Player Features and Ideas Discussion

As someone who has been in and out of this game since 2006, I think the time has come for me to feel compelled enough to get on here and ask what SHOULD be an obvious question: Who exactly in the UK do the rest of us need to come and slap around some, in order to get you guys to spend some time making the UI a little more readable, from a SIMPLE font resize perspective? Alternatively, who do we have to buy lunch for?

I'll explain. As it stands at this moment, the largest character font size you can adjust OUTSIDE of the chat window is a 13-point size, and there are no alternatives to the default font. The chat window lets you scale up to a larger character size, but there is a lot going on that has nothing to do with chat, nor does it affect the character name size, simply chat elements.

Here's the issue. All the time, computer monitors and flat screen TV's are getting larger. I've seen some models within range of an average person's budget at, or exceeding, 85 inches. It's silly to think this isn't becoming the preferred way to play EVE for many, many users. Everyone wants the immersive experience that large screen video provides, but......as the size of the TV gets larger, the more a person is going to move back from that larger screen, much like no one wants to sit in the first few rows of a movie theater, because your face is almost touching the screen, and it isn't immersive, so much as it is crowding. So, we adjust the range to the TV to something we consider 'comfortable'. (and, that isn't going to be the same for everyone)

Now comes the issue...as people move themselves further and further back so as to not lose perspective on the larger screen, the font gets smaller and smaller. (what actually happens is that the eye has to work muscularly 'harder' to keep focus on an element that's now at a greater physical range from that person) And yes, I've heard the argument that IF the monitor gets bigger, the font should be bigger too, but at higher screen resolutions, that change in size isn't really linear to the change in size of the game environment. Trust me, when sitting 6-8 feet from a TV exceeding 55 inches, a 13-point font for context menus as a maximum size isn't doing it, folks. If no one else has ever complained about blurring vision and eyestrain as a result of trying to read the provided character set and the offered sizes, I'll eat my carrier.

Also, anyone who works in eyecare (it should not be lost on you that this has the potential to become an actionable medical claim against CCP at some point, don't think it can't happen, people sue each other over hot coffee, and WIN) can tell you about things like changing focal ranges across a large group of people. I can't believe CCP hasn't contracted the services of an eyecare professional, at least once, to get some buy-in on the kind of EYESTRAIN this game causes, and the potential for long term vision damage, for lack of a simple set of customizable readability options. You can customize just about every other component of the UI to suit tastes, except for the size of text, beyond what little is provided by the options pane. (and that doesn't include other font styles)

I can make CHAT bigger in order to better see the spammers and beggers in Jita, but I can't make my context menus and other informational items larger, both to relieve the strain on my eyes, as well as enhance playability? And, please don't waste my time telling me it can't be done, because just about every other aspect of UI elements have been changed, modified, or completely redesigned at some point.

Adding a couple of additional font types and giving us a better selection for size (at a minimum, at this point, you should be offering people the ability to scale up to about 18-22 points in UI elements) isn't some kind of insurmountable challenge. No one is asking you to reinvent the wheel. I can STRETCH a UI window element the length and height of my screen if I want to, but it doesn't make it any more readable. I cannot believe I'm the only person that's ever expressed this concern. The text I'm using in this post is bigger than what's offered in-game.

This game is causing some of us very real vision problems, and we're still asking you nicely to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. You've had the better part of TWENTY YEARS now to address this. What gives? Is it going to take a class action from players before you address this? It isn't going to surprise me a bit when I hear some group of players got together and went down that road.....seriously. Thanks.

I'd invite other player commentary, particularly from other players wearing eyeglasses or contacts that have a fixed focal range, in order to further enhance the point I'm trying to make here.

It isn't just scaling, it's also contrast. White text on a black background was OK back in the 1990's when most gamers were teenagers or young adults but it doesn't work for older eyes! I accept the need for a dark background in space but black text in a font chosen for legibility on a paper white background should at least be optional when you are docked.

The need for scaling is less when using a legible font but will increase as the player base gets older. CCP needs to invest in the client - not just for those of us with grey hair and progressive lenses but the rapidly falling prices for 4K monitors mean these will become mainstream over the next couple of years.

This is the part where I point out that you can change window colour too.

The moment you realize you need glasses and are too stubborn to admit it to yourself.

You can change the font size for context menus but you cannot change the font size in the market app, industry app or other places where the ability is desperately needed.

Nor do any of the window appearance themes allow high contrast dark text on a light background. If there is a setting that does allow this, it is well hidden!

I discussed this with Sugar Kyle last year and gather there are "legacy code" issues it will take major surgery to fix. Nonetheless, I think it's time CCP raised the priority - none of us are getting any younger.

And yet, I don't seem to have any vision or headache issues when I'm outside of the game, using the same monitor for a host of other things, including work. As usual, blame the player, not CCP.

Just because you pay for the game doesn't mean they're required to do whatever you tell them to... what you're basically saying here is you want them to completely rework the UI at your request. That's not a small amount of work by any means, and it's something that's best done in small pieces since it's very likely that a lot of the older components can't actually support your request without reworks.

You know, almost like the gradual rework they've been doing on the UI for the last year or so that's likely to continue for the next several years.

Also this really is something for you and your particular subset of players. I play on 22 in monitors with good resolution and I don't have any issues with migraines or reading text in the UI. From the few comments in this thread this seems like an issue mostly with much larger screens and a few people with vision issues.

While I'm not saying people with vision issues should just suck it up, or anything of the sort, I think from a dev's perspective it's pretty reasonable if CCP aren't willing to just immediately drop everything and work on this at the expense of other features, fixes, or improvements.

sitting 6ft away from a "tv" which you use to play a complex game like eve is hardly an optimal way to play a game, damn i can bearly read my xbox one games when that far away from my tv.

well obviously not 6ft away otherwise you wouldn't have readability issues, a 55" vizio isnt a monitor, its a television which will in no way match up to a proper monitor, ccp responded to one of the posts regarding ui scaling for 4k monitors, the reply was "not enough people use them to make this a priority" i imagine the same goes for people using tv's for gaming.