Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Good Day,


In game I am known as Evelathia. I am 25 years old and a Heavy Duty Mechanic, I live in Alberta Canada. My father is known in game as Xalderze he is in his 60's Alberta Canada, He works day in and day out, for hours and hours, I can remember a time I did not actually see him for 2 days because of his job he was not allowed to leave his post. but after all that he still comes home to play EVE and relax with a big old glass of coffee and his magnifying glass.


I have seen the announcement about the new UI changes to the Ship icons, I my self like them, but for my father this is going to be tough, I love being able to play this game with my father, I may not do the same things as him in eve but we chat and enjoy our time on here. HE LOVES this game as do I.


I am more then concerned, that with this change he may not actually be able to play this game anymore which is an absolute sin and would leave me heart broken.


My father has a medical condition called Rod Cone Dystrophy which allows him to see some peripheral vision but not right in front of him unless he uses a magnifying glass, this condition has made him clinically blind since he has been the age of I believe 8 years old, he hasn't legally driven a vehicle, nor had the vision to see the world as me and my sister have, I have never met a stronger man in my life that shows no pain about it and does not ever get himself down or upset because he can not do certain things.


All my life we have always had a hard time doing things together because of this blindness he wasn't able to just take me out camping or just hop in the truck and go on a mans day shooting guns an such, but I managed to find gaming and it interested me, I started off with Wold Of Warcraft when I was much younger and he enjoyed my stories, so he looked and looked and looked for a game that interested him and he found eve back in 2006, I enjoyed watching him and all the things he was doing, so I started playing in 2007 with him.


We have had our fun made corps together, went to wormhole space together and then we split ways, I went to try null sec life and pirating, he has a difficult time with the pvp aspect cause of the fast pace and the magnifying glass doesn't slide across the screen very fast at all, so not to worry he stuck with Industrial side of eve, we chat all the time in game, and most of our phone calls in real life always depict some sort of craziness about eve in them, from oh my god no why would CCP do that, to the usual goons again go figure.


To have this game has been the most amazing thing for me and my father for 8 strong years now. We have been to Fanfest once and are coming again this march, its our Father Son get away together.


I am asking you CCP please work on a visually impaired UI for EVE so I don't loose my amazing father from a game we enjoy to play together and spend hours on together, that has given us the ability to finally connect so much better and have that bonding time with each other. Again my father would definitely not ask for something like this as he is a strong man but I know this will not go well for him.

you can only make UI 125% larger
there is no option to make icons larger,
yes your right you can make overview larger that does not increase the current size of ship icons on your overview.

Thanks for the suggestions i checked them to see if i could make it work for him, but the current icons are good its the new ones coming out that are much much to small.

Why should my father have to go out and spend more money on some TV when CCP could easily just make the UI a lot more visually impaired friendly, It is something that needs to be done, its not a tough question to ask of them in today's world. many people have issues and they get along fine with them until a certain point.

My father uses many different programs to increase the size of things but Eve Online is not friendly with any of them, example of one is called ZoomText is a huge one he uses to enlarge things so he can see them but it wont work with eve online.

Could CCP make it so their game is able to run with a program like ZoomText??

i will definitely look into the Windows magnifier, that is the only one we have not tried, if that works then hopefully problem solved for a while.

And thank you for taking this into consideration CCP it is greatly appreciated and i am sure if you ever had questions about ideas for it, my father would be more then happy to give details into what may help and what may not help a visually impaired person's.

Is it too late to make the new icons a toggle?

By no means I am in the situation of the OP's father, but I've already had issues in the past with UI changes and CCP listened. The slider to remove transparency from the new UI was a must for me and other players who couldn't cope with the poor contrast of text on transparent background.

The new icons have stepped in like a bull in a china shop, as they completely disable us to play. The list of issues with them is long, but I think that CCP Surge is already listening to feedback.

What do we need? Tippia already pointed. Make icons that work when they're small, then make them bigger to suit larger resolutions. Use shape, angles, filled/outlined and noticeable differences in size. And think why do we need icons, how we use the crosses, and move on from there. We already have a funtional GUI, improve it.

EVE is not a FPS or a game where good eyesight, fast reflexes and coordination are mandatory. Any step, even accidental, in those directions will leave out of the game the most vulnerable members of the community.

Thank you guys for all the support, for now my father and i have bought him a new PC screen and were able to use CCP Darwins tried fix, it does not work in full screen mode but does work in windowed modes, the fixed windowed mode still is not quite good as he cannot resize it to his screen to be able to view the whole game.

We were able to adapt before the new icons go live but i would enjoying seeing all the other suggestions that have come in this post looked at as well as mine vigorously to see if we could get a game that is friendly for our old and strong community so everyone can keep playing and enjoying this sandbox.

Good to hear your father has found something to assist.
CCP please realise, that you are a successful company. I cannot say that for profitability, or subscribers, as I do not know that for sure, but successful in the sense that people who join you and stay, stay for many years.

And as a result you will find, we are all getting older.

With that comes the entirely normal effects, where almost all of us start to need glasses, and the eye changes focus less rapidly.

Please consider this the primary driver for user interface changes. No matter how much more intuitive, how much better the data is displayed, how beautiful you make the icons.

It all counts for nothing if we can not see it or focus on the fine details in a changing environment.

I have much the opposite problem, my peripheral vision is hideous, and am very nearsighted.
My solution may work in reverse: 3 monitors, directly in front is a landscape, and to right and left are portraits.
The portraits are set to a much lower resolution so I can see them at a glance without turning my head, with high contrast to make the details pop out.

edit: respect to both of you for being hardcore eve players and bringing this up. making eve more accessible to all is a big, big +1

I too would like to add my voice to the support of this subject.

Given I play EVE on a 102 cm (40 inch) TV in the lowest resolution it supports and I can only read the words in the Overview from a distance of about 20 cm (on a good day) the size of stuff in the overview and menu's quite important to me.

So please CCP let us make your new overview/icons bigger. (Or send us freaking huge TV's to play on? )