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I'm going to be extremely positive about this.

Why? Because I am having no difficulty in making out the difference between the icons at a glance.

They all seem to be intuitive and are acceptable for the size that they are required to be.

Maybe it's because my eye has been trained to pick out very subtle differences in shape and silhouette. That doesn't mean that these icons have differences that are too subtle.

This is a large change to iconography and I think we should accept it and adapt to it. You will find it easy and helpful in the future and will think back to the "Good ole days" when the overview was mad up of red and grey + symbols and capsuleer ships were just an empty bracket of 3 different sizes meaning you had to actually read the ship type to know if you are about to fight a destroyer or a cruiser. Well guess what.... all you nay sayers and complainers just made "Bitter Vet" status. Enjoy wearing your medal.



P.S. The new monochrome neocom is way better than the old blurry images.

Quoted for emphasis and linked back to the original post.

Hahahaha, epic! As long as the icons show only the class of ship, we're still ending up with a crowded overview (need for type column for ex). So I guess, the change is about making the overview more eye candy.

You know what the problem is?

The problem is that NONE of the ship icons look like any actual ships in the game. The icons look like Star Wars ships, especially the v-shaped star destroyers etc. But none of the ships in EVE look like that. None of the battleships are diamond shaped, none of the frigates are ^ shaped, none of your ships look anything like the icons.

We'd have a much easier time recognizing things if you took the outline of an iconic ship from each class and made it the icon for that class. For example, the Vexor, everyone will recognize a Vexor outline. Pretty sure we're all familiar with the rookie ships, pick one. Rifter, Magnate, Armageddon, Scorpion, Avatar, Moros, Nyx, are all recognizable shapes.

Basically, your ship icons kinda suck. Going by the system you've picked, the icon for an asteroid would be a sword - something completely unrelated to the shape or purpose of a roid.

You do of course mean in years to come when the hardware they are specifically designed for is affordable for the masses and not just the rich and idle who want to play 1 character on maximum resolution.

With all these new changes being targeted at a minority of highend machines owners who can run all the pretty but mainly irrelevant bling effects, it is going to leave a lot of players with 2 options. Buy a new machine or find another game.

As others have pointed out - being able to easily recognize the difference between a cruiser and a battleship by icon size is pointless when you still need a column for ship type to tell which cruiser you should be shooting at.


Changes that add something useful are great but those like this that are just for the sake of change and or directed specifically at a minority group are more of a nuisance.
If your going to change all the icons, do it right the 1st time, make them useful.
When you land on grid you need to quickly identify the biggest threat, right now that is achieved by using a column for ship type. These new icons are not going to change that or help to change it in any way.

So, in 7 pages, 130 posts, and nearly 24 hours, we finally have one dev response saying they designed the icon base much larger than it was going to be used because they feel the need to cater to a small percentage of clients that will have transitioned to the probably still expensive 4k setups in what, 5+ years, and therefore making indiscernible when it was shrunk down to it's size in game.

So this change is not good for now, he just admitted that, but they still want to go ahead with it because if enough people spend enough money and go all in on the 4k craze in 5+ years it might be good?

Thanks CCP for making yourselves sound more insane with the poor choice of the only thing you decided to respond to in this entire thread.

Please address the more valid concerns:

1) 27 different icons for drones? All most of us need to see is that there is a drone on field, if we really care to know what kind we will mouse over it or select it (or just turn drones on in our overview list, because clicking on fast moving warriors is a pita)

2) POS sentry guns/station guns? Why the change from a very clear and unique current icon to something that is terribad?

3) Why do labs retain the icon looking like a factory, and factories look like, eh, maybe a power coil of some sort?

4) The lack of clear and distinct differences between ship icons. When the difference is only 2 pixels variance between 2 slightly differently slanted/angled triangles it is not very easy to see. Please make these icons unique and discernible. For example see Homeworld, it worked and that was near 20 years ago, and it still works.

5) The overview icons should be a quick guide to basic info, not a place to shove more info and therefore make it more confusing and cluttered. We only need to get the most basic info from a icon in the overview, why, because there are numerous other places in the overview for the more detailed info, like mouse over, selecting it, or looking at one of several columns with that info already there.

I would quote some of the better suggestions I've seen but there are so many, and different ways to do it too. Have you been reading those posts?

Looks good on paper, but the icons need a bit more work:

• The industrial and combat ship icons are almost identical. They're both basically triangles, and look nearly identical except when oversized. The slight differences in shape will not be easily noticeable in-game. Please consider using wholly different base shapes for industrial and combat ships. Squares, or rhombuses, or anything other than triangles.


• The little engine flare things on the bases of the destroyers and cruisers will blur into the image on all but the lowest resolutions. You can even see this in the posted screenshot. Little details are an awful way to distinguish icons in a fast-moving environment precisely because the player won't have time to squint to see the little tiny details. Merely increasing separation between the engine flare and the main icon probably won't work well because the icons are already too small .


• Triangle width is not sufficient to distinguish combat icons by itself. Especially on large monitors, where variance between a frigate and a cruiser may be just a few pixels.


• Icon size should correlate more with ship size so that small ships have small icons, and large ships have large icons. Such a system both very intuitive and is much better than simply adding more stuff to icons to distinguish them.


• Please add a 'large overview icons' option.

In general the icons seem like they were designed for an 800x600 monitor, and for a fairly slow-paced game. They rely too much on fine details, which will not work as a mechanism for easy ship identification on large monitors, and will doubly not work when the player has to do things other than try to figure out whether that triangle is stumpy like an industrial or pointy like a combat ship.

Structure Groups?

I for one would use shadowless flat colors instead. Color gradient and shadows are so yesterday.

I'd even add a bit of alpha, like 95% or something.

These are definitely a step in the right direction and I would take these over the current implementation any day. In the concept space scene provided, I can make accurate classification of ships.

If am going to critique, in my opinion more emphasis should be given to the differentiation of the ship classes. Its nice to have a running theme, but for example the difference between the frigate and cruiser are too small. If I were looking to target frigate specifically they don't 'jump out at me' enough.

Of course this is all conjecture until we get a chance to use it in situ.

TL;DR POSSITIVE FEEDBACK