Not smart, mind you... but less stupid.

I'd worry a lot if ANY thread made ANYONE feel 'smart'. (Smarter, maybe... but I can't actually think of a thread that would be broad enough in its content to legitimately let anyone feel 'smart'. :) )

Well...uh... there is always my posts. Right? *what have I just done * ._.

;P

How do you know TONS? This is a serious question. I know one at my former university doing research on black holes, zero at my current (they're just astronomers or physicists), one from University of Michigan, and one who technically does geophysics but on other planets. I hover around astronomy circles, am a member of a few astronomy organizations, and still am only well acquainted with three.

I'm talking real people who got an astrophysics PhD or do actual astrophysics research. For example, a friend of mine got her BS in astrophysics, but has a PhD in astronomy and teaches astronomy. She is not an astrophysicist, and calls herself an astronomer.

Those real astrophysicists are exceedingly rare. As in, I bet in the US there's maybe a thousand.

Are our definitions different, or do you have a life where you actually know lots of astrophysicists? If the latter, please tell me how!

lol - 'tons' might be an exaggeration. I knew a few in college (I was a physics major, my advisor specialized in high-energy physics, dabbled in astrophysics, some of his buddies were pure astrophysics folks). I have no clue what their degrees were in - I just knew what they taught. (I also knew a bunch of students studying astrophysics - but they were mostly undergrads, so I guess they don't meet your criteria.)

My complaint is that when hovering over the first perk the descriptive text box obscures the bars.

Hover downward from the top and it will usually reposition the tooltip below the cursor so it doesn't overlap the stats.

Oh, that, yeah those are really, really annoying, it takes precise positioning most of the time, and even then the cursor is always on screen and often it has to be over a bar for that bar to be visible. If it was a PC game you would (hopefully) be able to bring it up with a click and then move the cursor out of the way, and if they used a regular console selection system you wouldn't have to worry about it because things would always be placed for maximum visibility.
I pretty much stopped selecting the wrong thing and I don't really have issues getting to what I want any more, but the cursor system is still one of the biggest UI issues in Destiny.

I didn't say anything about engrams. This was about completing quests.

I think what he was saying was "Bungie changed the behavior of the engrams because of public pressure, even though the original setup didn't really violate any UI guidelines - I see this situation as the same sort of thing: there's nothing technically wrong with what they did, it's obviously user error, but they might change it just BECAUSE people aren't reading the instructions."

yes

(With a value judgement that this is weakness on Bungie's part, of course. :) )

I'm not saying they were wrong, usability and player satisfaction should come first and I think purple engrams should give purple items most of the time, I'm just saying the complaint about being inconsistent wasn't the smartest complaint because it was spelled out what you can get

I totally agree. What I'm getting increasingly annoyed by is perks that don't even show an increase or decrease in a bar, or even show the opposite of what their description says, so I don't even know what they actually do. I keep thinking they'll address it with the next update or the next one, but it's been 8 months and they haven't even acknowledged it.

That's because it is showing the difference between the perk you currently have selected and the one you're hovering over. So, if the perk you're hovering over has reduced recoil, yet the bar is showing it will have MORE recoil that's because the currently chosen perk has even less recoil than the one you're looking at.

That's not what I'm talking about, I know what those mean. I'm talking about a something that says, for example, "increased stability", and shows lower stability (red bar) than something that doesn't mention stability or says "decreased stability", and things that show no change to the bar when you hover on them. It's mostly sights, chokes, ballistics packages, and whatever else goes in first stack of three items that does this, but the "counterbalance" perk (IIRC) also never shows an increase in stability, whereas the "perfect balance" perk does. The sights etc. on exotics are especially egregious, there are cases of different ones with the same description and the same bars.

My complaint is that when hovering over the first perk the descriptive text box obscures the bars.

I'm not sure what you're referring to.

I'm talking real people who got an astrophysics PhD or do actual astrophysics research. For example, a friend of mine got her BS in astrophysics, but has a PhD in astronomy and teaches astronomy. She is not an astrophysicist, and calls herself an astronomer.

Those real astrophysicists are exceedingly rare. As in, I bet in the US there's maybe a thousand.

Are our definitions different, or do you have a life where you actually know lots of astrophysicists? If the latter, please tell me how!

('Smart' requires a broadness of skills that simply can't be captured in a single thread.)

I didn't say anything about engrams. This was about completing quests.

I think what he was saying was "Bungie changed the behavior of the engrams because of public pressure, even though the original setup didn't really violate any UI guidelines - I see this situation as the same sort of thing: there's nothing technically wrong with what they did, it's obviously user error, but they might change it just BECAUSE people aren't reading the instructions."

(With a value judgement that this is weakness on Bungie's part, of course. :) )

My complaint is that when hovering over the first perk the descriptive text box obscures the bars.

Hover downward from the top and it will usually reposition the tooltip below the cursor so it doesn't overlap the stats.

I totally agree. What I'm getting increasingly annoyed by is perks that don't even show an increase or decrease in a bar, or even show the opposite of what their description says, so I don't even know what they actually do. I keep thinking they'll address it with the next update or the next one, but it's been 8 months and they haven't even acknowledged it.

That's because it is showing the difference between the perk you currently have selected and the one you're hovering over. So, if the perk you're hovering over has reduced recoil, yet the bar is showing it will have MORE recoil that's because the currently chosen perk has even less recoil than the one you're looking at.

My complaint is that when hovering over the first perk the descriptive text box obscures the bars.

Overall I'd say Candland and crew (Be Dave) did a pretty good job.