(separate post because I realized a separate thing going on)
I think part of the problem is probably the cursor itself-- it's a circle, and the area that affects things seems to be a small area in the middle of the circle, and that's not as easy to envision and see as the pointer or arrow cursors that have been standard on PCs for 20 to 30 years. I know a few times I thought (or felt) that putting part of the circle on an item would work and the game reminded me it didn't work by not doing anything. Maybe if they change the shape or even just added crosshairs or something it would feel better.

If there's only 1 thing under the cursor circle, anywhere under the circle, it should select that item. If there are multiple things under the cursor, it reverts to the one closest to, or under, the center point of the circle.

I had no idea it worked that way...

Currently there is a bug where certain instances always revert to just selecting the item with the center point instead of the whole circle, even if it's only 1 item under the cursor.

...and that might be why.
I could've sworn whatever you would select if you pressed A or whatever button, i.e. what you're hovering on, is a little bigger than items of the same class, like if you're hovering on the selected primary weapon icon it's a little bigger than the selected helmet icon, did that not happen? Doing that or something like that would help too, if you didn't already... and now I'm realizing you must have thought of that already....

I did a bunch of research into cursor navigation. Maybe I'll write up an article someday summarizing it. There's lots of cool solutions. We know there's some weird edge-cases, but I'm pretty happy with where it ended up, and super glad we took a chance doing something a little different.

I guess that's that then.

Zero.

I thought it was fine.

I should print this out and frame it for my desk. :)

You could whip that out when you need a raise.

"I deserve more money. Even Cody Miller had nothing bad to say about my work!"

Isn't that pretty much equivalent to "Cody Miller says I'm better than God!"?

Zero.

I thought it was fine.

I should print this out and frame it for my desk. :)

You could whip that out when you need a raise.

"I deserve more money. Even Cody Miller had nothing bad to say about my work!"

I did a bunch of research into cursor navigation. Maybe I'll write up an article someday summarizing it. There's lots of cool solutions. We know there's some weird edge-cases, but I'm pretty happy with where it ended up, and super glad we took a chance doing something a little different.

Please do that! I'd love to read it and I'm sure many other people would!

Speaking of which, it would be sweet of the web team to create a webpage for Bungie publications like they did with the old Halo B.net site.

(separate post because I realized a separate thing going on)
I think part of the problem is probably the cursor itself-- it's a circle, and the area that affects things seems to be a small area in the middle of the circle, and that's not as easy to envision and see as the pointer or arrow cursors that have been standard on PCs for 20 to 30 years. I know a few times I thought (or felt) that putting part of the circle on an item would work and the game reminded me it didn't work by not doing anything. Maybe if they change the shape or even just added crosshairs or something it would feel better.

If there's only 1 thing under the cursor circle, anywhere under the circle, it should select that item. If there are multiple things under the cursor, it reverts to the one closest to, or under, the center point of the circle.

Currently there is a bug where certain instances always revert to just selecting the item with the center point instead of the whole circle, even if it's only 1 item under the cursor.

I did a bunch of research into cursor navigation. Maybe I'll write up an article someday summarizing it. There's lots of cool solutions. We know there's some weird edge-cases, but I'm pretty happy with where it ended up, and super glad we took a chance doing something a little different.

Zero.

I thought it was fine.

I should print this out and frame it for my desk. :)

The circle is far too big compared to its affect-range. Just reducing its visual radius would fix that aspect for me, though.

Risky business when it has to be visible enough on TVs at sofa range…

It's radial where each selectable petal has 4 symbols/letters. Each of the symbols are entered by use of the ABXY buttons. Caps Lock and secondary symbols can be accessed by holding down the triggers.

That sounds interesting. Taking advantage of Fitt's Law again for this one, just like the radial inventory menu in Diablo III.

And? Why is this even an issue? If you're swapping activities, you're returning to orbit anyway. Might as well make a pitstop to gear up appropriately and ditch everything you won't be needing.

