Test Server Feedback

Yes, This ^^^^^ !!! For some stations this is needed !!

I didn't find this thread initially, so I made the below post in general:



Then I saw this, reading through this thread:



CCP Turtle, you have not followed through on this. Where are the straight, vertical, lines showing where an object above or below me is in relation to my horizontal plane? The curved line setup doesn't do this, it only shows distance. Something the overview already shows me. The curved lines only account for the sphere's purpose but does not account for the vertical lines showing relative spacial location. Those straight, vertical, lines were incredibly important for more clearly depicting the 3D location on a 2D display. Once I discovered this feature was missing I docked up immediately, as it's vital for me to fly and interpret what's around me.


I see others have mentioned this issue in the thread. It also seems like CCP Turtle hasn't answered to those complaints and ignored them, while answering to others. Can we please get this feature back, be it an adjustment to the current camera or adding another camera mode for "spatial awareness".

Don't get me wrong, visually the "style" of the camera has vastly improved but functionally it's been reduced to useless and redundant, since the overview already shows distance. Bring back spacial location, please.

''Nope, but we will make sure the new overlay has all the same features as the old one before it replaces the old one on Tranquility.

Cheers,
CCP Turtlepower''

I'm gonna carry on being nice about this but the new Tactical Overlay is really not doing it for me. CCP Turtlepower please how hard can it be to give us the old overlay back as an option? I really really dislike this new one and it's basically integral to my PvP playstyle. I haven't PvP'd since you replaced it and I don't feel comfortable doing so. It just doesn't give me the information I need because it lacks proper 3D representation without tracing curved lines all over the place.

PLEASE can we have the old one back?

I'd like to request that we have the option to use the old style tactical overlay or something similar to the sphere. I understand that there were folks who were tired of the sphere for range, but it was incredibly useful. Having used this for a few days now in a variety of circumstances, I implore to consider allowing us to revert to the hold tactical overlay or to add a range sphere option to the new system.

I understand that there are people who are glad to not have the sphere, etc. there from an aesthetic standpoint, but aesthetics should not determine the choices for tactical tools at the expense of providing quick information for decision making.

Why:

1) In large fleet fights the curved lines become useless since they just become a jumbled mass that more often obscure parts of the battlefield than assist in determining the range of enemy ships. White lines on top of white brackets quickly becomes a visual mess. When passing above or below and enemy fleet and the curved lines start shifting to the other side of the circle much faster than the enemy ships are actually moving, those lines get even more distracting.

2) In PVE, I now have to choose between the tactical overlay and showing brackets for wrecks--I used the old overlay 100% of the time. Once there are more than a handful of wrecks on the screen, the curved lines to wrecks quickly become a tangled mess and start to obscure the ship brackets. Hence, the new system requires me to reduce the amount of available information on the screen because of the clutter created by the tactical overlay.

3) The old sphere was very handy for quickly determining ranges to targets because it was very easy to sort out visually from any direction. The point of the sphere was to quickly determine in/out of range in a single step. The new system adds an extra step to this process, forcing me to trace out the curved line from the ship (again, nearly impossible to do in fleet fights) to the horizontal plane. Hence, my eyes have to look at two objects (the ship and its range indication circle) to determine the same information I could do by looking at one object (the ship) with the old overlay. For a "tactical" tool, this is a move in the wrong direction since tactical tools are supposed to speed up the decision process, not add extra steps.

4) The circles on the horizontal plane are visually very similar to ship and other brackets. This very distracting in any engagement where ships are moving constantly as there are now twice as many bracket-like objects moving around the screen that my eyes have to sort out. It gets especially distracting when those circles are moving across the horizontal plane faster than the ships themselves (e.g., passing above/below).

I understand you want to update the cosmetics of the tactical overlay, but replacing the range sphere with curved lines adds significant visual clutter to the grid without providing additional information over the old design. Please give us the option to revert to the old tactical overlay or add a range sphere option to the new tactical overlay. Without these, the new tactical overlay may look prettier and more "modern," but from a tactical standpoint is a step in the wrong direction from the old overlay.

Hey man thanks for the swift reply.

Combat

It's just that the curved lines are all very close to each other when you have a group of ships, they don't stand out very well and they didn't give the instant visual representation that the spheres did. Having proxy lines that represent a ship is no substitute for actually having the ship itself inside or outside the targeting bubble.

When there are more than 5-10 ships on grid, distinguishing those curved lines for each ship then tracing it up to the horizontal plane is next to impossible as they all merge into each other. I liked having a 3D representation of my targeting, gun range, falloff and ranges for my other modules.

I used to move my camera around to the side of the ship, zoom out and kite, watching the enemy ship drifting in and out of the bubble. I could easily see if the enemy ship was entering or exiting my range bubble, but now it's hard to tell.

If other ships joined the fray I could see where they were instantly with relation to my guns. With this new system I have to take my eyes off the other ship, trace the new enemy's line and then go back to the other ship by which time the other ship could have overheated MWD and come into scram range.

Conclusion

I see what you're tried to do here and I appreciate the effort but for me, the old system provided information that was easier to digest and react to. This new system is visually inefficient. While being pretty, it takes longer to work out where someone is in relation to you.

