Hello! I'm Vox, and I have been playing Osu! for roughly 2 years~
I wanted to suggest a new way of displaying notifications, such as when you receive a pm, or a friend comes online. My reasoning behind this is that when a user receives a notification, its there for a reason. We get notifications to inform us, and if a user wants to be informed if they get a PM or one of their friends comes online, then there is a small downtime where they are not able to focus on the map to get this information. So, the user either sacrifices knowing the information held inside of the notification or risk their accuracy because they were forced to look away in order to read the notification and receive the information.
I have three suggestions, three new way's that could not only allow a user to receive information brought to them by notifications, while not distracting them/forcing them to risk any accuracy on there map.
1. Is to congregate notifications, collect them, and then push them through once the user either pauses the map, or gets to the grade screen. You could have an option when right-clicking on a player to set there "Notification priority", essentially allowing a player to choose if notifications about/from certain users will be pushed through during gameplay, or held off to be shown at the grading screen/pause screen.
2. Is to add a setting in the options menu, allowing users to prolong the duration of notifications, and when they move their cursor over the notification, it will leave the screen within a few seconds of that action. This would effectively allow a user to keep a notification onscreen until they either hit a rest in the map, allowing them to look down at the notification, read it, then move there mouse over the notifications to make it leave the playfield before the map starts up again. Or, if no rests are present during the song, then it could also keep the notification alive until the scoring screen, allowing the user to read it then, then mouse over it to make it disappear.
3. Is to add a mailbox. A little icon in the UI that could gain exclamation mark, or some other indicator, whenever the user has new notifications. It would be something small, something the user could notice in-game, and be very apparent after finishing the map, but not something distracting. Then once the map is over, the user could click on the mailbox to show a notification history, a list of past notifications, with indicators around the new ones received. This would keep the user from ever being bombarded with way too many notifications after the map is finished(a problem that I realised could cause issues with my first suggestion), while still letting them receive all the notifications that they may have gotten while in game.
These are by no means problems that every user faces, nor are they serious, detrimental issues. These are simply some suggestions i had simply wanted to post, as the idea crossed my head today while playing Osu!
I wanted to suggest a new way of displaying notifications, such as when you receive a pm, or a friend comes online. My reasoning behind this is that when a user receives a notification, its there for a reason. We get notifications to inform us, and if a user wants to be informed if they get a PM or one of their friends comes online, then there is a small downtime where they are not able to focus on the map to get this information. So, the user either sacrifices knowing the information held inside of the notification or risk their accuracy because they were forced to look away in order to read the notification and receive the information.
I have three suggestions, three new way's that could not only allow a user to receive information brought to them by notifications, while not distracting them/forcing them to risk any accuracy on there map.
1. Is to congregate notifications, collect them, and then push them through once the user either pauses the map, or gets to the grade screen. You could have an option when right-clicking on a player to set there "Notification priority", essentially allowing a player to choose if notifications about/from certain users will be pushed through during gameplay, or held off to be shown at the grading screen/pause screen.
2. Is to add a setting in the options menu, allowing users to prolong the duration of notifications, and when they move their cursor over the notification, it will leave the screen within a few seconds of that action. This would effectively allow a user to keep a notification onscreen until they either hit a rest in the map, allowing them to look down at the notification, read it, then move there mouse over the notifications to make it leave the playfield before the map starts up again. Or, if no rests are present during the song, then it could also keep the notification alive until the scoring screen, allowing the user to read it then, then mouse over it to make it disappear.
3. Is to add a mailbox. A little icon in the UI that could gain exclamation mark, or some other indicator, whenever the user has new notifications. It would be something small, something the user could notice in-game, and be very apparent after finishing the map, but not something distracting. Then once the map is over, the user could click on the mailbox to show a notification history, a list of past notifications, with indicators around the new ones received. This would keep the user from ever being bombarded with way too many notifications after the map is finished(a problem that I realised could cause issues with my first suggestion), while still letting them receive all the notifications that they may have gotten while in game.
These are by no means problems that every user faces, nor are they serious, detrimental issues. These are simply some suggestions i had simply wanted to post, as the idea crossed my head today while playing Osu!