Over the past year I've played just about nothing but BA and my selection of widgets is now pretty precise and clear. I've downloaded, installed, updated, tweaked, renamed and reconfigured no end of widgets to get the setup which is perfect for me. I have my favourite widgets, widgets I think could use some improvements and widgets I just couldn't do without such as CustomFormations, Ice UI and Defence Ranges.
Now, because LuaUI is so user friendly and easy to customise, I've been able to get the setup which is just right for me. A lot of people trying my widget setup out, would be horrified and wouldn't like to play games with it, others may like it. This is why user preference is so important, it lets players use their own style and format of GUI to allow them to play the way they want to play, chat the way they want to chat and form their own setup to suit them.
I'd be willing to bet I'm the not the only one who is absolutely petrified by CA/ZK's widget list. When I played it for the first time in a year or so, I had all sorts of crap on I didn't want, all sorts of awesomeness off that wanted and all sorts of brilliance not even listed that I couldn't install. It took me a while to get it sorted and find out what everything did and decide what I didn't like and what I did like. It was even more frustrating trying to get my exact BA setup replicated in CA but I could rant for ages about that so I'm not going to
I recently played KP and Evo, much the same frustration occurred, although, KP didn't take even half as long to sort out, (despite being a completely different game mechanic altogether). However, I discovered Evo had adopted Chilli UI, a user interface I really do despise (Sorry Car!). This normally wouldn't be a big deal for me as I'd just spend another half hour or so disabling all the widgets and chucking my usual ones back in there, however, Forb decided to lock Evo's widget list and disallow any other user widgets from being used at all. I'm not having a bash at Forb as many game devs have taken this route with their games. It's also not a bash at the games themselves.
Anyway, the main point is, I gave up playing CA, Evo, S44, old Gundam etc simply because I either didn't want to spend ages remaking my setup, or, because I couldn't replicate my setup at all due to locked widget selections. This for me, is a shame, because I do like pretty much all these games and would really like to get into them, however, if I can't tweak the GUI to allow me to use the setup I am used to, I find it hard to get into them. Whether this is because I've used pretty much the same layout for years or because I actually just think the widgets are worse than the widgets I use, it doesn't really matter, I should be able to use my own widgets.
The biggest killer for me is Chilli. I'm not going to go into detail but for me, Ice UI does the job in a simple, clean way without looking like some sort of NASA Space Station.
I just don't see what the big deal is with allowing users to choose their own widgets. In my opinion, it would be better to create a blacklist of widgets that shouldn't be allowed rather than a whitelist of widgets that are allowed. As for the default widgets, I couldn't care less, make them as awesome as you want, but locking them and setting them in stone is a real shame.
Again, don't see this as a dig at developers or their games, but rather, some advice from a long time BA player wanting to play different games.
