Almost two weeks ago, a new gameplay element was added to Guild Wars 2 called guild missions. When I got home that night I fired up the game to see what the deal was. Since my guild had upgraded the Architecture category of bonuses for our guild the farthest, I checked that first and found new upgrades had been added to the bottom of the list including Guild Puzzle Unlock. I hovered over it and a tooltip explaining the upgrade and the requirements to build it appeared.
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| The Architecture category of a guild's Upgrades tab |
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| Close-up of the tooltip for Guild Puzzle Unlock |
The tooltip shows two icons, but no text to describe or identify them. I was pretty sure the first one with the green up-arrow meant I needed to upgrade the Architecture category to at least the next level. I had no idea what the second icon, the orange shield with a lock on it, was for - it was a symbol I had never seen in the game before. I started searching through all the options in the Upgrade tab and eventually found the upgrade with the matching icon in the Art of War category menu.
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| The Art of War category of a guild's Upgrades tab with Guild Chalenges Unlock highlighted |
It's frustrating that I had to root through all the new upgrades in all the categories to find out that Guild Puzzle Unlock under Architecture has a prerequisite on Guild Challenges Unlock under Art of War. These are the first upgrades that have dependencies outside their own categories, so it was even harder as a user to figure out what the dependencies were. The more time I spent trying to find the upgrades with matching icons, the harder it was to remember what upgrade I was trying to learn about in the first place.
To improve the UI, more information should be in the tooltips. They should say what the icons stand for, and if the required upgrade is outside the currently selected category it should say which one the requirement is in.
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| Tooltip for Guild Puzzle Unlock with icon descriptions added |
A player who recognizes the icons can quickly see the requirements for an upgrade and move on, while a non-expert player can spend more time reading the text to understand what requirements are needed. Adding text will also ease the mental burden of the player - they won't have to remember which upgrade they are learning about and what the icons of the dependencies look like to try to match them up by browsing the other categories.
