is on the internet From the team- "The archive is a work in progress and will be updated in the near future"
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PSN: TimIsOnTheNet
Yeah, +1 for graciously dealing with all our whining about a free site giving us stuff we enjoy.
I do have a few things (that have mostly already been mentioned in this thread) that I think do need to be changed :
1. There are a few places on the site, notably the very top navigation bar and the age of the posts in the /news/ section that are extremely hard to read. The top navigation bar is dark blue on black, and it's almost impossible for me to read without squinting or getting very close to my monitor. The age of the news posts is similarly hard to read for me being medium blue on dark blue.
2. You can break the comic navigation graphic on the main site. (The one that has PA, Trenches, Camp W, etc as the large graphical band that auto-switches every few seconds [minor completely subjective quibble : that should be slower please]).
a. Step 1 : Mouse over Penny Arcade on the left. This selects that image and makes it large. So far no problem.
b. Step 2 : move your mouse just barely into Trenches (the next one to the right) and stop moving the mouse once you see movement.
c. Step 3 : On Firefox, it flips back and forth as the PA section expands and contracts. This seems like an issue to me. On IE it sort of wiggles for a second, and then goes to Trenches.
d. Step 4 : Do Step 1 & 2 again, but this time when you see movement, start moving your mouse to the right of the screen somewhat slowly. Keep it just to the right of the orange PA part. You'll see the orange bar with the PA image in it take up more and more real estate and eventually fill the screen if you get the timing of the mouse movement correctly. Eventually the PA image flies off the right side and you're left with just an orange bar.
3. I agree that the news posts being reverse chronological ruins the flow of a bunch of the earlier comics' news posts. I am mostly okay with the work around of going to the comic first and then clicking on "Read News Post" to get to the main post about the comic. Using that method, though, misses any follow up posts, or other posts that have been added for that day. It is still head and shoulders above reading backwards through the news posts, though.