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Some posts in this thread are just straight up whine-posts written by people who hate change.
Other posts are actual concerns about the icons.

For example, I don't have too many complaints about the icons but I do hate the icons for PC Ships.
With the old icons, I'd look at my Overview and see "Oh a Frigate is locking me".
With the new icons, I look at my Overview and see something that looks like a military rank symbol and since it seems like we not only have icons for ship size but also ranks in that weight class, I have to do some kind of reverse lookup to see what the hell the icon is referring to.

Basically, the old ship icons were just based on weight class. Small box? Frigate. Big box? Cruiser. Big bolded box? BC.
The new ship icons are adding a level of detail we don't really need from them. I see it's a frigate. If I want to know what kind of Frigate (Standard, Navy, T2, etc), I'll look at the damn name.

Well said, and thanks for writing this up clearly. I don't agree with all of it - actually the nonship hieroglyphs are great. But I can see why the ship icons are annoying people, and a lack of customisation is a bit poor (esp colour preference).

In future it might be worth setting all significant UI overhaul features as Beta test options on TQ. If need be set it optional at first then default it to live with an option to toggle off. UI changes are long overdue and are appreciated, but with so many changes in progress it's hard to stress test everything and give feedback.

It'd be really nice if you could put an updated blog out about this asap so we don't have the torture of people raging for months as they have over tooltips, the launcher, the map etc. Fair enough, some of the feedback is nerdrage that needs to be filtered out, but portions are legitimate and reasonable.

@ all the good people who are proposing some ideas to fix the catastrophic new icons : I admire your enthusiasm and all, but there is a very simple solution to have perfectly working icons : let's use the old ones.

Excellent summation, please CCP read this through at least twice.

CCP probably stopped reading and decided to not give a damn some 45 pages ago. And I apologize if I pick up on what must have been said many times before.

The general idea of getting more icon differentiation to distinguish ship classes is not bad. The way it has been implemented is for at least two major reasons:

1. You removed the distinction between NPC and player craft (except for color, which some may have difficulty to distinguish).

2. This is the bigger one. The open brackets were an ideal class of icons because they were not only internally consistent as demarcating ships in space, they were also very different and thus distinguishable from any other class of icons. In order to create greater distinction between ship class icons and provide closed line icons, you increased the similarity of ships in space to virtually every other item in space (such as FW outpost, for example). So to recognize that something in space is a ship rather than some other object has become more rather than less difficult. So whereas before I might have had the problem to distinguish a destroyer from a T3 cruiser, I now have the problem to distinguish a ship from a FW outpost, a container from a customs office, etc.

It is with a sense of resignation that one realizes that the natural tendency of some at CCP is to complicate things and that those who bring the most needed changes do or should actively fight that tendency.

Until then, I will overheat my T8-Monopropellant-Hydrocitro-Gizmogrification-Hydrocarbonator. Surprisingly, all I need to know is that it makes fizzy lemonade. I could have called it fizzy lemonade maker, but I didn't want you to know what it does.

I am pretty surprised that everyone is discussing icons but haven't noticed problems with new textures.
Playing eve for 7 years, I never entered the forums to post. But it seems now I know why I like EVE the most and what was hurt.
I admire that EVE has continued to improve the graphics engine and has bypassed graphics from all other space-related sims I know. So I have a high-end PC and I like watching neat, shiny, high-res ships, shining in the light of alien stars, that's mostly why I still log in.
I don't like dirt. I don't like dirt covering Amarr shiny armor. In fact, all Amarr ships now look for me like Minmatar designed (no offense). I really apreciate your packing and graphics work, but ruining the beauty of the game to get the tech to some use isn't a good decision.
Also, studying several small and big models for some time, I found that while the base material textures are high-res, dirt map textures seem really low-res, I am pretty sure I can see pixels from the dirtmap. On the edges of the ship, where with antialising the edges were smooth, now the line itself is, I don't know, 'wavy'. Instead of seeing a straight line, I see dots of different color overlapping to form the line. It can be seen on the Zealot's bottom front curves, or the Providence edge near the center.
Please, either revert this dust thing, or fix the issue. When I logged in today to fly a few orbits around my station, I found that I am now disgusted with how my Zealot looks.

This is probably the bottom line. The longer this goes on the more convinced I am that open square brackets was the best thing about old overview icons. They were so different from every other class of icons that it was instant recognition.

