Can we talk about legibility of item text?

Image shows how the item's mods get reorganized when holding alt. This example is particularly bad as it split up the bleeding mod text. A small annoying feature of this game, but compounded by the frequency of oddities like this.

Can we talk about how illegible items are? Is this part of the "90s charm" POE clings to?

Can we please apply some typography 101 to the items and introduce type hierarchy, grouping, heading, subheading, predictable mod sorting, maybe even tasteful colors? It's entirely possible to do this and still make it "feel like poe"

The "wall of text" school of design is eyewateringly painful to sift through. It makes crafting asinine, of which the search filter appears to be a bandaid for viewing illegible item results.

But what do I know, a new player to this 10yr old game. The veterans all have have Stockholm syndrome and are blind to the eccentricities of this game's design choices. "everything thats bad is actually good!" or "POE2 will fix everything."

uh.....you have to CHOOSE to hold alt and also put the setting on that gives you "extra stats" for that wall of text. Otherwise, the normal view is just the 4 mods as they appear on the left. You aren't meant to be staring at that giant wall of extra stats for any length of time.

There is no real issue there....

Plus, it splits up the bleed modifiers because they are different modifiers. One is bleed chance, the other is bleed duration. It would be much more confusing for the average player if these were lumped together on the same line. Much more clear to have 1 mod = 1 line.


You have no idea how "ugly" rainbow-izing the text would end up.....just find one of those people on the forums that colors their text and you can see how awful that would be in-game.



Also you talk of illegibility and the need for classy coloring / organizing....and yet, the NORM for text is book-like line by line. More spacing and you'll deal with the text covering the entire screen. More colors and you'll deal with a massive headache. Different fonts and that just looks unprofessional and childish.

And this is what happens when you have no clue what you are talking about.

Without holding alt it shows the mods as it was dropped/crafted, so it can have as without holding alt "pref-suf-suf-pref-, it split (as mefisto said) the different bleed modifiers. There are many other ways it could be arranged pre pressing alt. Other ways to craft the same jewel where the mods would be in a different place in the item.

When pressing alt it groups all suffix and prefix and then shows it like that, how it is supost to, in an organized manner.

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FearZGamer wrote:

And this is what happens when you have no clue what you are talking about.

Without holding alt it shows the mods as it was dropped/crafted, so it can have as without holding alt "pref-suf-suf-pref-, it split (as mefisto said) the different bleed modifiers. There are many other ways it could be arranged pre pressing alt. Other ways to craft the same jewel where the mods would be in a different place in the item.

im pretty sure thats not true?








things are always in a strict order. there is just for some unknown reason a different strict order when u look at the item normally and another when you hold alt.


the guy is right, theres no reason it should be that way, pick an order and use it for both views.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

things are always in a strict order. there is just for some unknown reason a different strict order when u look at the item normally and another when you hold alt.


the guy is right, theres no reason it should be that way, pick an order and use it for both views.

Link to thread: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3431946

that doesnt say what you have said in your post. theyre talking about families of stuff and stat descriptions like having a mod for % local es and then another mod for % local es + % stun recover and yet another for % stun recovery and while those are 3 seperate mods theyre 2 different stat descriptions, % local es and % stun recovery.


i get things like that mean you cant always put prefixes then suffixes, because % stun recov can come from a prefix and a suffix, 2 different mods but 1 stat description.

but within reason theres no need for % elemental resist to be displayed above % damage with 2 handed for example. they may have coed it in a way where thats what happens, obviously they have because its happening, but i refuse to believe it would have been impossible to display those affixes with the prefix first and the suffix second.

they are saying the act of describing them outputs them in a consistent order, im guessing thats something to do with the order of the stats in the database or some other technical process chain? so they havent set an order its just the order that something in the process is resulting in.

but its a specific order that comes out the same every time before and after u press alt, its just not the same order.

^what the GGG post alludes to is that:

The item mods do not have an order. They are simply rolled individually and listed in some sort of top-down list, likely leaning on some sort of ordered weighting or pseudo-order much like Cluster Jewel mods.

BUT

When you hold alt to display the mod descriptions, that gets its data from a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT list which includes both the stat and description as one entity. For whatever programming reason, it was necessary for these to be totally separate. I would guess that it cut down on server load when items drop or roll. It saves the extra information to be processed when you hold alt, and NOT when the items all drop. We can actually somewhat observe this happening on a busy item, holding alt sometimes results in a slight delay before all the information pops up: indicating that it is being processed then and wasn't PREloaded.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you CAN'T set the game to show all the extra text by default: it can only be done via holding alt AND toggling the option. This also lends more credibility to the fact that this information is being processed through different means.


It is a quirk of the game that, like they said, COULD be fixed but would require a ton of man hours that they simply don't feel the need to put in.

There is no excuse why text can't be coded by color! for example: fire damage or fire resistance being in RED text form. Perhaps, not even as ingame but ability to customise personaly. I would like to change the font as well. I'm tired of staring at the same font.

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mefistozxz wrote:

When you hold alt to display the mod descriptions, that gets its data from a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT list which includes both the stat and description as one entity. For whatever programming reason, it was necessary for these to be totally separate.

i think its saying when you hold down alt you see the mods on the item, when its in normal view you dont see the mods on the item you see the description of what those mods do which is 2 different things.


so the mods on the item might be:

1. Prefix:
125% increased physical damage

2. Prefix:
35% increased physical damage
120 accuracy

3. Suffix:
240 accuracy

4. Suffix
40% increased physical damage
25% chance to cause bleeding on hit


but that is not what the normal view shows, the normal view shows the stat description of what the mods on the item are actually doing, which would be

200% increased physical damage
360 accuracy
25% chance to cause bleeding on hit


i think they could have just showed the actual 4 mods but it looks cleaner and is easier to understand just seeing the combined stat descriptions? which as we can see are impossible to divide up into prefix and suffix because one stat can be coming from multiple mods that are prefixes and suffixes. i would have liked it to be coded in a different way where they had easier control of the order and made it more logical, i think it would have made items easier to understand and different views easier to switch between. we didnt have the alt view at first tho, that was added later so the normal view was already done a certain way.



theyve obviously coded it the way they have coded it so it is what it is. personally i would prefer to see within reason stuff that is mostly/always a prefix coming first and suffix coming second on items in the normal display.

that said is it jarring when things change in that department, when elemental attack damage went from being something that showed on the top of the item to something on the bottom on belts etc that just felt really jarring to me to look at a belt because you get used to the shape of text on a good item and suddenly a good belt has a different text shape at a glance.

^true, there is that too which I neglected to mention.