First of all, this isn’t meant to come at TS3 with hate, it’s just an observation.
You’re not going to get customers if you can’t get basic error messaging right. What I mean is, during registration in the client it just says “A critical error occurred: 1”. Search “TS3 a critical error occurred 1” and nothing shows up. Just tell me in plain English what’s going on or don’t bother telling me anything at all, because there’s nothing I can do with that information anyway. If it’s unexplainable, most services will just give you a bug hash and send an internal message somewhere with debug information. So I, the user, gets "Sorry, something went wrong. The engineers have gotten a message regarding this. Please try again later.
If you still have issues later and need help, create support ticket with this hash: ABC123"
See how much better of a response that is?
On the website, I tried to register instead and got “Cannot process queries”. That could mean absolutely anything. It doesn’t help me, the user/customer at all. I did see TS.ChrisR responded to another post saying it means “Username already taken.” So I can search. However, that error taken at face value to a new customer, after erroring in the client would just assume you don’t know how to do business, so why the heck waste my money? If you’re not professional and willing to do the work to just give your customers a little care with verbose, English error messages, why should they give you any money at all? You’re obviously not taking your business very seriously.
So, despite the bad start, I decide to login to my old account anyway. I can login here, perfectly fine. Login on the website? Gets stuck at the spinning “Processing”. Never errors. I consider this strike 2. Try on the client… works fine. Great.
You now have servers and communities searchable, which is great. Being able to hop in and use the app is a great feature, however, to hop right into a voice channel before the user has had the chance to setup their hardware is a big nono. I should be able to join a community without being forced into a voice chat. I should be able to be continuously connected to all the servers I follow and keep updates/messaging from my groups/servers without having to be instantly in a lobby. That’s just unintuitive and gives no respect to user privacy or control.
This might be server specific, but really has no benefit to the user whatsoever. Even in IRC clients, you can connect to a server and be on the server status window before ever stepping into a channel. I see no configurable options to change this behavior.
There are a few UI things that don’t make sense to me, like my “Security level” and “Servers may require a higher security level”, but nothing to click, like a help or “What’s this?” to tell me what it even does or how it helps the server. I’m seeing a pattern here where you just don’t communicate with the user and tell them what’s going on in a thoughtful or meaningful way and that’s not going to lead to many conversions.
Anyway, good luck team. I’ll come back for TS5.
