Player Features and Ideas Discussion

CCP owns the rights to to EVE, they could easily say we won't allow anyone to develop external tools.

And I didn't cop out by saying CCP Seagull has the helm. We can rant and rage and **** all over the forums, but what features we get are up to her and what the developers can code.

Ghost fittings in my opinion beats out EFT and Pyfa for ease of access and use.
The EVE app is crap compared most of the others we have, but it's a new breed that the others won't touch until the ESI API is finished. Third party phone apps are beat out by the iOS Neocom, and CCP has years of development on their app to even approach what Neocom offers (this might be a confusing area, EVE portal has mail and that's about it).

Then you move into mappers and you got like 3-5 decent and know ones. You have tons of industrial apps and marketing apps and blah blah blah.

EVE-Central, Market and eveprasial could easily be replaced with a more robust in-game market tool. But with how laggy the current one is, I would dread the day if doesn't get some more muscle under the hood. The in-game industrial window still needs a lot of love and could use a lot of love that the third party apps offer. The Fuzzeorks LP store is nice, but not needed, as it should be easy to add a way to see the LP stores for LP you have stocked up or via the show info window.

Iain, I am not trying to argue with you over the merits and features of EVE. I am just trying propose future features for New Eden to make life better for everyone. But I leave the final decision to CCP. Until then I will continue to try to provide my ideas and thoughts on things I feel could make improvements to the game. There has to be progression in the meta or it gets old very fast and the player base shrinks.

This is correct. Fortunately the tools required to do this are already there. If this was lack of realistic ability to do so, such as ghost fitting was, it would be different. However, the current method to map wormholes doesn't cost anything, and is rather simple once you catch onto it.




Why is it no one is ever capable of asking other players how things are done? Read a guide before venturing into a dangerous place? This information is all covered in multiple guides. Yes, part of minimum competentct is knowing how to follow the chains. Besides, pretty much every culture on the planet has it's version of the story of Hansel and Gretel. It should be common sense to leave a trail behind you as you wander through the deep, dark forest.

Your argu
No. In game map is a basic tool, dotlan is more advanced. Ghost fitting is a basic tool, EFT and Pyfa are better. Using bookmarks is a basic tool. The tracking websites are better.

If the basic tools already exist, why add more tools to do the same job?

the hell are you talking about we managed just fine using only bookmarks

What other projects do you envision the UI design team is working on that would be impacted?

These are developers who have up to this point had nothing to do for so long they decided to unnecessarily revamp a perfectly good probe window (to be fair they added visual dscan to it that is semi-useful) unecessarily changed teh skills and character sheet UI to be less useful, and have generally just been spinning their wheels aside from the occasionaly involvement in tech required for the NPE (chat boxes and overlay highlights)

Is there some other bit of UI you think is vitally important? Updating the "beta" map maybe? But hey, why do we need to update that thing when we have third party tools that work better amirite?

Overall EVE's UI development people have done nothing in the past few years but add largely useless and in some cases actively less usable interface changes except for those that were attached to new systems (like the NPE , multisell/buy, and access lists required for upwell structures)

If I have to choose between them "updating" another part of the the current, perfectly functional UI or adding a UI tool that actually adds functionality... I pick the latter. They're actually good at adding UI for new functions and ****** at updating old ones.

We don't need UI development, we need balance and more content. We need development teams to work on making sure new structures are balanced before before POSes are removed, as well as making sure ships are as balanced as possible. The beta map was a waste of time, IMO. I still don't use it and am fine.

The issues with EVE that need development work aren't tied to the UI.

Then why do you expect UI developers to fix them? Every person at CCP does not do the same job, nor have the skillset to do the same job. I work in interactive software for a living. In all but very rare cases every single person at the company has an extremely narrow skillset for which they were hired specifically, and which consumes the entirety of their working time. In fact I've done the job of UI developer. In most cases you aren't actually allowed to write anything that isn't the scripting engine that the UI runs on, which can only access the API for the backend of the rest of the server architecture. If something needs exposed to the UI, you send a request to have it exposed.

In EVE's case we know that the things in question are already exposed. We use a public version of a private API used to do exactly that.

That's where you and are are pretty much going to disagree on this infinitely. Basic tools for keeping track of individual wormhole locations are made avaliable. Basic tools for tracking chains are not.

The ability to name bookmarks is not analagous to a visual chain map, and a visual chain map is a significant advantage when talking broad chain maps that are being contributed to by more than a handful of people.

I know I certainly would have major issues running my operations if I were limited to bookmark formatting alone. In fact these problems are why tripwire 101 is one of the first things new players in my corp are instructed on because its so indispensable to the day to day functioning of our corp. You simply can't get a clear view of the day's chains from a list of bookmarks unless those chains are quite short and only branch out from a single location.

Now, I'm not trying to convince you otherwise at this point because you are similarly attached to the idea that because it is merely possible to navigate with bookmarks that it is sufficient. I'm just saying that the task of bookmark-only navigation for a corp dedicated to wormhole exploitation and exploration quickly becomes unnecessarily complex and frustrating in the absence of third party tools, nearly to the point of unplayability.

People shouldn't be crippled if a third party tool simply vanishes, and there are no guarantees that a given third party tool won't vanish. if chain mappers vanished right now, it would be crippling to the WH community. That's kinda my metric.

I don't make the rules lady, but once you reach a certain breakpoint in a complex thing like an MMO you start to see work broken down in to VERY specific tasks as a matter of efficiency.

For UI this is compounded by the fact that the UI for games is generally more complex from a design and art standpoint due to conventions of the genre and the necessity for most game UIs to format constantly changing datasets in real time and deliver information to users in a consumer-ready format that can be easily interpreted by people with no specialized training.