I've attached two images to illustrate my point. On non-widescreen monitors, the shop takes up almost the entire screen, save for a small frame around it. The minimap is rendered essentially useless while looking through the shop. On widescreens, there is plenty of frame to the left and right of the shop, and the minimap is completely uncovered.
The shop could either use to be scaled down a bit for non-widescreen users, or let us resize it ourselves to suit our needs.
Well... actually the shop was designed with 4:3 in mind. That's why it fits on a 4:3 screen at all! It's not designed to show your chat or minimap though, nor would we necessarily prioritize this over letting you browse items. I'd sooner have you shop and get out as fast as possible and you'll see further changes to the shop to facilitate this based on what we're learning now that it's live.
At high res the shop scales up too much, I wanted to have a shop scale slider for release, but we could not get it in time.
The old shop didn't seem to have size issues, I even was fine with it on a 5:4 monitor (yes they exist). The new shop is a swollen mass for everyone. I love the functionality but the aesthetics are just bad for it.
Consider the shop in Dota 2 that is about as wide as 1.5 minimaps and fits every screen. Granted their sorting system is bad but it offers a simple recommended item set, shop list, and search results all on one tab. It's fast, clean, and let's you get what you want quickly. Making it look fancy and unique can be good as long as it doesn't interfere with access, and this new shop currently is. It lags in opening and closing, obscures far more of the screen, and requires longer mouse travel to navigate as far as I can tell.
The DOTA 2 shop is more compact, but they sacrifice ease of learning somewhat to do it (can't see names of items without tooltipping).
We elected to focus on making the recommended items and the item shop in general a better learning tool for players. Also, at higher resolutions our shop is scaled up too much. We will allow more player control over this in a future release.
It would be a lot of effort to make a "secondary" item shop wit a more compact, DOTA 2 Stylish, activable from the "more options" or "interface" menu?
This way you can have the "default" shop, useful for new players and people who prefer to have a big shop and as an option you can have a compact, less "intrusive" (not saying the actual item shop is super intrusive, but you can always improve) in the menu options.
Not sure if it's possible or even worth it in design time, just an idea I got. What do you think?
We are looking at something like that for the future. Being able to scale the shop is one way.
The old shop didn't have a bunch of helpful info, and I understand the goal to make items easier to understand. I'm glad that there is grid view support to reduce this info for players once they are comfortable with the items, but the shop remains large and wastes horizontal space.
Any word at least on if there would be an option to remove the border elements? It seems like these create noticeable freezing on opening and closing.
Those are two separate issues. If you are getting freezing issues please attach a dxdiag so we can reproduce it and continue tracking down this problem. Can't say for sure if we would remove border elements, that's not my call.
New shop UI assumes everybody uses widescreen monitors
The shop could either use to be scaled down a bit for non-widescreen users, or let us resize it ourselves to suit our needs.
At high res the shop scales up too much, I wanted to have a shop scale slider for release, but we could not get it in time.
Consider the shop in Dota 2 that is about as wide as 1.5 minimaps and fits every screen. Granted their sorting system is bad but it offers a simple recommended item set, shop list, and search results all on one tab. It's fast, clean, and let's you get what you want quickly. Making it look fancy and unique can be good as long as it doesn't interfere with access, and this new shop currently is. It lags in opening and closing, obscures far more of the screen, and requires longer mouse travel to navigate as far as I can tell.
We elected to focus on making the recommended items and the item shop in general a better learning tool for players. Also, at higher resolutions our shop is scaled up too much. We will allow more player control over this in a future release.
This way you can have the "default" shop, useful for new players and people who prefer to have a big shop and as an option you can have a compact, less "intrusive" (not saying the actual item shop is super intrusive, but you can always improve) in the menu options.
Not sure if it's possible or even worth it in design time, just an idea I got. What do you think?
Any word at least on if there would be an option to remove the border elements? It seems like these create noticeable freezing on opening and closing.