The menu button change is counterintuitive

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Necrogue wrote:

The only thing it did was add an extra click.

False. It replaced a set of eight tiny, somewhat hard to interpret icons with no explanatory text until you hover over them (made harder because of their small size) for a single, labelled button directing players that this area of the UI is for the main game menu (which was not obvious before, as the buttons themselves didn't communicate this visually) that's bigger and easier to click, and a larger menu with space for a textual description of each of the buttons making them easier to understand and learn the hotkeys for, and making each of them them easier to click once the menu's up by giving them more horizontal space to click on rather than just the tiny button to click on.
The cost of this was an additional click necessary to access any of the items in the menu, yes, but you're intentionally ignoring one entire side of the tradeoff.

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Necrogue wrote:

The PoE menu button takes up the same amount of space as the old menu

It lets us fit more items on the menu in future as necessary, where before there was no room to do so. Adding a new menu panel to the game no longer requires us to pick between leaving it without a button, kicking an onld one out of the menu area, or making more space by resizing things.

The ability to understand the menu for new players, and to learn the hotkeys for various tabs, has been improved, and the need to click on a specific tiny are of the screen reduced, at the cost of an extra click for accessing these items via this menu. There's no cost at all for experienced players who know all the hotkeys and use those to access the various screens and panels on the menu, which has always been the fastest way to do so anyway, and the one I would expect most of our long-term players to use the majority of the time. This is hardly as one-sided as you're presenting it.



Your attempt to re-frame the art lead's desire to remove long-term placeholder art and replace it - as was always intended - with art more fitting to the game world and covering less of the orbs, to fit your own agenda strikes me as in poor taste at best, and I would strongly recommend against anyone pushing the thread further down that path, as it leads no-where good. I'd hate for people to post constructive criticism and useful feedback about previous or potential future changes to the UI here only for the thread to have to be locked for other reasons.