Reddit Post

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/4h41uy/the_new_tactical_overlay/

Thanks in advance Turtlepower

Hey Turtlepower, that's cool that you're still keeping an eye on this.

I've already commented on the subject a lot so I'm not going to repeat everything, I will however repeat that I'd like to have the option to choose for ourselves on the fly (with shortcuts to switch between two styles ie).
I think the straight versus curved lines and sphere versus circle for range both have pros and cons for each, and we can probably resume it like that: the new tactical overlay is much better with a handful of ships on grid, but much worse in fleet fights with lots of stuff on grid.

I know that would mean keeping more things updated and so on, more work in the end. But now that we have 3 cameras that may not be too much to ask.
At least think about it and discuss it with the other devs working on it, thank you! :)

All the devs involved in the tactical overlay's development have met and discussed how to move forward; here are the results:

Cyno Range Spheres - Since this is by far the most requested feature, we will add this as soon as possible. Hopefully we can get it into the next release.
It's hard to see what is in and what is outside your range - There is actually a subtle transparency difference between items and lines outside your range and inside it, but this is probably a bit too subtle since many of you did not notice it (lines are more transparent outside your range). We are looking into possible solutions to make this more obvious.
We would like to point out that there is another way to see what is in your range; if you hover over a module that has a range (like a gun) it will place little targeting bracket arrows around all brackets inside your range.
Color blindness issues - we have scheduled a deeper investigation into this and hope to implement some changes in the future to improve this.
Vertical lines - we decided not to add this back to the overlay, at least not yet. Most of the feedback we have received is that the new curved lines are simply better, particularly in large scale fights. We will continue monitoring feedback of course and could very well revisit it later down the line.

That should be your targeting range.
Your case is a bit of an unfortunate one, as you've obviously mastered using the old tactical overlay. We are certainly considering this feedback, but for now please try using the new overlay in PVP. Perhaps you will appreciate it more once you have mastered its usage to a similar level.

Fly safe
CCP Turtlepower // Team Psycho Sisters

Thanks for responding bud, don't take any of the following in the wrong way but I need to explain things in a blunt way.

Honestly this patch I don't feel great about any of it. The Shadow suicide damage is too high, fighters seem really overpowered and imbalanced, doomsdays are hella overpowered (80 cerbs insta-vaporized lol) and citadels are making warp paths laggy as hell.

After this patch I've also experienced about 3-4 CTDs (Crash to Desktop) which I was never experiencing before. I'm not running a bad rig either, Haswell i5 chip, 8GB RAM and a GTX980.

To top it off this tactical overlay is something that I voiced my concerns about before release, got completely ignored by both the community and the devs, now it's live and has completely replaced the old one and I'm pretty stuffed. I'm left with a buggy, messy game with a difficult-to-use control system that feels far from what a finished expansion should look like.

I've tried being nice over and over but it's not working.

About the other guy's point about the vertical straight lines. You came to the conclusion that the curved lines are better right? How are they better? Without straight lines you can't trace straight up to position your ship for things like decloaks. Curved lines don't replace the functionality that the straight ones gave us. They actually give us no more functionality than the spheres had. So they replaced a good, functional feature (spheres) and you removed another good feature (straight lines).

Your advice regarding the overlay is simply; 'Keep trying it till you git gud at it'. I'm telling you, it doesn't work. It's like replacing my nice snowboard with an old rusty pair of cross country skis and saying, 'If you keep riding those for long enough, you'll git gud'. No mate, I won't. I'll end up double ejecting and dying, a.k.a. losing billions of ISK in PvP ships because I can't see wtf is going on.

If you've had a meeting with a bunch of devs and decided against adding the old overlay back as an option the first time, you're not likely gonna change your mind the second time. You haven't stuck to your promise of making sure that the new overlay has ALL THE FUNCTIONALITY of the old overlay BEFORE replacing it on Tranquility.

I'm not saying remove the new overlay, I'm just saying that I really dislike it and I'm not alone. Those of us that dislike it want the option of returning to the old overlay, which you're refusing for no reason other than principal it seems.

You're not making it easy for me to keep giving you £20/month. If I bought a game where the control system was great, then they patched it and it was yuck, I'd take the game back.

Please look at this seriously, give me a real reason why it can't be done or why it shouldn't be done or I'm out. I have other hobbies that I can invest £20/month in.

You don't need QA for a system that's been functional for years. I'm sure they didn't QA the overlay until they decided to ruin it.

Thanks for the update. However this bothers me. From what I've read in this thread people seem to be ok with the curved lines, as in they are workable, in small scale fights only. Not necessarily better. In large scale fights the curves are useless as they all blur together and you can't tell what curve goes to where, contrary to what you're saying. I haven't seen a single person say that the curves are better for large scale fights.

This still doesn't fix that you can't tell where a ship or object is in relation to you, horizontally, with the curved lines. Only the straight lines do this, they also do not have the blurring together problem. There are still many people in this thread requesting the straight lines as the curved ones mess up their location awareness. It is still a feature that was there before and is now removed when you said all features will be maintained. The new curved lines do not do the function of spacial awareness.

I like the options being put forth by others to split them into a toggle or separate camera modes. One for the curved lines and distance, and one for the vertical lines for spacial awareness. Could this be done as a workaround?