Test Server Feedback

I looked at the suns and was rather horrified at how bad they looked. They have obvious lines of longitude and latitude, and a repeating pattern of crosshatching.

Then I turned up my graphics settings, and as I did so, the crosshatching became less, and eventually disappeared. (I normally run as low settings as I can, as I am using a 7 year old laptop, and sometimes run 3 clients on it.) But on low shader, low texture, they look terrible. Even on low shader, high texture, the crosshatching is visible. To see this the best, go to a system with a red dwarf sun.

BTW, even on the lowest graphics settings, my FPS will sometimes drop to 2.0. It happens quite often in Jita.

I would look at your launcher settings (go to the launcher menu in the upper right and choose "Settings") and see if "download everything" is checked. If it's not, check it, wait for the download to complete, and see if that helps.

If that's not the issue, please press F12 amd choose Report Bug to submit an in-game bug report, preferably when this is happening. You can press ctrl-F to get the frame rate monitor up and submit a screenshot of that with your bug report.

I'd like to discuss some changes regarding the Advanced Audio Settings. I'm not sure if your team handles that, but CCP Darwin said to post the feedback here.

Please review this thread on Reddit.
And also this thread that popped up.

• We'd already like MORE granularity, not less, when it comes to what audio we hear.


• To my knowledge, nobody has asked for simplified audio settings - I understand this may be something CCP wants to make maintenance easier, but there are so many audio cues that are useful, along with many that can be disabled so the sound stands out. We all have personalized preferences for audio settings. I personally turn off everything except gate/wormhole activations and shield/armor/structure damage alarms. Many others enjoy the music and ambiance while they are out in space. Give us MORE choice, not less!


• The recent changes to the DSCAN/Probe interface added additional sounds that we cannot turn off unless we turn off ALL UI Interaction (see this thread). We've already asked for separate options to mute the new sounds in the Probe and DSCAN windows, but from the SiSi screenshot posted, it looks like we will have to mute all UI Sounds now. This isn't an acceptable change.

This audio change wasn't even listed on any of the Test Server Feedback threads. Please have a full discussion regarding the audio changes - a separate thread if necessary if your team doesn't handle this.

Thanks!

"Download everything" and waiting for it to complete did not help the issue. Bug report 116682 sent.

Regarding the Advanced Audio Changes:

We added some code a few releases back to track how the Advanced Audio features were being used by active EVE players.

We were interested in seeing for players with Audio enabled whether or not Advanced Audio was active, and if so which sliders were actually in use (not default values). We also looked at any prominent combinations of sliders, and where we had duplicated functionality between the main audio settings and the advanced audio settings.

One of the goals was to minimize the amount of work that goes into maintaining and updating the audio system so that the team can focus on issues that affect more players. Additionally, we frequently do receive negative feedback from players about the complexity of options presented in the ESC menu.

We did not want to eliminate all Advanced settings, but we did want to simplify if at all possible. Logging of every active user over the past few releases gave us an indicator of how to move forward with that simplification.

CCP Antiquarian touched on this, but I feel it's important to emphasize that the main reason to simplify the audio settings is to reduce the impact on our development of ensuring that those settings work on an ongoing basis. This leaves us able to do more per release as a team.

So, the feedback that would be most helpful would be to focus on what you specifically use those features to do, and why you feel the Singularity implementation falls short.

Leaving things the way they are isn't an option because it doesn't address the underlying problem.

Well, can't say much about the new Suns, aside: FELL THE HEAT

I must say those came out pretty neat and epic, and the ambient sound around them also adds to that feeling if being near something rather big and active like a Star. A Solid 10/10 from me.

Once SISI's back up, i gona hopa round and see if i can catch every color there is, and maybe update the List of Pictures here.

Hey Darwin - thanks for following up.

I think the community can probably give you enough of a use case to increase the options beyond the current SISI deployment. You know just as well as I do that you don't get a good enough sampling from play testing on Sisi. I think the most players I've seen logged in at once was maybe at the 250 mark. So once this patch goes live, guess what.. The forums will rage, people will get out their pitchforks thanks to (/r/pitchformemporium) and you'll be inidinated with "I don't like this change, bring back the old Aura etc.." chants.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/62isk2/sisi_ui_click_can_no_longer_be_separately_muted/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/62lkta/can_we_please_talk_about_advanced_audio_settings/

I understand the concern from the developement side, but lumping everything together (including the click that I'm sure some people turned off long ago) will not help keep players engaged. The common joke "Eve has Sound?" will only be more common if we lose our ability to control our experience.

Perhaps for these type of changes you take more of an active player feedback stance via surveys or something along those lines. If you were seriously going to put the time into looking into these settings advise the player base more, as this is kinda a big deal and be proactive rather then reactive to your changes.

We don't like surprises and you know exactly how the community responds when something is slid in with minimal knowledge before patch day.

I'm assuming your dev work flow has moved to a more Agile work flow, because you're running on a... what roughly 6 week deployment cycle now? So if its moderately sized cycle you can try something, iterate on what didn't work and release a new version rather than a fire and forget much like the camera features that never returned with the new camera.

Keeping us engaged on the process somehow would benefit you I think too... I know for mass tests players get a SP bump on SISI. The Wargaming.net devs have moved to giving production perks for play testing on their beta platform... Maybe something like that would help get more people engaged in the test process and reduce the pitchforkiness of the player base post patch? Just a thought...

Data from Singularity would be inadequate for this purpose, yes. The data about usage of these settings that CCP Antiquarian mentioned was collected on Tranquility.

1. Bring in some color into neocom icons.
2. Adjust Chimera so that it looks like Chimera rather than a Rokh.
Thank you in advance.