Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Many players, such as myself, have a very difficult time with combat in Eve because of the lack of spatial awareness.

When I get in a fight, most of the time I lose without really understanding what just happened. One issue is that I can't judge spatial things with the current GUI such as how close the enemy ship is to mine, where they are heading, what is their angle etc. I rely mostly on the overview, and don't really look at the main screen at all. However, this is almost like flying blind. There is so much information the overview does not provide.

When looking at the main screen, I have difficulty seeing the ships, judging distances and judging movement.

Therefore, I would like to suggest some additions be made to the tactical overlay, which is that screen with the concentric circles that help you judge distances.

The goal is to encourage players to look at the screen more and the overview less.

1. Introduce ship movement vector lines. When the view is zoomed out enough, add vector arrows to the ships icons. If that increases system load too much, only add a vector arrow to the currently selected ship plus your own ship. This one arrow alone will help judge where the ship is going and how fast in relation to the camera, or in relation some stationary object, such as the sun.

An alternative to vector lines is to give the ships highly visible contrails, which could serve the same purpose in judging speed and direction. A fast moving ship will have a long, very visible contrail.


2. To help judge distances, allow us to place visual bubbles around the currently selected ship plus your own ship. The bubbles could be in various sizes such as 5000 m, 10 km, 20 km etc. This could be used in place of the current tactical concentric circle display, which I find a little busy, or in addition to the circle display.


3. Give us the ability to give our own ship's icon a special color or animation, such as a flashing icon, to help locate your own ship.