Title says it all, put the functionality of Droid Buttons into the base game.

This solves the problem of newbies quitting because of controls they cannot use effectively, and makes the game better in general (way more flexibility).

I have made several friends try the game, only to have them complain about the controls and quit several minutes after joining. The fact that the controls are the first thing to be introduced to them (no matter how good the tutorial is) is just bad for player retention. Not one of my friends have not complained about the controls and the difficulty of use, and simply making the functionality of Droid Buttons available from the very start would fix this.

Especially for iPad as we cannot use plugins... Very much handicapped in combat

The main problem for player retention in VO is that this is a niche game we are playing. All the "cool" kids are busy playing games that are not meant for their age on their Playstation 4 with a lot of bloodshed and super intense graphics.
Then there's the small percentage of kids who are "different" and enjoy playing space games. This small number will have the choice again between a couple of space games out there, VO being one of them. Many pick the super-graphics game with the boring content again. For some idiotic reason, few give VO even a try even when it certainly is the most fun and simply the space game with the biggest charme out there.
Said "few" will be divided again because there are those who simply seem to not understand this game or can't be bothered to read. I'm sometimes shocked how fast people give up on playing this great game and give it a bad rating, just because they can't be bothered to read or listen to a veteran's explanation.

I think there was a problem with implementing Droidbuttons. The plugin is not dev-written and the devs would have to go through an intense process of re-writing stuff. If that is not the problem, I think there was something else to it which made it a tough deal.
Additionally, I think DroidButtons is not the "super-cure" for mobile gameplay. Playing on mobile will just always be hard, even if you made it as comfortable as can be. An awesome mobile player will never be able to compete in combat with a very good PC player. He may get lucky once or twice, but the usual outcome is to the benefit of the PC player. There is no dev work that can change this. A PC is much more efficient.

Yeah, but some of us don't live in the U.S and the PCs here are VERY expensive. And even if we do get a PC, we'd have to wait YEARS until we can afford lite-sub (this one is for players who don't have access to CC or DC)
Oh and here in the Philippines, if you exchange a dollar to Peso, you'd get 45 Pesos

+1 to the OP

Sieger, those people arent who i am talking about though, I for one never want people like that to enter our community. But the point stands that those who do not consider even trying Vendetta would never experience the controls on mobile anyway. The reason I suffer through the controls is because Vendetta is the game I have been looking for for 5 years and has the potential to be amazing, but the progress at which it is going is slower than anything I have seen in my life. The almost-finished models for the "new" trident types were shown around two years ago, and still there seems to be no sign of implementation. Mobile controls have not been changed to a significant extent since the launch on mobile 2 years ago. Deneb is still in massive favour of the Itani etc. The list goes on.

Sure there has been progress, capship docks etc but so much more has been sitting there stagnating.

I know I could be COMPLETELY wrong with what I just said, but this is the viewpoint of an average player, one who is reasonably more informed than most at that. Those who dont go on the forums, who dont see the devs talking with the players will have an even lower opinion of progress.

I daresay most players of the game now come from mobile, since all of the new players i speak to say they play on mobile, and so to have effective marketing this market group should be targetted! More player retention of the largest market group means more revenue, which means more employees, better equipment, whatever, you know the rest. And when 100% of the mobile players I speak to say the controls are difficult, poorly designed and clunky, its hard to see many staying.

And lastly, with what RMJ said, out of maybe 8 people I have asked about location, 3 were from the Philipines, and whilst i recognise this may not be an accurate representation of the populus, it is still evidence. Those who ask for improvement on a platform they can use cannot just be told "Why bother when you can go spend $400-1000 on a pc? Simple solution." Yes PC is a MUCH better platform, but VO is supposed to be native on mobile too!

I know the devs have their priorities but why this has seen so little progress is surprising to say the least.

A reasonable reply. Let me comment on the key points of your post.

Vendetta is the game I have been looking for for 5 years [...] progress at which it is going is slower than anything I have seen in my life.

That is because it is made by 4 people. We have no official statement what happened to momerath42 and if he was replaced, but it may even be less now. These men are trying their best and it is insane how far they got, looking at how small GS is. I respect that any minute I play VO.

I daresay most players of the game now come from mobile, since all of the new players i speak to say they play on mobile, and so to have effective marketing this market group should be targetted!

You are right: There are many new mobile players. However, I always try to get people to switch to PC. The feeling will always be better. I'm not saying I am completely opposed to changing controls. I just cannot see that making the controls a bit better would turn VO into a super-mobile game. It will still be more comfortable on PC. No matter what your friends say (That said, I seldomly see complaints about controls on the chat. Could it be possible you influenced your friends accidently before asking them what they think?)

