Test Server Feedback

I wholeheartedly agree. The UI should be clear and concise. The point is for the user to take responsibility. We're asking them to pilot a very expensive ship through space, doing all kinds of dangerous and extralegal things.

The pilot is responsible for their actions.

They should have the freedom to make their own mistakes and learn why it was a mistake in the first place. It's EVE Online for a reason. Sometimes you have to point out the arcana of what it means to fly a ship, sometimes you have to allow newbie to take a daring stab at a Concord Captain orbiting a star gate all by himself. It's a great teaching moment.

Don't make it into My Friendly Pony land. Nothing gets better by turning the place into a safe space full of marshmallows and soft cushions.

Make those changes to the UI that help us do what needs to be done in an intuitive and visually pleasing manner. Don't make it a colouring book for the risk averse.

Spent a bit of time poking around and am happier than I was previously now I know much of this is only because we're locked in Alpha mode.

When an account is made Omega do the gold edges to some items vanish, do gold sklll boxes etc turn white? I feel it's important that subscribers not have information reminding them the game is F2P one of the perks of the sub should be a fully nu-intrusive UI.

Little Issues

• 3D Character renders have horrible anti-aliasing.
• Born could be changed to graduated/licensed/certificated, this has always been an RP/Lore gripe of mine as characters are not born on that date.
• Pilot License tab could do with being at the end (far right) as it's generally the last used tab.
• Change the "show market info" on ships listed under skins to show the skins not the ships.
• Pop-up boxes with skill descriptions blocks the skill above, meaning you have to move down/off before you can move up to hover over the one above unless you move it just slightly. Maybe extend the height a bit so it gives more space above.

Poked around on sisi.

No aspect of this feels like an improvement. It's just plain horrible or unnecessary in every regard; and frankly whoever came up with the layout and way it displays skill categories and levels, the permanently displayed training queue and the assumption that we read with our heads tilted 90 degrees needs to go back to get slapped in the groin and sent back to school. You need a way of displaying clone state and available skills, i get it. This is not the way to do it. (oh and give us our old char portraits back. we made them for a reason, we kept them as they currently are for a reason......just stop it.)

Proceed directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200; start again or you really might as well label it beta and abandon it like the new map.

ok so like i need my omega state back right this moment, cause i see some new exiting ship skins on the test server,,, the barges...
they...they ahve little lights moving aroudn them! and the mining command ships do to! it looks so sexy and amazing!

Poked around in SISI some more. I'll wait until the end of the day to see the changes to the skills and such. But I'd like to request two things.

I don't personally like the large (aliased) live avatar at the top of the window. It looks pretty bad with the jagged edges and quite honestly I like my self made picture better. Luckily there's an easy way to collapse it so no major problem there. Unfortunately collapsing the live avatar also collapses some important UI information that can't be found anywhere else.

• Account status (Alpha, Omega), this is pretty important to be able to see at a glance. If the header is collapsed I can't.
• Medical clone location
• Security status
• Name and date of birth
• Race, corporation and alliance

With the header collapsed there is more than enough room to display this information above the character sheet tabs. At the very least display the Alpha/Omega icon left of the username and the medical clone location aligned to the right maybe? But if you could find a way to fit all the information above the tabs when the header is collapsed that would be even better.

Ideally I'd like to suggest that instead of showing or collapsing the header, you can switch between the ugly live avatar and a large version of your character portrait.

I'm too lazy to make a mock-up right now. Maybe later.

This is worth a try. Could even put the icon at the top with the letters in descending order. Reading from bottom up is just not natural.

What was the worst for me was trying to read the skills cathegories sideways. Trying to make sense of all those cathegories when new to EVE Online is hard enough. Having to tilt your head sideways to see what is writen is a bit painfull. They could be angled 45 degrees or so and it would make it a LOT easier. I am not a new player and trying to find the right cathegory was a bit rough even though I knew exactly what I was looking for.

Identifying the untrained skills was very easy though once in the right place. The new layout for individual skills was great. The colors are not that great though. CCP has always had great design and great graphics, I'm sure you can find better esthetics.

Although, when checking for required skills in the "show info" of a ship it was easier to see the missing skills when they were red. The missing skills need to stand out more. If you are opening the gates to new players everything needs to be clear.

The biggest obstacle for new players is how complicated this game can be when you first start it. When I first started I played for a week and quit because I was lost. A good friend told me to give it a 2nd chance and he explained on TeamSpeak everything I had troubles with and it got me hooked.

