When We Asked Players: How Could PAKRACARDS Be Better?
A shop diary about Discord feedback, mobile filters, and the small changes that make collecting easier.
Something strange happens when you spend a long time working on a website: the more familiar it becomes to you, the harder it is to notice what is wrong with it.
You know where every button lives. You know how to open the filters and which page to visit when you want a particular product. Some of those actions become muscle memory. When you see the same website every day, it is easy to assume that everything already feels natural.
But players visiting PAKRACARDS did not watch every version of the site take shape. They do not know why we put a feature in a particular place, and they should not need to guess what will happen after they tap a button. They experience one thing very directly: whether the website is easy to use.
We have been making another round of changes to PAKRACARDS, especially to the single-card gallery and the wider shopping experience. As I watched the site change piece by piece, I kept coming back to one question: what should we improve next?
We could keep searching for problems ourselves, studying the data, and comparing other stores. This time, though, I chose the simplest method. I asked the people who actually use the site.
So I went to our Discord.
The easiest problems for a site owner to miss
I expected a few comments about everyday browsing. The feedback was much richer than I imagined, and the most interesting suggestions were not requests for some impressive new feature. They were basic things.
“Why doesn’t the website have light mode and dark mode?”
My first reaction was embarrassment. I am a committed dark-mode user. If a computer, phone, or app gives me the option, I turn it on. Yet while repeatedly adjusting PAKRACARDS, I had never seriously asked whether our own shop should give visitors that same choice.
It is a perfect example of a small feature that does not change how anyone buys cards, but it can change how the site feels after ten or twenty minutes of browsing. A card shop is already full of artwork, product photos, foil colors, and visual detail. If someone is looking through a large number of listings, the comfort of the interface matters more than we had assumed.
We took that suggestion seriously. Light mode and dark mode are now part of the work we are planning for the next version.
Another comment made me reconsider whether our filters were visible enough, especially on mobile.
A phone cannot show navigation, products, filter choices, and every other control at the same time. To give the cards and products more room, some controls have to become more compact. From a design point of view, that seems sensible. Then a player reminded us of something more important: if a useful feature is difficult to find, it is not doing its job.
That changed the question. We used to ask, “Did we build the filter?” Now we need to ask, “Will someone visiting for the first time immediately know where the filter is?” Those are not the same thing.
How to find the filters on mobile
On the mobile single-card gallery, look at the top-right corner of the card count bar and tap “Filter cards.”
Step 1: Tap “Filter cards” at the top right of the single-card gallery.
The card finder opens from the bottom of the screen. From there, choose a series such as T2, T3, T4, T5, or TCG, then continue with the available filters to narrow the gallery.
Step 2: Select the series you want in the card finder panel.
As we continue improving the site, we will not only add features. We will revisit the ones that already exist and ask whether players can actually discover them, understand them, and use them in the way they naturally shop.
What a page contains versus what a player came to do
Other Discord feedback drew my attention to a different problem. When we design a page, it is easy to think like the person building it: there should be product photos here, prices there, a filter, and a link to the single-card gallery. None of that is wrong.
Players start somewhere else. They tell us, “When I shop, this is how I look for things,” or, “The first thing I want to do when I reach this page is this.”
The difference matters. We are designing a page. A player is trying to complete a task.
They may want to find one particular series, skim a few single cards, check whether a card is still in stock, or buy something they have already chosen with as few extra taps as possible. If a website only considers what the shop wants to display and not what the player wants to do next, a page can look complete and still feel awkward.
That is why we have been reworking the single-card gallery and parts of the browsing flow. The next version should not simply have more features. Moving from browsing to finding a card and finally buying it should feel more natural.
Data tells us what happened. Players tell us why.
We also use site data to look for problems. Which pages receive the most visits? Where do people leave? Which products receive more clicks? That information matters, but there is one thing analytics alone rarely explains: how the experience felt.
The data may show that many visitors reached a page and did nothing else. A real player can tell us, “I wanted to keep looking, but I did not see where the filter button was.” One observation gives us the result. The other gives us the reason.
That direct conversation may be one of the most valuable things about running a specialist collector shop instead of a huge marketplace. Our customers understand card series, rarities, and their own collecting habits. More importantly, we can speak with them directly. We do not always have to guess.
When someone takes the time to say, “This part confused me,” “This is how I normally shop,” or “This feature would help,” that message is more than casual Discord chat. It may become the starting point for the next improvement.
That does not mean every suggestion belongs on the site
Listening to players does not mean that every Discord suggestion becomes a feature the next day. More functions do not automatically make a better website. Every button, option, and page can also make the experience more complicated for someone else.
We still have to ask whether a change genuinely improves the experience, whether it solves a common problem or a very specific habit, whether it works as well on a phone as it does on a computer, and whether adding it makes a simple task harder.
Sometimes improvement means adding a feature. Sometimes it means making a button easier to see, changing the order of a page, or removing an unnecessary step. We want the community to take part in the growth of PAKRACARDS, but that participation should leave the site simpler and more natural, not more crowded.
Some changes to the next version began on Discord
That may be my favorite part of this process. I began by asking one question in Discord: what could make our website better? Some of the answers are already influencing the next round of work.
Light mode and dark mode are among them. We are also continuing to improve how visible the filters are on mobile. Other suggestions about browsing habits, page layout, and the single-card experience are being discussed one by one.
When the next version goes live, the site may not look like an entirely different place. Instead, you may notice that something once easy to miss is now easier to find. A task that used to require an extra step may feel a little smoother. Or perhaps you will open PAKRACARDS at night and finally choose the darker page you wanted.
Some of those changes may have begun with a single line from one player in Discord. I love that. Not because the community is designing the website for us, but because we now have people who are willing to say, “As a user, I think this part could be better.” That is genuinely valuable.
If you have ever thought, “I wish this worked differently…”
Tell us. It does not need to be a complete feature proposal, and you do not need to understand web design or development. It can be a bug, a confusing action, an inconvenient step, or simply, “This part always feels a little strange when I reach it.”
We cannot promise that every suggestion will be added to PAKRACARDS. We can promise that your feedback will not disappear into an inbox nobody reads. The person chatting with you in Discord may be the same person who later changes that part of the site.
So the next time you are browsing PAKRACARDS and think, “I wish they would change this,” do not keep it to yourself. Come and tell us in Discord. You may find it changed in a future update.