More player retention of the largest market group means more revenue, which means more employees, better equipment, whatever, you know the rest.

Most of the mobile players are young kids, trying out the game, often finding its not what they looked for cause you need actual skill to play it and can't just click and be the hero in a second like in most other mobile games. Most of them can't even afford a full sub. So retaining f2pers is not what we should look for.

And lastly, with what RMJ said, out of maybe 8 people I have asked about location, 3 were from the Philipines

I'm sorry if that sounds harsh but... How is a "large player group" of people who "can't just walk into a store and buy a PC for 400$-1000$" going to mean "more employees, better equipment, whatever"? It doesn't look like this calculation will benefit the financial situation of GS very much.

but VO is supposed to be native on mobile too!

In my opinion, it is not. VO has been a PC game for a decade before and was programmed to be exactly that. It's impressive that there even is a mobile mode, nearly no game long term PC game has that. It's simply not possible to turn VO into a mobile game that is equal in gameplay to its PC version.

I agree with many of your points here:

I understand the fact that 3 devs means slow progress, what i meant was, since the number of devs is impeding progress, you should focus on improving the thing which is likely to bring in more revenue and therefore more employees. I honestly do respect the fact that they do so much with three people, but those who are not informed would wonder why there seems to be little progress made, as they would assume the game is run by a "standard" number of devs.

My statement about complaints mainly stemmed from people voicing their agreement when i was suggesting improvements to the controls on several occassions. What I told my friends before they got the game was that "flying is hard and combat takes a lot of practice to even have a chance of fighting, it takes alot of skill to fly." And i said this to disuade them from quitting after they experience the initial difficulty of control.

"Most mobile players are young kids, trying out the game..."

I do agree with your statement, but kids have money too, and become fond of a game like Vendetta (though it might be rare). Personally i think there arent enouh limitations for F2P.

What I meant in reference to PC prices is that people without a high income are more likely to pay $9.99 each month for a solid mobile experience, than pay $400 plus $9.99 a month for a better PC experience. And i completely agree that Vendetta is a PC game, but if they say that it is native on mobile, then standards should be met.

Here's the thing, I'm not entirely convinced that DroidButtons is actually a solution to the "This game is hard and the interface sucks" problem. Then, instead of trying to get people used to a basic interface, which does actually work pretty well, you're asking them to configure up a custom interface for a game they don't understand or know how they will use. The default interface makes a lot of trade-offs that end up making it "not great" for any one case, but workable for most of them, as I disucssed in the earlier thread.

I'm fine with tweaking and improving the UI, even potentially having a few selectable interfaces that people can choose from with different optimized layouts. But integration of DroidButtons is problematic because DroidButtons layouts are visually ugly, and that is, in fact, why we haven't done our own version.. it's time consuming to try and make a system that is highly configurable and also creates an aesthetic result.

Think aesthetics aren't as critical? Think again, we get far more one-star reviews from people complaining about that kind of issue, than we do about the control interface.

So, anyway, I'm all for making the game more accessible to people, and creating more options, but I need to walk the line of keeping the graphics/layout aesthetically designed, while also having something that's accessible and usable to a lot of people. That was the point beyond getting feedback from people about their DroidButtons layouts, so we can potentially integrate ideas from these layouts as common cases, but in ways that are not as ugly as the actual screenshots in the above thread.

So, if you want to help improve the control layout, contribute to the Layouts thread, and perhaps even suggest new layouts (for particular device sizes, most likely), etc.

Asking a new player, unfamiliar with a highly complex game, to also design their own interface, seems like a bad idea. It's an experienced-user thing, not a first-5-minute-of-play thing.

Well, what do you want? People who play for 5 minutes, think the game is cool and quit a couple months later when they realize they're gimped by their controls or people who keep playing, buy a premium sub, and stick around for years?

I totally understand where you're coming from about aesthetics, but if a user customizes their own screen to be "ugly" they've done it because they want those controls on the screen and that's more important to them than how it looks. Form follows function.

Make the defaults pretty, let people adjust them, but put a "panic button" on there that lets you reset it back to how it was out-of-the-box in case they mess it up.

The root problem here is a GOOD UI is hard. It takes planning, and forethought, and understanding of all of the current game interface paths. It has been said before that the current interface has grown over time as a result of new features being added, and the inconsistent user input of top tab, right tab, lower buttons, left list, etc, is all a result of this growth.

