EVE General Discussion

MMO's seem to be leveling off. A callous attitude just won't cut it in a competitive environment. but perhaps it was a troll

CCP should think well. Microsoft enjoyed alienating people so much they came out with the Ribbon on their office suite. Ubuntu came out with the Unity interface and suddenly their competition Mint is taking over. You cannot afford to bully or mis-identify your customers

I do a few things on the computer. I either create, use and/or I/O. Where the ribbon fails is its focus on use. Billions of keystrokes were analyzed so that all the repetitive users actions could be made more efficient. Its quick to use but it became very hard to create new templates, designs, spreadhsheets etc without a lot of work getting up to speed. I'm still slower and its been 5 years. I think it slowed down a lot of other people also. Good thing the world was a captive audience

Before that Windows failed by moving us into the graphical UI. Table type data was quick to read and scan. graphical data can convey meaning quicker but only a few things at a time. As we move along in eve our ability and desire for more info keeps expanding

We have an old user-base that has learned how to get a lot of data off of our tabular overview. It takes time but the number of columns can grow. Lets not go graphical. While I'm I/O, whats wrong with wasd interface in addition to our current vector control tools

One terrible aspect of our overview setup is the complete lack of feedback until your on the field. The granularity of our overview settings is pretty good. Some room exists for improvement in standings clarifications and that neutral standings trick. Before we gloss that up, we need immediate feedback, preferably in station, maybe in the captains quarters even.

Imagine three interfaces, 2 of them new to us. Our familiar overview settings, a pseudo-overview which displays objects as they will appear in space and a proto-overview where we design and specify and define the classes of objects we anticipate seeing in our particular game activity like what we currently name our overview tab

For instance, on the right side of the screen is a regular overview but it only displays what I tell it to. Its a false or psuedo-overview. On the left is my proto-overview and in the middle is my overview settings dialog. On the left I select cruiser and immediately a white cruiser shows up on overview on the right. Back to my left I right click and select a state or a standing or even something like a angular velocity speed and apply it to the cruiser. Now in the middle I set my appearance options and on my psuedo-overview

Call the names anything you want but the idea is immediate overview feedback thats totally customizable. Making an overview is a creative process. We can still import or export but I don't know about you, I don't know what my overview is saying unless I'm the one that told it what to say in what conditions

We should not make the mistake of the ribbon and design a user interface where we actually need a creative interface.

TL;DR an overview proposal and call for caution.

My signature and I have agreed on this for quite some time.

Everything needs to be icon-ised more with fully custom layouts depending on what you're doing. Even to the point of using your own icons if you don't like CCPs available selection. Simple.