I am sure if I read through this posting and others on the forums I would find that I am repeating things that may have already been addressed, but I would like to add my thoughts.
I play a lot of games. I also tend to be a very loyal person to games I love. Some I have played for 3-10+ years. I’ve worked behind the scenes of some games with game masters and programmers, I won’t go into which ones at the moment as it isn’t relevant. I don’t consider myself a sky is falling dramatic person and I don’t get into the drama surrounding players or patches in general. I am more than willing to live with some weekly reset bugs that we are often seeing, I am willing to accept loading problems and bugs after big patches, despite how annoying they might be. However, immersion is an important part of a game, and therefore its UI and interface are the first face the world sees and the one you spend your daily time with. This makes it one of the two most important aspects of any game. The second of course being game play mechanics. (We won’t go into how the krakens have eaten gameplay. I think thats obvious.)
The reason I chose this game and became addicted to it, was the similarity to puzzle quest and that it was being billed as a game with knights, kingdoms, dragons, gold, traitstones, souls, and the overall feeling that those things in combination create. The thing that keeps me coming back is that not only do I like match 3 games, but I have a soft spot for collecting things in game. The fact that this game is at its heart, a card collection game is amazing.
The new UI feels as if it has turned its back on what the game is about. The cards I used to collect in my troops page are no longer cards. It looks as if I am opening a file folder full of internet images with a cheap color bar on top to mimic fancy, but fails to achieve it. The wording on the bottom is unreadable on mobile and very hard to see on pc. Before you had several layers of scroll work, artwork that was specific to the rarity in the border, and layers of graphic making each card FEEL like a card. I have NO problem with the UI being updated if it is done with as much care as the original artwork was created with. Another example is the kingdoms on the main map. Instead of their name in a beautiful bar at the bottom that not only had detail graphically, but information about the level of the star experiences you were working towards is a huge upgrade from the new mono tone, colorless shield with wings that is too small to really tell how many stars are in there. I liked to get into the game once or twice a week and eyeball the map to see which of those little bars was closest to leveling at ta glance and then search that kingdom to see about upgrades I can do. This is no more.
Overwhelmingly the people I play with do not like the look, but I feel as if that really doesn’t matter. The Devs have stepped back from game chat and back from the discord server because they ultimately know that they aren’t able to tell us it will get fixed. I feel as if the hope is, that if they step back and stay quiet, most of us will eventually wear ourselves out talking about it until we “acclimate”. Unfortunately we stand to lose quite a few members of our guild, and perhaps myself included if the trend continues.
I have invested quite a bit of time and money, the money I believe in doing because any game where you strongly love it and the direction the game is moving, you should make a few purchases on occasion to support the developer. I can’t in good conscience buy anything at the moment because I don’t support this direction. As an optimistic realist, I would like to think this is a bare wipe to move forward, but we need some signs of good faith of better graphics to feel as if that is true.
Thanks for taking the time to read my mild rant.
Happy gaming 