My suggestion is that we calculate the cost of implementing a new UI, and request quotes from companies that actually specialize in UI design, set up a basic crowd funding site and let the community fund the UI redesign and implementation that we so eagerly want. Once we're funded, put it on the development pipeline and implement.

Before going whole-hog and implementing DroidButtons-like functionality, a good first step would be to allow people to move the existing controls to where they are comfortable with them. The macro buttons are a decent alternative access method for other chat (group/sector/guild). Really the only other controls that many argue are missing is roll and or strafe up (both of which could be opt-in).

If someone says s/he didn't like the controls, that could mean anything from the ship didn't do what s/he wanted it to, to "I was expecting a click-to-move interface". Without having someone sit down and fill out a survey, like a paid beta-tester, it's really hard to get the level of feedback that would be useful toward improving the UI.

For example, I can remember at least one user who didn't like that ships could travel faster than missiles: he really, really didn't like it. Apparently, this single fact was enough to make him write negative reviews across multiple websites. The gameplay mechanics didn't match up with his categorical expectation that missiles go faster than ships, but not everyone knows how to parse impressions like this. Someone might have a similar experience and without even realizing what struck him/her negatively about the game resort to "well, I didn't like the controls".

Vendetta already has pretty good controls for a 3D mobile game (it isn't overwhelming, the important buttons are up front, nothing is too small, it makes use of features like long-presses, the accelerometer, and virtual joysticks that expand outside the original touch area). The only thing it's missing at surface level is an up/down strafe (roll can be accomplished with accelerometer).

It might be tempting to build an impression of the game's overall reception from ten close friends (in fact this is an excellent example of selection bias), but bear in mind that Guild is tracking this sort of thing across tens of thousands of users. I can empathize with wanting to bring friends aboard, but the fact is you can't please everybody and expecting them to provide actionable feedback with such a small sample size might be too much.

What really matters is what you think of the mobile controls. Personally, I've never had to resort to using DroidButtons or any plugin on mobile. I don't know if that makes me an exception or the rule. However, I've found the mobile UI as presented is enough to accomplish what I want to get done, including PKs.

/2c

Add an Up/Down Strafe button.
So I can PvP better (than my current state)

Yeah, a lack of up/down strafe is what really kills it for me too. You're a sitting duck in most forms of PvP with F/A on and only left/right strafe.

Even just the ability to re-bind the existing controls like VO's had for keyboard, mouse, and joystick controls would go a long way.

Adding an Up/Down strafe would (slightly) get Android players closer to beating MAJOR PvP Masters (expecially for Orbit tactics)

Well, what do you want? People who play for 5 minutes, think the game is cool and quit a couple months later when they realize they're gimped by their controls or people who keep playing, buy a premium sub, and stick around for years?

That isn't the choice, arf.

The actual choice is between people who play for 30 seconds, think the game is ugly, and then write a one-star review..

..Versus people who play for a few minutes or hours and then leave anyway, long before they ever top-out on the interface capabilities, without writing a negative review. Unfortunately, the reality of mobile is very least-common-denominator.

That small percentage that actually lasts and plays enough to, for instance, need vertical strafe.. these people are usually motivate enough to dig into things and configure them, get a controller, install droidbuttons, or various other things.

I still want to have control configuration in the game, and the ability to move around controls and the like. We kicked it around long before there was a public mobile version of any kind. We just didn't allocate the time, because of how long it would take to do properly. Even now, I would rather have a few pre-configured "advanced" interfaces, for right now, than build a totally configurable solution.

(Savet: We're talking about the HUD, not about the menu interface).

I like the idea of having a choice of interfaces to select for different activities and/or level of expertise better than only having a highly customizable one. Of course both would be best :)

Regarding what my friends said about the controls (yes i know this is a very small sample size, but it does give at least some insight)

This is a summary:

"The movement joystick felt very floaty, the ship didnt seem to respond quickly."(I explained to these people that this was due to the game physics and it was meant to act like this).

"Why is there no option to use the right side of the screen as a drag-to-look like other mobile games?"

"I keep crashing into asteroids while I'm shooting and trying to aim too" (Put this one down for flying inexperience first, but then found out that my friend had turned off flight-assist and was using one hand to fire primary trigger and the second to aim, meaning he had no directional flight control).

"Strafing is uneven and clunky" (He didnt realise the strafe joystick was actually analog, not just buttons. HIGHLY reccomend pointing this out, because it isnt obvious at first).

"I like the way you can switch button functions at the button" ( :D)

"Why does the turbo and primary trigger overlap with the strafe buttons?"

Thought this might just help point out some flaws.