EVE General Discussion

I'm dumb and profundly unable to follow basic forum rules, feel free to ignore/delete this thread, I'll repost this in the --akwardly located-- feedback thread

First, I understand I may be late about this now that crius have been publicly released. In all honesty, I did not bother checking SiSi because based on the various devblog I genuinely thought things were on a good track.

So far crius' changes seems (at least, to me) good. I may disagree with some but mostly CCP had a vision and put full commitment to bring it to reality.

What bugs me though is that the UI seems completely unfinished. Moreover, compared with the snapshot presented in these devblogs[ it looks like a huge rollback.

To be clear, I am not an expert industrialist, and I am probably far from having fully explored the new UI. But CCP had the chance to turn something that has been messy for years into a neat, clear, comprehensive piece of UI.
Instead of that, they just added more obfuscation to the system. This is not like if notorious people pointed out (again, and again) the importance of discoverability and clear game mechanics feedback.

Here are some of the things that I am the most uncomfortable with. This may not been "important" issues, but it seriously make me wonder how they come into the public version of crius without anyone having a second thought about it.

- Blueprint Details : Minor complaint here but ... What's the point of adding a rank to simplify things when we can't even see it. This is not the kind of information that should not be seen, retrieving rank is trivial, but CCP is just making things overly complicated where it is not needed.
Also there is no clue that research time increase across runs ! This may seems obvious for vets player but not for new players. Introducing a second tab with this kind of more "low level" informations would be worthwhile, especially in some years when infomations relative to crius won't pop up in the first page of a google search.

- Job Cost modifier : What the hell ? How did we go from the nice picture in "The price of change" to this crappy thing. The motto here is "no info at all".
I don't even know where to start ! The system cost index red bar is utter crap. What does that means when it's full ? For instance, Jita and 2R- have both full bar, but cost are drastically highter in Jita ...
I am ok with visual indicators, but make them accurate and comparable, and if not, say so !
The rest is even worse : the "total job cost" comes from some kind of vodooo magic. Simply put, you have no information AT ALL on how this cost is computed.
This picture is the perfect example of what it should have been.
These details are in a freaking pop-up, peoples that go here WANT additionnal info, not a stupid red bar. And even if it is the case, put this info somewhere else ! Station info, extra tab, I don't know but anywhere !
What's the point of hiding critical piece of information when i) it is retrievable from devblog (although, it will be an increasly pain in the ass for new players as time passes), ii) it is meant to be optimised iii) It is the one of the more important decision factor in industry !
Worst thing is that CCP know how to do it, they have nice breakdown recap for materials ...

- System cost indexes : Ok, at this point I'll start to be concise if I do not want to repeat myself. CCP obfuscation at its brightest. How intuitive is it to go to World Map control Panel -> Star Map -> Stars -> Industry -> system cost index to have a numerical value for that ?! The only reason why this is "just" midly infuriating is because of my previous point : this value has no practical use since literally all the other relevant informations are missing !

- Build menu : Until now, all of my complaints were directed at an overly simplified UI and could be inputed to over-zealous simplification of the UI... Then what the hell is that "type supported" pop-up thing ?
Don't get me wrong, pop-up with recap of installation modifier (times bonuses, system index etc) is a good idea (the way of representing system index is not but .. anyway) but is that necessary to have an exhaustive list of all the ******* ship-type that can be built ? Is there only a case where you can build a marauder and not a black ops ? Do we need so many type ? or is this another lazy implementation ? Is knowing that you can't build titan in station is more important than any of the stupidly hidden information ? Who will benefit from this ? How many clueless newbies this will confuse ?

- Station Upgrade : Ok not really a new thing here, but an all-time favorite of CCP. This is true for mostly anything upgradable. There is no simple way of knowing which upgrade is installed and what are theirs effects. Again this can be easily deduced (for station, for I-hub, etc). This is critical for line members (where to prod, where to research, where to mine ...) and the only thing you can do is to guess from side effects. This bothers me since Dominion and I-hub, so I get used to it, but I mention it because it underline what is wrong with the UI at the moment : Key informations are utterly hidden while, at the same time, designed so that the players need to take advantage of them. And no, this is not spoonfeeding, this is bad complexity versus good complexity and horrible UI choices.


Rereading this, It may be a little too much agressive for a simple UI complaint. Nonetheless, I hope i made my point clear. Moreover, I do realize that I may be mistaken or that I may have missed key points, so please be my guess, I am all hear if you are willing to argue on why these UI choices are for the best.

but even if there was, why would -anyone- bother posting THERE? that just seems silly

If only OP understood what the word "Prototype" really means which is plastered all over the blog

..continued from another thread..

The swarm quickly grew in size until it dwarfed the small pale frame of CCP NakedMan. The buzzing became louder and louder until it drowned out all other sounds. Suddenly, the sound changed. Now, a piercing wail harmonized with the angry buzz.

Curiosity now joined the fear that CCP NakedMan had felt. He gripped his fateful stick tightly and took a step forward. The swarm stood its ground. He took another and another until he was close enough to see what it was he was dealing with.

Gnats.. fur covered gnats. Thousands of them. the reason for the differing sounds soon became apparent. Half of the gnats were gnashing their teeth in anger, the other half were sobbing uncontrollably. CCP NakedMan peered even closer. All of the gnats oozed a thick liquid from every crevice on their bodies.. entitlement.. it was the only thing it could be, that.. and tears.

..to be continued....