A calmer welcome
A player wrote in about the join screen: “It is super overwhelming to load in and immediately be displayed with 5 different options, all with different stats, which I don't have much context for yet.” They were right, and the numbers were worse than the complaint. The lobby now leads with your callsign and one big gold button, shows one machine at a time, and puts everything else behind quiet doors.
The feeling, converted to numbers
House rules: before touching a layout, measure the complaint. We loaded the old air lobby in a fresh browser and counted what a brand-new pilot was staring at. 34 clickable things. Six unit cards showing 30 stat bars, every one unexplained. The join card itself ran 1,511 pixels tall on a 1,080-pixel screen — and the TAKE OFF button sat 651 pixels down the page, below two rows of hardware it was asking you to evaluate first. The combined-arms lobby was the same wall with more tabs: five arms of the service competing for a rookie's first click.
The kicker: every option on that wall matters to somebody. Veterans want the deck choice, the paint shop, the spawn heading rose, the keybind editor. The problem was never the features — it was that the screen presented all of them as equally urgent, when the only urgent thing on a first visit is fly something, now.
One card in the spotlight
The unit picker is now a carousel. One stat card in the spotlight, ‹ and › to walk the hangar, a dot rail with a “1 / 6” so you know how deep it goes. What you see is what you spawn: arrowing onto a card picks it, and a career-locked hull can still be admired — the lock badge says what it costs, and your actual pick stays put. The category tabs survive, but as color-coded chips: sky blue for aircraft, teal for the fleet, olive for armor, orange for the guns — the accent runs through the active tab, the card's roofline, and its stat bars, so “where am I spawning” reads at a glance. That's the “little more color to differentiate UI stuff” from the same feedback note, doing structural work.
Quiet doors for everything else
TRAINING and SPECTATE used to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with TAKE OFF, dressed almost identically. They've stepped back into a small row below the hangar, joined by two new folding doors: 🎨 PAINT (the swatch row now unfolds on demand instead of always sitting under the cards) and 📖 HOW TO PLAY (the whole controls manual, folded to one line until you ask). The site chrome — soundtrack, settings, hall of fame, about — became four icon buttons pinned to the top-right corner, exactly as the feedback suggested. The ♪ even lights gold while the soundtrack plays.
After the pass, the same fresh-browser count reads: one unit card on first paint, 5 stat bars, the join card down from 1,511 to 945 pixels — it fits on one screen — and TAKE OFF sits 140 pixels from the top, the second thing you see after the masthead. Same door count for the veterans; every feature is still one click away. The rookie just isn't asked to read the whole toolshed before touching the sky.
What the harness caught
The confession, as tradition demands. Every card still lives in the DOM — hidden, not absent — precisely so the e2e harness and the keyboard plane-switcher could keep clicking cards they can't see, and that part worked first try. What failed was subtler: the browser suite's settings check timed out, because it opens the keybind editor through the footer's SETTINGS link — which we had just hidden behind the new ⚙ corner icon. The suite was politely clicking a door that no longer existed for real players either. That's the system working: if the robot can't find settings from the front door, neither can you. The spec now walks in through the ⚙ like everyone else, and the full suite — every theater, desktop and touch — runs green.
The war is still overwhelming. The front door isn't.