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And now for my rant on the skill queue.

This is the single biggest issue I have with the changes and where I believe the developers really missed. (BTW, if I actually used sound when playing, I would probably agree with those complaining about the changes to Aura's voice as being the biggest issue).

Issues with EVE Online new skill interface
I know many of you have worked very hard on the interface re-designs. Unfortunately, with the skill queue especially, I firmly believe you missed it, re-organizing and adding some functionality while omitting other functionality and introducing features that cause eye strain.

My issues with the new skill interface are below.

1. In the top area, I am unable to sort skill areas alphabetically (or at least it does not appear to be available).
a. This SIGNIFICANTLY increases time required to locate a skill area!
b. I am personally not nearly as interested in how many skill points I have put into a specific area as I am interested in finding information FAST. This new setup prevents that since they are not sorted alphabetically anymore.
c. Information is configured in a matrix format, where you have to look top to bottom and left to right. This significantly increases time to locate information. The old list format was fast and EASY.
2. Three boxes/viewing areas stacked on top of each other instead of the old two boxes side by side
a. The top two boxes used to be the left box, could/should be re-combined since they are complimentary and were easy to read and understand when you had the expanding menus.
b. I am unable to maneuver quickly through the middle or lower box; this hides LARGE numbers of skills, especially if you have a long queue!
i. VERY hard to read and see what is there or what you have in the queue.
c. The old side by side setup was very intuitive and EASY to scan through skills. This new interface is terrible when compared with the old one!
d. If you want to see more of any box, you have to resize the box, which limits other boxes. This constant re-sizing adds amazing amounts of time. TERRBILE setup!
e. If you want to drag a skill from the center box into somewhere in the bottom box that is not visible, it takes a REALLY long time to either scroll to that spot before dragging the skill, or drag the skill over and wait for the bottom box to slowly scroll.
i. The old side-by-side setup made this fast and easy/intuitive.
f. Bottom line, the three box/viewing area adds significant time to managing skills!
3. The new setup wastes a huge amount of space in the bottom box.
a. Spacing between skills is close to twice as large as it needs to be.
b. Spacing left to right is a huge waste of space. The old queue made the space available vertically, was easier and faster to read and use.
4. The new animations showing what skill is being trained are distracting.
a. Draws the eyes immediately to them and makes the top skill harder to read.
b. The blinking button at the bottom right is also extremely distracting.
i. Why do we need a large blinking button showing how much time left in queue when the old small buttons worked just fine?
ii. The old format had a small number showing skill queue duration, which again, worked very well.
c. The old method of blinking the currently training box on the skill was plenty, and told what was going on very clearly.
5. The colors and shadings make the information VERY hard to read and find.
a. This also introduces eye strain; yes I experienced several times, and the eye strain immediately went away when I closed the skill queue.
b. The old queue was easy to read due to the consistent font sizings, simple colors, and no shadings.
6. The pop-ups are garbage (yes, garbage).
a. They get in the way constantly and are very hard to use.
i. This is especially true for the center box where you select individual skills. If you move the mouse over a skill on the left side then want to move to the right side, you must wait for the popup to disappear.
b. Get rid of them or find a different way to display the information so it is a) not in the way and b) does not disappear if you want to use it but happen to move the mouse to the wrong place.
7. The new information available directly from the skill queue is kinda cool, but it could have been incorporated into the old setup without absolutely mangling the interface.
8. The icons showing which skill group a skill in training is associated with appears to me to be a waste of space.
a. This is even worse because some of the icons are similar (gunnery, missiles especially), which increases eye strain to make them out.
9. The arrow by the search box which switches between text and icons for skill groups would be handy if I cared to actually memorize all the icons. Text is much more useful for me.
a. This feature could be retained if you also had as a selection option to sort skill areas alphabetically (see above).
10. On the skill information displayed on ships/modules, etc, under the “Requirements” and “Mastery” tabs, the new formatting is hard to read.
a. The new blue period is hard to locate and does not provide as much information as the old interface.
b. The old red x’s and yellow circles were very easy to read and intuitive.


In summary, go back to the old skill queue, and add information to it. If it is not possible to add additional information to the old queue, then the old queue, unmodified, is just fine, and radically better than what you have provided us!

Thus ends my rant, except to say if I continue experiencing eye strain due to this new feature, I may have to seriously consider leaving the game. The old skill queue format did not cause this, even with all the time I spent on it.

End of rant.

After all these weeks, I find myself strongly believing that CCP can no longer afford to pay for the copyrights of the original aura recordings. Of course, if a director had not had the copyright of his movie, he 'd be a fail director.
They either had some really bad deal with the original actress and the contract doesn't cover them, or they had just the trial version of the voice and it expired. So we get the fallback, some random chick and some random filters. Thankfully we didn't get Microsoft Sam. Oh wait.. that one is copyrighted...

This means the following:
1. Aura will not be coming back, they cannot afford it anymore.
2. The ship is sinking.
3. CCP will not give any feedback; they cannot admit their state, that would be nails in their coffin.
On the contrary, they will continue acting as if nobody ever complained, ignoring the issue.

My account might get banned for this post.
This post may be deleted for exposing them.
This post will not be deleted as this would prove it exposes them.
This post might be edited, go on I have screencaps.
This post will remain here to be seen by everyone, while no action will be taken, thereby silently confirming #3 and #2

G'day mates

If that would indeed be the case, then I wish that they would just admit it to us.

That way we would at least be able to understand their situation, and it would make it easier for most of us to accept it. After all, this is a game that we have all come to love dearly, and I'm sure most of us don't want to see the CCP ship go under, at all.

So if that would truly be the reason behind these recent changes, and they would come clean about it to their playerbase, I think that that would result in nothing less than a supportive reaction from us (financial and otherwise) .

Whereas right now, it comes across as if nothing is the matter (which could, for all we know, just as well be the case), and that these were conscious decisions made by the CCP team because they thought that they would be genuine improvements. Which most of us happened to disagree with, resulting in an anti-supportive, or rather, rebellious, reaction from us.

So, as I've said multiple times before, I think CCP needs to rethink their policy of communication towards their playerbase. Because keeping silent obviously isn't doing them any favors. For as long as we don't have any definitive answers, we will fill in the blanks ourselves.

In my opinion, and I think this is axiomatic, if you want people to invest in your product, you have to provide them with transparacy.

I still have not gotten used to the Aura voice...

If and only if we cannot have the old one back, could we re-record "kennekting", "dockingpermissinrequested" and "dockingpermissinaccepted" and "wup draiv äctiw"?

Character sheet... still big pain ... If we cannot get the old one back, would it possible to reduce the amount of free space between lines in the skill queue?

see #768

20000 online doesnt mean 20000 players.

if those 200 are real ppl, and not 5 dudes with alts, then that would be a big chunk of player base

Aura now also includes bad grammer..

"The Star-gate denies you permission to jump *long pause* AT the moment"... should be "FOR the moment".

The new Aura voice is terrible. Please give an options to revert back to the old one or get rid of it all together. I appreciate the work that went into delivering it, but it completely misses the mark for me. Good day.

It is an accepted truth in customer service that for every person that takes the time to make a complaint there are dozens more who think the same thing but don't take the time to complain.

Take the ratio of negative to positive comments in this thread and extrapolate it to the entire player base. That is the way to look at the numbers.

'Cannectin...'

In which world is 1% "a big chunk"?

In the one i live it's the definition of minority.....