Test Server Feedback

The point about the relative importance of ships vs drones is true, but they shouldn't be too small. Maybe they need thinner profiles.

Okay played around with this a bit. I like the ship classes, I like the drone classes with the caveat above (tried them all), I like the player vs NPC vs hostile NPC distinction, all that's good.

Found one bug not listed as a known bug: circadian seekers are still red crosses instead of a ship icon.

Now the bad:

• Pacman stargates. Apart from looking a bit silly and chunky, I feel like they should have a square profile as they're structures.
• The new wreck brackets (only visible in space currently) don't distinguish at a glance whether they have anything in them as well as the old. It'd also be nice if bigger wrecks looked different.
• Mobile depots and MTUs have a huge bracket! They look more like stations than little personal deployables, I want to dock in one when I see it.
• Pods don't really look distinct enough from ships.
• Beacons..... bleh, I don't know, I just don't like it. It's not a shape that I can really process at a glance. Also it's not distinguishing NPC from player, at least cynos should look different.
• Corpses still don't have a bracket (yes I know it would clutter space but they could have one in the overview). A little stick figure would probably not be too out of place?

Overall I think this is progress and significantly better than the previous attempt at changing brackets.

I just hoped on SISI and what a disaster...

At least fix star gates brackets so they are easily distinguishable.

Here's the easy solution to that... post an image of the icons in context... not shown in their oversized spaced out design template, but in game where people will see them.

Like this http://i.imgur.com/9QH5Gzk.png, and its a heck of a lot easier for you to just place 1 of everything than it is for us to buy, load, jetison, rinse, repeat until we sufficiently fill the space. And like in this example, I got tired and gave up after only buy 2/3 of the drones, and I wasn't going to be bothered to find a system with a wider variety of celestials/beacons/etc, nor was I going to setup a POS in order to anchor 1 of everything to give a proper lookover/comparison.

Maybe it would help the whole process if the icons were designed from the ground up "in context", which you appear to be saying they were designed "out of context". I am very grateful you realized at least in some small way that not everything needed a unique individual icon, but still needs a lot of refinement.

So now for some in context feedback...

1) EVERY single frigate hull falls into the same icon, EXCEPT the mining frigate and the noobship? Why? Both are used for combat and are frigate sized hulls, and we can very quickly identify if it is a Venture or a Ibis by reading the Type column...

2) Not sure how the rest of the caps look, but Dreads are near indistinguishable from a Cruiser... slight difference there in actual size.

3) Cargo containers, a box with a line through it like it is something that is empty? I'm confused here.

4) Wrecks, which icon is it supposed to be, the old MTU or the old wreck?

5) Deployables looking like stations.

6) Shuttles are NOT UFO's... please fix, or just make them a frigate icon, that is their size... again, if we need detailed info we will get it from the ship name or the type columns, not the icon.

7) THANK GOODNESS FOR NOT 27 SEPARATE DRONE ICONS!!!! Except they are over-done and need more work. I don't see what is wrong with the TQ drone icons, they were very quick and easy to tell it was a drone. And again, if we needed to bother ourselves with any further information about what type of drone we would simply hover over it or look at the overview columns.

8) I really extremely like that all of the industrials have the same icon, since they are the same size and are generally non-combatants.

9) Stargates are just wrong looking, the current one on TQ would work just fine in this new system would it not? Maybe with slight modification (read not over-enlargement and terribad design changes). It doesn't need to be that much larger than everything else.

Maybe someone will go one step further than I cared to do with my precious few hours this evening and make a more complete mockup with a full POS, more celestials and a gambit of NPCs.

After looking at the full list of icons, I think I prefer the original (first) draft from way back. This batch of icons reminds me of my Atari 2600...

Naaah. The old icons looked cool and modern sci-fi-y. The new ones look 80's arcade.

Added the known issues and I will do my best to keep this list up to date.

Thank you for pointing out that it was missing from this dedicated thread.

This, but I was too lazy to type it all out. I'm not going out finding all the things, and then trying to figure out if its a bug or a new icon. You show us what is intended, then we can judge it.

The new wreck icons are terrible at conveying the fact its empty/full. It looks as if there is something infront of it, not part of it. That little 'cargo can' that is set above/apart from the triangle simply doesn't function as well. Thats why we some of the current TQ stuff over some of these new changes that seem like they were designed in a vacuum....they have FUNCTIONALITY.

Also, i noticed you didn't address the fact that cruisers and dreads have nearly the same icon.

Drone icons are too important looking...the current TQ works...its a drone, thats all we really need to know...unless its a snake-owned Gecko...we still don't really need that many classes of drone icons. (the fact that CCP thought we needed 27 of them in the first place reveals the disconnect and designing in a vacuum) Attempting to show drone function with the icon is simply a bad idea.

Why have a whole separate 'class' for a mear two hulls..."mining frigate"....ventures and prospects should just fall under "frigate", as well as newbships.

good work, keep it up!

You should try to get away from the restriction of having a distinct outline with a darker (or no) background.

Current NPC red crosses lack the outline, and yet they aren't bad at all.

Plus, it would allow you to operate with much more diversity, and truly distinguish player ship types from NPC ship types.

Look at what I can do, on the top of my head, with lines that are not outlined. : https://i.gyazo.com/175ee65723638f836dcf89b60cf03ee4.png

That's quite a lot of diversified stuff, enough to cover all kinds of NPCs. No need to make triangles, and triangles, and triangles everywhere.