I think maybe you've misunderstood me - I'm talking about changing weapons within the same activity; even Crucible varies in whether you'd be better off with a shorter-range AR vs a mid-range scout rifle. But even if you are changing activity, you're talking about an additional visit to the tower instead of (say) Crucible -> Orbit -> Strike.

Is it perhaps inconvenient? Sure. I'll give you that. But it isn't the enormous pain in the ass people keep making it out to be.

So you concede that it's inconvenient but don't think people would seek to make it less inconvenient? I don't know about you, but I'd rather have to deal with UI foibles than have to make a 3 minute round trip to the tower and back just to change guns. But at the same time this doesn't mean that UX shouldn't be polished, and that is ultimately why GV started this thread – because the the cursor UI isn't always

The circle is far too big compared to its affect-range. Just reducing its visual radius would fix that aspect for me, though.

Going down this line of thought (as I was initially, and occasionally afterwards, perplexed by the shape) the problem isn't that it's circular. The problem is that it's a hollow circle. I'm sure a lot of people, myself included, see that hollow cursor and without thinking, attempt to encircle the square box. The reality was you didn't necessarily have to. If the cursor was a filled circle, I'm not sure that train of subconscious thought would persist as now you're covering the item. Cover enough of the box with the circle and you'd probably feel more confident about your selection and the feedback would be stronger.

I'm not UI expert though, so it's entirely possible I'm just talking out of my ass.

But that line of thinking hampers progress. How can you strive to develop a better navigational tool if most people have that mindset?

Bungie tried something slightly unconventional, but not revolutionary at all, to be honest. GV, for one, didn't like it due to lack of speed and slight proneness of time-delaying error. I'm merely proposing a system that allies the fluidity of thumbstick directional navigation with speed and precision.

Sure, it might suck. I'm all for testing it out first. But if the tester never even gives it a chance on grounds that "they already know the last system well and the new one has a learning curve", it will obviously never be good enough.

I'm sure there are a few people out there that never use computers/type-writers to write essays because writing down by hand has a smaller learning curve. ;)

You're not wrong, it's silly and it's a stupid reason to stall progress. Nevertheless, I can't offer up much more than, "I prefer to stick to what I know." As a species we've been typing in largely the same way for nearly a century and a half. That's one hell of an obstacle to overcome when introducing a new method. I think earlier, somewhere, someone mentioned using Smartglass as opposed to the console keyboard, and honestly, I think it's more likely we'll see a larger shift in that direction (using an auxiliary device as a keyboard) than it is we'll see a shift in onscreen keyboards themselves. That's not to say I don't welcome attempts to change the status quo. I just can't promise I'll look at it without cringing and edging closer to QWERTY.

(Earlier I mentioned the fact it looked like T9 up-turned my stomach, irony is, I used to be ridiculously fast at T9, and often I could compose without looking at the phone. I find it's rather like commercial free radio though, or SD to HD, once you've switched to the better option, you never go back. Better in this case is going from T9 to QWERTY.)

That reminds me, one of my problems with the cursor UI is pretty personal but not unique. I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, so I would often position the cursor just so on an item before I actually selected it

Ah, yes, that would greatly increase one's frustration, I guess. Took me maybe half an hour to realize I could selects things much earlier than I originally though (position-wise).

Bungie tried something slightly unconventional, but not revolutionary at all, to be honest. GV, for one, didn't like it due to lack of speed and slight proneness of time-delaying error. I'm merely proposing a system that allies the fluidity of thumbstick directional navigation with speed and precision.

Sure, it might suck. I'm all for testing it out first. But if the tester never even gives it a chance on grounds that "they already know the last system well and the new one has a learning curve", it will obviously never be good enough.

I'm sure there are a few people out there that never use computers/type-writers to write essays because writing down by hand has a smaller learning curve. ;)

Zero.

I thought it was fine.