If you want players to enjoy the game, make sure they understand easily what they are seeing. New players wanting to buy into Omega state should do it because they want more of EVE Online, not because you have put the option to pay for it everywhere.

I have a friend that was on the trial a couple years back and he wanted to go the industrial way. His first mission was a transport mission and he needed an industrial ship to complete it (big packaged to be delivered). But the skills to fly industrial ships was locked on trial accounts so he quit and never came back. I see that you haven't blocked this on alpha clones. Thumbs up for that!! Make sure all new players can try everything they want to see what their play style is. I want all my friends to come play EVE, but I can see a lot of them getting discuraged by the complexity of the UI (especially if it's confusing). DO NOT MAKE THE GAME SIMPLER!!! This game is great and needs to stay as complex as it is, it just needs to be simpler to understand so that more people can see how beautiful it is.

Holy crap! My A.D.D. kicked in hard there...

Conclusion : Vertical text is bad and UI needs to be intuitive and soothing.

Pretty much this.

p.s How have you managed to use more screen real estate to provide less information?

p.p.s Skill groups are not in alphabetical order? in fact I can't work out how they are ordered, it does not seem to make any sense.

Thanks for making the bars horizontal, huge improvement.

I see you've made the bars fill based on ranks trained out of the total possible. That's ok, it gives an overall sense of completion for the category, but we still need to be able to easy see how much SP we have in each category and each skill (so we can easily give a number to others and also gauge how much of our total is allocated to each - not all ranks are equal and those numbers are critical for injection, extraction and SP/min or remap calculations) or you could have a series of icons (or a dropdown) at the top that lets us sort the groups alphabetically/by total SP/by total Ranks. I think that would satisfy everyone - and you can leave the bars showing rank completion that way, for the effect. But we do need the numbers please and easily visible.

I agree with others that the 3d portrait at the top is not very nice. We can still see our portraits if we want to, sure, and thankfully that's how we see other player's character's info (please don't change that). But although it doesn't really hurt, since it's just aesthetics, an option would be nice, even if the 3d is the default. Put it in graphics settings, along with the asteroid environments and drone models and stuff. We should be able to choose between the 3d portrait and the regular picture a lot of us care a lot about :P - I'll also second Spitcrow's suggestion to allow hiding the top pane while still being able to view home/sec status/corp and all that in a compact way - right now, hiding the top pane leaves only the name there, which is a waste of so much space at the top. If there is need of this for the purpose of hiding the info on screenshots, put it in the settings, it would be a niche use.

I'd also recommend the nebula background to change depending on the region our home station belongs to, rather than be fixed.

The tooltip behavior is still inconsistent. I think you adjusted the threshold for when it stays or leaves but it's just not good enough, sorry. Here's an example:

https://youtu.be/q5Hw4zQbXz0

Can you tell when I'm trying to mouse up to the next skill or when I'm actually trying to hit the "Add to Queue" button? If you can't tell 100% of the time, there's your problem. In fact, for most of that, I'm just casually trying to get to the button but instead I hover over the skill above it. If I try to mouse up too slow or too fast, the opposite of what I want happens. Not to mention, it blocks visibility of skills above it. This is why we insist these tooltips need to be on the side of a _list_. An alternative is to leave it this way and have a hover button or just get rid of the thing entirely and just leave double-click and dragging to be the ways to get a skill into the queue.

You could also just give us a compact, side-by-side list view like the previous one, which worked just fine. In fact, if we had this UI until now and you changed it to the side-by-side one TQ has, we'd interpret that as an improvement. So again, not very good, unless you at least provide us with a layout similar to what we already have. It may not be perfect, but it's easier to use than this.

The changes to the requirements tree for skills/modules/ships were good btw, props for that. We get to see individual training times immediately. Still, the old colors for skills that aren't trained enough or injected were better - could use a subtle red or yellow background for them there, or perhaps some brighter icons as a compromise. Other than that, it's improved.

Again, we don't need Omega symbols and yellow omega frames for everything, but I guess we've hammered this one in enough already.

Some things I noticed:

• The training time multiplier is no longer displayed on the character sheet and is only in the skills show info window. This will probably confuse new players because they won't know why one skill takes twice as long to train as another.


• You can't see the number of skill points you have trained in a skill. This used to be displayed beneath the skill in the skills browser, the only metrics you can see now is the number of skill points you have in a category and your total skill points.


• If you minimize the 3d view you cannot see the information displayed in that section. I think a text summary of information like death clone location, alpha/omega status, corp/alliance would be appreciated.


• If you dock the character sheet with another window the 3d view is forced closed which makes a text summary even more important.

Other than those things it's very nice.