Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I agree with the majority of these points.





However, I wish to state that I, personally, sorely miss the capacity to change ui colours to user desired shades and tones. I now find it more difficult to differentiate between my Ishtar clients at a glance, and this is directly impacting my ability to do battle with either Tengus or other Ishtars in my Ishtars.

Also, the blinking is waaaaay too subtle now, I barely notice it when I'm not really looking for it.

I have discovered the reason window blur makes UI elements like brackets and modules underneath it difficult to see (screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/1eGXqxM.png):

When window blur is active, UI elements underneath the blurred window are transparent even though they shouldn't be. This does not happen with window blur off. This makes brackets, modules, etc. extremely difficult to see with window blur enabled.

Biggest complaint, outside no longer having custoizable colors and the low quality icons, is that setting window transparency also sets the right-click menu to the same transparency. So I have to choose now between being able to see what's going on around me or being able to read the right-click menu.

I love that i finally (its only been since january 08) can differentiate between market and fitting at a glance (and CLICK THE RIGHT ONE EVEN, gasp in sheer excilleration)

I agree with the prior mentioned fleet window stuff, as an FC this is annoying and if we could get it so thaty clicking a random chat channel doesnt stop ALL Of them from blinking that'd be ideal...

Even better if we could get a more prominent blink back along the lines of the old one.. .

Same here. I also kept mixing up corp and fleet for the longest time for some reason, and no longer do.


Agreed. Modal windows are bad. In fact, all popup windows like that are super annoying for the user. They should integrate as many of these into the new notifications system as possible (eg. fleet and convo invites), and seriously consider whether a modal window is necessary for the rest.

I sorely want to be constructive but I'm not sure I'll manage it, so I may slip into humorous derision now & then...

My biggest gripe is the uniformity of everything. This is meant to be a true vision of the future, but it's retro-futuristic at best - it looks like an 80s vision of the 90s, not a 21st century vision of the 30th century or whenever we're supposed to exist. In every other element of this game photorealism is meant to be the goal, but we're expected to control everything using a monochrome interface where everything looks the same & nothing stands out.

To paraphrase the late, great Douglas Adams, my ship's interface is now blue on a blue background. If I click one of these blue buttons, which may or may not be neatly labeled in blue, a little blue light turns on to let me know that I've done it. I can choose from everything being solid blue, or I can make some parts either transparent blue or (most confusing of all) blurred blue. (Substitute your chosen scheme for blue where appropriate.) If this were just an offline trader game with no time restrictions, that's not so bad; where information needs to be immediately understood or genuine losses can be incurred, it's utterly unacceptable. The new layout & blandness reminds me very much of the rightly-decried changes to the X-BTF client between versions 2.4 & 3.0, which dealt that franchise a serious blow that it is still struggling to recover from.

I am poor, and my laptop only has a 1280x800 screen, so I have a lot of overlapping things. If I go for transparent, I can kinda see what's underneath but if I change focus away from what I want to use then I get to see through it more clearly. Clicking in/out of windows makes some elements get lighter, others get darker, and some disappear entirely.

I have no problems with my eyesight, no learning disabilities, and no inner ear issues, but this thing's making my head swim. When my free time permitted it, I was able to play for 18 hours straight day after day on the old interface; now I can barely manage an hour a day. Going back to my comment above re: learning disabilities: the total lack of customisation with regards to themes has already impacted at least one friend, as they are dyslexic & ran a special high-contrast colorscheme to make it possible for them to read anything.

I admit I didn't try it out on the test server, technical reasons aside this was primarily because the screenshots I saw didn't suggest this level of homogeneity. It's truly disorienting for me, and if I can't get a handle on it before my subscription renewal I too may just have to give up the game.

I don't think the purpose of the UI is to actually simulate to any modicum of accuracy what the interface inside of a 25000 A.D. neural interface egg might look like. I also don't think the purpose of this UI change was to make it radically different.

The reason they changed the UI was to bring the undeniably quite dated Eve UI up to 2014 standards, and on top of that make it more uniform. The first part succeeded quite well; whether you like it or not, the UI does look very 2014. I believe this particular design fad has been dubbed "material design" by Google, and it's basically when everything is rectangular and flat and there's lots of solid colours. The Google design spec also includes a lot of tweening animations, but since Eve isn't played on tablets I can excuse them being omitted. Personally I'm not a huge fan of this particular fad, but I think it does work decently well in Eve.

The second part (making the UI more uniform) still needs some work, however. Someone mentioned PI windows still having an old UI, so stuff like that needs to be fixed. There are also some design gripes that still need to be changed, such as the silly pop-up windows already mentioned in the thread (should be integrated into the new fancy notifications system), not to mention the flat-out bugs that make entire features like window blur pretty unusable (as window blur makes normally opaque UI elements obscured by transparent windows transparent. This includes modules, brackets etc.).

MMORPG interfaces seldom are designed to be "in-character" with the rest of the game. Something like World of Warcraft's interface has bits of flavour here and there, but is primarily designed to function as an interface for displaying and interacting with information. The same goes for Eve's interface, which has (an attempt at, if you want to be bitter) a science fiction atmosphere with its "Everything is made light (or glass)" design, but its primary purpose is still to display the vast amounts of game information Eve needs to display.

The issue I think lots of people have is that the old Eve UI was so offensively bad that actually learning to use it required a lot of work and accustoment. Now that the visuals changed radically, we're seeing a lot of the usual change-resistant complaining that everyone who has spent any lengths of time in this community will be all too familiar with. "Oh no these icons are all different, where are my colours, this is awful, CCP please I'm quitting", they say, but in a week they will get used to it, in two weeks they will mostly forget it, and in two months they will like it.

Further colour customisation would be a nice thing though. I honestly don't care how it's done, but we need more colours. Colours are good. They make me happy.

I can't handle this any longer. I didn't find the old interface offensive, I found it gloriously simple - it's how I managed to get involved in the game so quickly. WoW is a poor example because it's not intended to be a control panel for a human, but a representation of how to access that human's skills; in contrast, EVE's interface is most definitely meant to be a spaceship's control panel and to claim otherwise seems ridiculous.

I've just cancelled my sub, as I've barely managed to play for the last week due to how this is affecting me - it's cognitive dissonance.

I bought my subs, and a few plex, and now that's all written off because someone decided that removing colour was the way forward. Colour is important. Colours have been made use of throughout human history because they are important and depict easily recognisable information swiftly. I cannot believe that in the future we'd force ourselves to use "greyscale" (or single-palette) and throw away the ability to discern information from multiple visual cues simultaneously, and I see no advantage in doing that now. People say "it just takes some time to relearn", well that may be true but some people may not BE able to relearn this due to their own learning peculiarities or requirements, and assuming they can then that time comes with a price, especially in this game where every undock comes with the risk to your very real investment in the game. I can accept & absorb the ongoing cost of a subscription but I fail to understand why I have to pay double that of other players (when factoring in the losses attendant with relearning how to understand what was already understandable).

Goodbye EVE, it was nice while it lasted.

(Oh, and the topic notifications don't work for me either.)

+1. We also need more options for transparency. The notification box for example cannot be made transparent.


Why is that a problem though? The UI is local, it only affects that user. If he wants it baby blue and pink, let him I say.