EVE New Citizens Q&A

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I mean, the game's been out for what, a decade now? I would expect better explanations for so many things.

Trying to scan down a relic site? Well, if your probe strength isn't high enough, you might not be able to get higher than ~70% even with your probe right on top of the site.

Trying to salvage a wreck? Well, your Salvage equipment says it has a small % chance to succeed. It lies - you have a 0% chance because of some hidden negative bonus on elite wrecks that isn't explained anywhere in the game.

One piece of equipment says -% bonus, and another says +% bonus? lol no, they're really both negative.

It's reasonable to assume that something will be more difficult - even far more difficult. But making something actually impossible without anything in the game explaining that is unnecessarily unintuitive. And really, some consistency with whether or not a bonus is positive or negative seems so basic it's like CCP isn't even trying.
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I like to say that the UI of EVE Online gets in the way of the incredible game that it is.

The reason for it? It's a throw-back to when the game was made. The original developers appear to have had a thing for spreadsheets and designed most of the UI around the look and feel of it being a spreadsheet. Over the years there has been a concerted effort to remove the spreadsheet element of the UI and replace it with something that is more intuitive.

Unfortunately for us that process is a very long and slow moving process. Every change to the UI to make it 'nicer' and friendlier is met with an awful lot of resistance from entrenched players who got used to how it was and don't want to (understandably so) have to relearn their game.

Basically, the UI was designed by people more interested in functionality and shortcuts than in design and intuitiveness. The folk who worked on EVE Online weren't UI masters. They were coders. Back in the day the height of "brilliance" when it came to compiling and the like was a series of command line toggles (something like: ATTRIB [+ R|-R] [+A|-A] [+ H|-H] [+ S|-S] [d:][path]filename [/S] - if you don't remember DOS or UNIX's love of command line options consider yourself lucky imo).

To display a lot of information it was (and, really, still is) easier and more efficient (especially given the computing resources of a PC back in 2003) to use a series of boxes and display the information in a spreadsheet form. This saved on CPU and made the EVE Client remarkably efficient. Unfortunately it also meant that the UI wound up covering up the game itself. Essentially, we were playing spreadsheets online. The screen became cluttered with boxes with text that would blink, change colour, and have little icons next to it to indicate what was happening.

Interestingly, there used to a radar type UI element in the game but while it was pretty enough people found having information displayed in a text box as more useful. The radar element was replaced by the directional scanner overview.

Well look at the good side, it was very worse than is today, and now its so better. It will never be perfect but it is in constant development.

There is too much in EVE to document well, and that document would be massive tome and boring as heck.

Probably the best attempt to date has been http://www.isktheguide.com/ and it is outdated and incomplete.

Luckily it is an MMO, so you can ask and learn from others.

it isn't helped by the fact that CCP change everything ever few years as part of rebalancing or overhauls

if you aren't higher than a 70% how can you know your probe is on the site?

I think the salvager has an "access difficulty modifier" not exactly percent to succeed. although if you run into it once it is easy to read up on why, and how to get around that.

+% and -% and well even just percentages. ah well a little thinking, and/or reading and you can figure it out.

You also need probing knowledge as well as skills.. Likely your tactics could improve a lot :)

A game that takes time to learn the ins and outs of?

What do you mean there's no arrow pointing where I should go?

You want me to learn from out of game sources?

Blasphemy!



((you'll come to appreciate a game that doesn't hold the hands of its playerbase))

p.s. it took me a full hour and a half (between trying to figure out where my ship was and how to undock, how to warp in space, etc.) to finish the very first tutorial mission. Mind you that was 2007 so the tutorial missions basically told you nothing. I actually logged out for a few days before I went back and figured out the game. Still learning.

He didn't ask for the game to be easy. He asked for it to be intuitive. Big difference.