I get that CCP wants to try to make this game look sexier but at the end of the day we probably should be going back to square brackets.

Ok. The whole game has an overall windows 8-like feel.
Not necessarily a bad thing, although I did prefer the old HUD and NEOCOM buttons.
They were more artistic, but anyways, not abad revamp.

Planetary interaction has a smoother feeling now (it used to show some lagging).
I would like to see the ticking timer when doing planetary launches though.

Thank you for giving us new toys to play with.

D'awwwwww so many people said so many nice things to me c: *curtsies*

It's a great example of how DIFFICULT it is to make icons that work under all circumstances. Please do not take the following as me bashing on you, but as constructive critique to your efforts c: I'm sorry for using you as an example to point out why it is not as easy to create icons as some people try to make it.

You only created these icons for 100% scaling, which means some of your smallest ship icons will be impossible to decipher at 90%. Even at 100% scaling the Rookie ship is way too small and the destroyer icons don't deliver.
Your capsule looks like a probe, sorry :c Even the old capsule worked perfectly fine.
I like the idea that your carrier looks like a giant drone :D but this is where you made another mistake, including all other designs sharing this... you added darker lines which will become even more blurred and hardly distinguishable if you start scaling again. That might work on 100% scale on a pure black background, but any coloured background this is going to be less effective. Even if your icons had a 50% transparency black dropshadow, which is what the live icons seem to have.
You decided to do jumps of 4 pixels in size instead of 2, which nobody asked for. I never heard anybody in 6+ years saying, they could not distinguish a frigate from a cruiser or a battleship from a cruiser. So that means the old difference of 2 worked totally fine. You might as well have tried 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 for Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Battlecruiser, Battleship + Capital. But 16 is off limits already and 8 is ... small. Like, really small. The old sizes were 10, 12, 14. With 16 you're cuddling with target brackets big time. The Overview icon frame is 18 or 19 pixels, which explains why 16 pixels is too big. Target brackets!
The Destroyer, Battlecruiser and Dreadnought look more like structure icons than actual ships, so that is a bad design choice as well.
Titan doesn't really look as imposing or distinguishable as it probably should be.
Your NPC icons look too cluttered and blurry. You emphasize brackets as if used for player ships, not the faded crosses that actually indicate "I'm an NPC!" This is going to give red-blind people a really hard time. And now imagine target brackets on top of them? Then they look like a globblewobble of red.
The distinction between NPC destroyer / Frigate is pretty much impossible at a glance.
There should be a difference between Mining Barges and Industrials. I mean, they're totally different things, right? c: That is what the new icons accomplished at least.

Alright I stop now. No hard feelings, okay? I'm sorry I was nitpicking so hard but you forgot a good number of things in your enthusiasm to help c: It is case and proof that designing such small abstract things is not easy.

Honestly, this is just a sidegrade of the current icons, not an upgrade. So let me talk about both now;
The Rookie ship icon should be shuttle, and a rookie ship made to a frigate. Let's be honest, a Rookie ship is still a combat frigate. A shuttle is just a harmless pod in a speedy coat.
Another thing is size. Width of Frigates to battleships is IDENTICAL, making the distinction be solely based on icon height and shape. Width of Capital ships in the mockup is only 12. The current live icons at least give 14 width to the Dreadnought, but then do a weird diamond shape for the carrier, and then a 14 height for the Titan. I see less problems with the capital ships on the live icons, than with subcapitals.
And all this is not even considering the bottom right of the icon being obstructed by a colour tag, possibly reducing the real icon visibility to half, instead of three quarters in the old icons.

The funny thing is, if you think about what I wrote in my last post, by exploiting more variations of the bi-symmetrical shapes of brackets and crosses... you could get more useful shapes out of the crosses than the brackets, making the crosses the BETTER choice for player ships, and not the brackets. Because player ships would arguably be more important than NPC ones, even in PvE. Crosses also are less in the way of target locks than brackets are. Plus I think they were almost immune to colour-tag clipping.

*rubs her face* I smell a conspiracy of people trying to make me draw my own mockup of icons, right? Especially since I wrote about open possibilities of the old icons. ngruh.


Except the old ones were not PERFECT because you could not distinguish Destroyers an Battlecruisers, which is certainly an important point. Functional yes, but not as good as it could be. So not perfect.

need to say i like the concept