EVE General Discussion

I developed open source for three years. Sometimes it's a pain in the ass to listen to angry assholes giving you what they think is reasonable feedback for what is essentially a free product. Thankfully, you guys seem to take it in stride. Keep up the good work.

A miss conception, actually it does, it just has to match formats, were working on making this system smarter.


We are limited to what CCP provides us as their SDE, if CCP breaks their SDE, they break their 3rd party sites too, so please go bark up the right tree.

We have the option of doing the disreputable thing, like taking the data from some other source, or we can stick with the officially provided data, we have chosen to abide by what CCP provides us.

I suggest you file a bug report, the more people that complain about the SDE being broken, the more likely they are to fix it in a timely manner.

useful feedback: the site is gigantic "buy GTCs from us" ad

Last time i checked, servers were not free, neither was bandwidth.

the site is slow and cumbersome to use

I open battleclinic and the first thing I notice is an annoying flash applet with a loading screen.

I see an Announcement & Contests box that is too small to have a decent preview which could help me to decide whether to click the articles or not (just removing urls from the text preview would probably help a lot).
As all articles are more than a month old I probably don't want to read them anyways - but I have to click them to find out about that as no dates/timestamps are displayed along them. The blank "news" picture that accompanies them is not very nice either.

Then I have three boxes that nobody is going to care about -

KillBoard: Most Recent Kills - Ic are about kills that either affect me/my corp/my alliance or about kills that are unusual/noteworthy for some general reason. I might care about the 10 most expensive kills, or the 10 last supercap kills or the 10 most viewed kills or the 10 kills with most comments (but then comments are so hidden away that I mostly don't notice them even if a kill has some) - but the 10 most recent kills? no idea why anyone would be interested in that.

Recent Loadouts - same reason. If there were only 3 loadouts posted a day and I might seriously want to keep up to date on all loadouts that are posted to battleclinic I would understand. But 5 random loadouts that were selected by virtue of them having been posted recently do not entice me to click them. Also a lot of space is wasted on race and ship class, information that is already implied through the ship type - better use the space to give me some information that helps me to decide whether to click the link or not.

Recent Forum Posts - now this can work but not the way you do it. Limit it to one entry per thread, Tell me what forum section the thread was posted in. Give me a mouseover tooltip with the first sentence of the post. Otherwise I am not going to follow any of the links.

In general you don't seem to believe in tooltips - maybe that makes you iPad friendly or something but it's annoying to PC users who expect some more information before clicking on anything.

oh by the way why should I care about some random photographer? City of Heroes webcomic is already a stretch but you have some CoH players on your forum. But photography? smells of SEO for yourself or some friend.

My EVE character name is two words - which means the "Manage profile" entry drops out of the box on the top right.

Don't get me started about the SMF profile page and its navigation links - whoever believes that this is good UI design deserves to be shot.

And how am I supposed to know that I can't update my API key in my Profile settings butI have to go to killboard and then API? I don't care how many 3rd party components you did integrate into your site - I want one seamless user experience.

http://i.imgur.com/IQyu2.jpg aside from the obvious - the site doesn't respond nicely to zooming out - I highlighted the most important navigation menus. There are at least three levels of navigation (more if you count the Games menu, one of which is very far from the other two) + the forum profile in the top right and the sitemap in the bottom left.
The sitemap is missing half the sites by the way and I have no idea why a human would ever want to look at a sitemap - unless the navigation you provide is crap and he can't find what he looks for without hitting Ctrl+F.

the forum listing is terrible - look at somethingawful for hints how to make a big forum readable. Expanding every subsection is not the right way to go (and even if I collapse them manually I have to expand them again to read any child forum).

so yeah that's just a few things off the top of my head, there are probably another few dozen equally horrible aspects of your site that I could identify given some time.

edit: bonus: http://i.imgur.com/tLp5R.jpg
use a dark semi-transparent background under the navigation panes on the left to help the viewer understand the different layers/depth in this image, give the "Official Home of..." text some breathing space to the left, don't put an image of buttons & menu which does nothing (evemon screenshot) right next to buttons that do something, scale that evemon logo down considerably, ...
This is actually quite decent (but you should still add the background on the left), whereas this can only be summed up by wtf - not only does the navigation obscure the advertisement, your description of the link is also cut off mid-word on the right.