The game is great and I love it but one of my greatest gripes is the menu UI. To get into a session it takes up to 12 clicks to get through mostly redundant menus that are the same every time they are clicked. I feel that safer seas should be combined with the same third of the menu as maiden voyage with the pop-up merely serving as a hint rather than a selection screen every time. This or a save selection option similar to steam launch options would be nice for rarely changed settings such as crew type and safer seas.
I have some other ideas for UI designs but I believe they would take a significant amount of time to develop and implement. Just as a concept:
After clicking past the title screen, the next page should include a list of ships that the player has access to with multiple ships per page like the reputation page, this includes all ships accessible to the player in guilds and otherwise with signage for whether a ship is in a guild or not and the guild it is in if so. Down the bottom of the screen there should be toggles for safer seas and a selector for crew type (open, closed, guild) that save through game launches. The standard ships should be to the side of this UI and will be a greatly reduced in horizontal size version of the current selector in the menu. This is in addition to the currently present tabs of discover and guilds with the play button removed from discover as it will no longer be the first page the user sees. Clicking on a ship will bring up a confirm prompt before starting loading into the game with the only time the crew roster screen is shown being if the user selected open crew (otherwise the screen is redundant as any player can join in progress).
With the design outlined above theoretically only 3 clicks are needed to get into the game on a guild ship with closed crew. 1. Title screen 2. click ship 3. Confirm
I doubt it but is someone wants a wire frame of the my proposed UI I could give it a look.
