In Merchant on iPhone, difficult to page forward and backward

[Illusionator]

Description: In Merchant on the iPhone 5 (and also iPhone 4), while in Buy or Sell, it is difficult to page forward and backward through the cards. The touchable hotspots for forward and backward are very small. I am an experienced SE player on the iPhone (I am level 33, and I only play on iPhone), and it usually takes me 2, 3, or more tries on each page to page forward or backward through the Merchant's cards. You have to touch the small arrow JUST right. Could the buttons and/or touchable hotspots be made bigger for paging forward or backward through the cards on the Buy and Sell screens of the Merchant on the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4?

Platform: iPhone 5 and iPhone 4 (bug reproduced on both).

Version: SE app v2.000

Steps to reproduce:

In SE app v2.000 on the iPhone 5 or iPhone 4, access the Merchant, click on Buy or Sell, then try to use the tiny forward and backward arrows to page through the cards. I find it is quite difficult to do, even with lots of practice. I always kind of grit my teeth when I find I want to go into the Merchant. Would be great if this were as easy and satisfying as the other parts of the SE user interface.

[a player]

On iPad2, as well, the buttons in the Merchant are not very responsive. I'm not so certain that it is only a size/"tap it correctly" problem. My sense is that the app is not checking for these taps very frequently, and/or not buffering them properly if my tap does not correspond with the check.

[Illusionator]

"a player": Interesting analysis. I suspect you are correct about what the problem is with the "Merchant" forward/back buttons on the iPhone 4, iPhone 5, and iPad.

Interestingly, when I access "Deck" on my iPhone 5 and iPhone 4, the buttons for forward/back look the same as in the "Merchant" (small arrows), but those "Deck" buttons work MUCH better than in the "Merchant." Ideally, I wish the forward/back buttons in both "Deck" and "Merchant" were larger (there is plenty of screen real estate available for larger forward/back buttons for both "Merchant" and "Deck" on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5). But weirdly, the existing forward/back buttons in "Deck" are very responsive, even though those exact same buttons in "Merchant" seem to miss a bunch of the button presses.

Your theory makes sense to me. I am guessing (like you are) that in "Merchant", the user interface event polling loop that checks for forward/back button presses is doing more work per loop than in "Deck," causing "Merchant" to miss some button presses. For example, perhaps the "Merchant" event polling loop checks online card inventories (or something) in each iteration, resulting in "Merchant" dropping some of the events for forward/back button presses. If the "Deck" event polling loop has less to do in each loop iteration, that might be why "Deck" is much more responsive in recognizing forward/back button presses than "Merchant" is.

Anyway, would be wonderful if the "Merchant" forward/back buttons could be made more responsive (and larger) in iPhone 4, iPhone 5, and iPad. There are some Legendary Dark Prophecies cards I would love to buy, and I keep going to "Merchant" to check stock (because they are usually out of stock), but that's painful to do right now. On the iPhone, I have to press the "Merchant" forward button a bunch of times to get to the second-to-last page of cards in order to access the Legendary Prophecies cards, and that is quite hard to do because "Merchant" ignores most of my presses of the forward button.

Thanks so much for chiming in. Good to hear that I am not the only one experiencing this problem with the "Merchant" forward/back buttons on iPhone/iPad.

[a player]

Yes, Illusionator, I think you've nailed it. The logic for iOS Merchant activity should update inventories periodically, while the user is NOT pressing buttons. As long as you are trying to skip to page 22, or whatever, you probably don't care so much about the fact that they are out of Kristoffer Wylds on page 3. I'm not certain what would constitute a desirable update frequency when no buttons are being pushed, but I would guess that once or twice per minute ought to suffice.

[Illusionator]

Description: In Merchant on the iPhone 5 (and also iPhone 4), while in Buy or Sell, it is difficult to page forward and backward through the cards. The touchable hotspots for forward and backward are very small.

I just wanted to mention to the SE dev team that this bug/problem still exists in the new v2.010 version of SE on the iPhone 5.