Test Server Feedback

I put up some feedback on Sugar Kyles blog that I'll copy/paste here:



I'll go on to say, that you may be over-thinking this and trying to redo everything when only a few things need to be fixed. Things like being able to tell apart subclasses. I like the style of the first new set, but still fail to see why so much work is being put into something that already works pretty well.

Red crosses are fine for NPC's, the criticism of that has always been that the red cross is all we can see of the ship while zoomed out, and since we spend so much of our fighting time zoomed out it feels like we're fighting red crosses instead of ships. You'll need to do a lot more than change icons if you want to fix this.

These icons are really ugly. Please, return back old style icons. And drone icons are making so much mess

Hey ccp while you are at it, how about you give Supercarriers a different icon from normal Carriers..

Dont miss this oportunity

Better than the first round for sure, i can actually differentiate among most of these in the overview
the problem that i still have is if you get a blobl(15- or more ships/drones) in space and are zoomed
out(so that you can actually get a tactical view) they tend to blur into a some kind of porridge, that
is that its very hard to see any individual icons, you just see a smear where stuff at the edges move.

To reproduce what i am describing gather 15-20 ships in a spot, turn on your tactical overlay
and zoom out(yes i know your art department cries when we do this but a lot of us still do it)
until you have the 100-150 km cicrce visible top/bottom of screen. Now try to see how much useful
information you get from the icons.

Basically they are good in the overview not so much in space and since i believe one of the goals
was to make us _less_ dependant on the overview they still need a fair bit of work.

Let's take this reply a step at a time.

Firstly some of the Icons are clearer than your first attempt, these icons make maximum use of the icon space available.

Some of the icons, specifically destroyer and below, are frankly unuseable, these make minimum use of the space available.

The conclusion from this is NOT to use size of icon to differentiate class of ship. Drones etc can certainly be different.

The esthetics, hopefully you do not actually intend to use these icons and they are placeholders not to distract from getting reaction to the use of differentiations? Because they really are quite ugly and unpleasant. But I am pretty sure you already know that.

In short, thank god you did not make the last version live, but this version is definately not near ready for release.
Hopefully you can learn from the feedback to make the third time a charm.

It has been one week for this new brackets / icons iteration.
CCP Surge, is it possible now release the full list of new propose icons, so we can take a look without the hassle of buying one of everything in the game?
Also, a big thank you for your effort. Keep with your good work.

I hopped on earlier, and have some input.

I'm going to ignore some of the aliasing and pixelation issues. I'm going to make the assumption that this is simply a product of these being in development. I'd hope that the ones that go live would be a bit more polished.

The fill design for NPC objects seems good. However, I think the fill is too "thick." The ships are fine overall. They do turn into a bit of a soup at far zoom levels, but the current brackets have a tendency to do that anyway, albeit to a slightly lesser degree. To be fair, though, there's not a lot you can do about this, as any icon you ever use will look like soup when zoomed out very far with 100+ items on screen at any given time.

While flying through space, I was already able to very quickly identify ships once I found the trend. I did not intuitively make the connection between NPC items and player items being filled/non-filled until I read this thread.

Drones need to either be less opaque to allow easier visibility of ships within large groups of drones when viewed in-space, or a change-up in style. Right now, the drones clash with ships in a way that takes away from the visual recogntion when at farther zoom levels or when lots of drones are in play. More prominent ship icons with fainter or more discrete icons for drones (At least in space. Overview this isn't an issue) would be a welcome change.

That's my feedback for the whole set. I do want to point out a few specific icon issues, however.

1. I have repeatedly warped to a TCU instead of a station instinctively. I've also tried to, reflexively, warp to mobile depots thinking they were stations in a "I need to GTFO" moment. Given that TCUs are typically on a POS surounded with bubbles, this could be a VERY big problem initially. Perhaps make player structures a different shape from those of stations, to keep station icons very unique in order to prevent this.

2. Supercariers need their own icon to differentiate them from carriers.

3. Battleship icon is very distinctive, but doesn't feel as if it fits with the rest. It looks like it should be for a smaller, more agile craft, and not for a big beefy warship. Perhaps flip the large pentagon-shape that cruisers use for the battleship icon and vice versa. This would be a much more organic transition from the small triangle of the frigate, to the taller, more pointed triangle of a cruiser, to a big,beefy triangle for a battleship. Not sure how the Battlecruiser icon would look with this adjustment, however.

Anyway, until the next iteration, that's my 0.02. Overall, I like where it's going, but still needs work.

Another thing while we're on the subject of UI icons: is it really impossible to make them visible in space behind blurred windows? This issue has not been adressed since the introduction of windows blur ...

Went on the test server to check out the new 'features' and I must say I'm disapointed.As someone who was used with the curent icons for about 8 years now I feel a less intrusive set of changes would be better.

For example keep the old icons curently ingame for frigate cruiser and battleship and add new icons for stuff like destroyer battlecruiser and capital ships,for drones distinctive icons for only combat,e-war,logistic,fighter and fighter bomber(and no not the space invader type icons).

As for structures and celestials the important things like stations,gates,sun,planets,belts could remain the same or be only slightly modified(again making an easy transition for players) and things like POS modules or beacons could be revamped entirely.

And to top it off if you insist on these changes make them optional to keep everyone happy,

Hey guys, checking back in here and reading your feedbacks.

I've been doing a bit of polish on these in the meantime, as well adding many new ones, especially for POS and deployables that we simply never had before.

Some of the other updates you might notice on Sisi:
- No more pacman stargates :)
- Cleaned up some of the jagged pixels around the diagonals. Even though we tried a more utilitarian approach to these with crisp clear lines some of these were simply too distracting.
- Pass on the drone brackets to make them smaller overall; the reduced pixel weight makes them easier to filter out in a throng of ships

There are some aesthetic criticisms floating about. I won't shy away from that. The take on this particular set of icons was much more Military and Utilitarian themed; thus trying to stick with a lot of simple lines and shapes that would be easy to identify at a glance. However the old icons were even simpler in many ways, and I'm open to discussing what you guys found aesthetically pleasing about them.

On a few other points brought up here:

- Blobbing of brackets at really high zoom levels: I agree in-space brackets can still get messy with a lot of ships on grid. We already have some tech in place to help manage this like the mouse-over tooltip, but more can be done. I'll also tease that there are some projects underway surrounding a brand new tactical overlay; one that will give you better control over which in-space brackets show up in your HUD, and at which zoom levels :)

- A blurrier distinction between NPC and player ship icons: The NPCs have a light fill and I agree that the old crosses were dead simple to distinguish from players, although they had less info to convey. I'm just curious which parts of gameplay do you guys find the lack of being able to tell players and NPCs apart from one another quick most noticeable? I'm just looking for more reasons to make the distinction more clear.