I find that hard to believe with the thing in the item screen where if you move the cursor over a little too far or cut a corner it moves your selection to a different item class.

If I remember correctly, you play on a CRT, right? Perhaps the reason you had issues is due to your display... others may not share the same issues that you saw because they have larger screens, better resolution, etc.

I didn't have any issues with the interface either and quite liked it.

Agdtinman came in and said the screen scrolls differently in 4:3 and makes the cursor feel floatier, which I'm sure is part of it, but then LCDs have a slightly longer response time than CRTs, and I imagine that wouldn't help my problem of being slightly off.
That reminds me, one of my problems with the cursor UI is pretty personal but not unique. I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, so I would often position the cursor just so on an item before I actually selected it, and that added time and frustration, and of course it's a problem that doesn't exist with the usual console navigation. I do do this in PC interfaces sometimes, but it's significantly faster and less fidgety to position a mouse cursor in a precise point or line or area than it is to position Destiny's cursor precisely. That's more my problem than the game's problem, but it's hard to ignore those urges completely even with medication, and I'm not the only that has them.

I don't think anyone was complaining about the regular system, which shows up in console games all over the place, including the Halo games.

Since Steam Big Picture's implementation, I cannot complain enough about the current implementation of on-screen keyboards for the consoles. But I concede my opinion might be a bit rare.

EDIT: Here's a pic that displays the system I'm talking about.

I can't argue with you, on screen keyboards suck. But I look at that image and... Yeah... No thanks. I makes me think of T9, and then I throw up in my mouth. The Xbox QWERTY keyboard isn't exactly stellar, but it doesn't have me twiddling a thumbstick and then playing QTEs with my controller to type.

Full disclosure, I also don't "get" the swipe/gesture based keyboards everyone seems to rave about on Android (and I think one is on iOS now?). Those feel like an awful abomination. Perhaps, in both cases, it's just simply that there's a learning curve. If that's it, I counter that I already know how to type, I don't want or need to learn a new method. I'm old school I guess. I like QWERTY, I don't need gestures, I don't like auto correct, and I don't like auto complete. Hunting and pecking on a console sucks, but at least it feels familiar.

To be honest, I'm a lot more frustrated talking about it and having to explain why it was frustrating than I was most of the time using it, which seems like a bad sign to me. It seems like one of those things that's easy and feels right, or is hard and/or feels wrong, and for me it mildly hard and it felt wrong. I don't think anyone was complaining about the regular system, which shows up in console games all over the place, including the Halo games.

I feel ya. I don't know if the plan is maybe to release a PC version down the line, or if they just felt that this would be easier considering the type of game and gear and whatnot. I also agree with you in that I don't think it would be that large of a problem without the whole cursor design, but I also haven't tried it in this game since it doesn't exist. Maybe they're trying something new. It's probably not going to feel right or be easy to use for everyone, and it may take time to get used to it. Maybe you'll never get used to it, especially if Destiny is the only game doing it. It's a tough call and there's no easy solution. I don't see them going back away from the cursors, though. Well, at least not in this iteration of Destiny.

Believe it Naruto.

From my own Beta review, I quote myself:

"I absolutely love the whole "hover" selection with the thumbstick to select what screens or icons I want to go to. I like how seamless everything feels."

I don't understand how you were finding such a hard time with the hover UI, or somehow clicking on the wrong things.

I remember some initial fumbling during character creation, but I feel like most of that could be attributed to the learning curve. Pretty sure by the time I hit character three I wasn't having any problems on that screen.

Inventory was never an issue. Maybe you were just carrying too much crap Vagueness. I never saw a reason to carry more than three alternates for any given slot, if that much. Anything more was usually engrams that could be ignored, or garbage that was swiftly dismantled.

I also tried to keep it to three alternates, and as long as you have more than one item of a given class or type and you need to move to, from, or across the area for that type of item, the problems I mentioned pop up.