Anom / Sig window feedback

[Rail_J_kar]

The window is getting cluttered. I’m going to suggest some changes to help identify at a glance the different types of activities that can be found in the window.

I’m sure there’s more icons and colors that could be used, but I refrained from using red, yellow, and orange since those colors are used for scanning.

CCP might also consider changing the red un-scanned sigs to yellow or orange, since people who are color blind tend to not be able to tell green from red. (It’s not an issue I have, but it’s somewhat common.)

[Rail_J_kar]

Hmm, the battlefield icon should probably be different … so it’s not confused with combat sigs. Could maybe use the icon from the fw window.

[Geo_Eclipse_Oksaras]

@Rail_J_kar

color blind

Omegas have a color blind option for themes

[Rail_J_kar]

Does that change the color of the anom window?

edit:

The second one is better, but it looks like it still needs help. That first one is especially bad.

[Andlaust]

@Rail_J_kar

The window is getting cluttered.

So let’s make it ten times as cluttered by adding even more to it!!!

Did you stop to think before typing that?

[Rail_J_kar]

I didn’t add anything… I’m changing the colors and icons of what’s displayed… so it’s easier to tell the difference between the items displayed.

[Andlaust]

Relic Site
Angel Den
Angel Den
Cosmic Signature

I don’t see what’s so difficult to tell the difference here?
You want to use the icons, which is both ridiculous and adding unnecessary complexity

[Rail_J_kar]

When it’s 4 there’s no issue… but when there’s 20-30 in that window, it’s eye cancer. Just a wall of green.

[Gerard_Amatin]

Instead of new colours and new icons, I would suggest that CCP allows us to filter Anomalies on sub-type like we can filter everything else in the probe scanner window:

I thought this would have been the solution for this thread too, but it turns out you either get all anomalies or none. I haven’t done any homefronts yet but I guess they show up like ore anomalies and regular combat anomalies in the probe scanner window?

The filter is pretty awesome, but while you can filter out other signatures like relic sites, wormholes and other costmic signatures, and can filter specific results like only attack battlecruisers, this is not going to allow us to filter out 3 man homefronts from ice sites.

What you can however still do if you find the window too crowded is to select large parts of it (shift-clicking to select a block, ctrl-clicking to select multiple at once) and ‘ignore result’:
to make the window much less cluttered.

That’s how I do combat probing, in a few clicks your entire probe scanner window is reduced to only the one relevant scan result that you are looking for.

[Rail_J_kar]

Filter by subtype would be good, but it’s not sufficient. Even if it did what you’re asking of it.

Ignoring the result is also a workaround, but also not an ideal solution. Especially if you don’t actually want to ignore those results.

In addition…
Your workarounds: requires several clicks.
My suggestion: allows the player to understand the information more easily without having the interact with the ui.

What I’m suggesting isn’t overly ground breaking. The theme stuff Geo mentioned shows CCP already has the tech to change the colors independently of the text and icons in that window, and a few more icons wouldn’t be overly negative in terms of workload.

And since you brought up Combat scanning, what if you could highlight certain items within that window so it stands out from the rest without having to ignore entry items? Something like the home station indicator in the overview. Drop a little star on it or highlight the background or something.

[Andlaust]

Filter would be nice. More iconic eye cancer we don’t need.

[Rail_J_kar]

@Andlaust

More iconic eye cancer

So you’d prefer the icons we have be removed?

[Gerard_Amatin]

I know it’s a joke, but the current icons should not be removed. They have a good purpose, which is to show where the signatures are located, what their type is and what the scanned status is.

Your suggestion seems to have two parts:

1. To use more colours to distinguish main categories of anomalies
2. To introduce more icons to distinguish more subcategories of anomalies

While I am not against the second suggestion, I am interested in a discussion about the level of granularity of the subcategories. Currently the anomalies/signatures have an icon indicating what you can expect at that location on a high level (combat, mining, relic, wormhole), but you do not know what kind of mining site or what kind of combat to expect. To know that you can look at the name.

Now you could of course make new icons for every subcategory as well, but you have to wonder if that makes things clearer, or less clear. For example you could have a unique icon for each of these:

But then people have to learn lots of different icons by heart while they could instead currently see that they are interested in a signature or anomaly involving combat and then pick the site by name.

Ship type icons for example also are clear on a higher level with one icon per category, without going into full detail about the subcategories of faction, tier or name of the ship:

So with icons it’s necessary to pick the right level of granularity. You want the icons to distinguish clearly between the different categories, but you also want to keep the icons clear and understandable by having only few categories.

Are homefront sizes each worth their own icons? Are faction warfare site types each worth their own icon? Is the list of combat anomalies above worth each their own icon? Debatable.

I prefer fewer icons like we have now as I think one icon per category is much clearer than hundreds of icons for all of the subcategories. However, I would not be against one new icon for homefronts or one for FW sites, I think that could be a nice addition.

That was the second part of your suggestion, now on to your first: To use more colours to distinguish main categories of anomalies.

I am against colours for categories.

Colours in the probe window already have an essential purpose, which is to show the scanned status of the sites.

Green = warpable
Red = unscanned
Orange, yellows = in between unscanned and warpable

To introduce more colours in that screen which already uses colours for a different essential purpose is going to be an unclear inconsistent mess. Those colours for categories would make the probe scanning window much less readable than it is today.

[Rail_J_kar]

@Gerard_Amatin

Green = warpable

You make a good point with this.

And to that I might suggest the differentiation of warm and cool colors.

pvp, pve, ore/ice

<100% signature

furthermore, if blue + green is too much to say those are both warpable… then we could keep the green text, and just change the color of the icons.

@Gerard_Amatin

Now you could of course make new icons for every subcategory as well, but you have to wonder if that makes things clearer, or less clear.

@Gerard_Amatin

I prefer fewer icons like we have now as I think one icon per category is much clearer than hundreds of icons for all of the subcategories. However, I would not be against one new icon for homefronts or one for FW sites, I think that could be a nice addition.

I do agree that too many icons defeats the purpose, and as you say, the anoms have names on them to help identify more challenging content.

I don’t really see the need to subdivide the icons for combat anoms (other than fw complexes - as I think they’re different enough to warrent their own classification.)

And while sub categories of anoms don’t need separate icons, differentiating combat anoms and signatures would be useful.

They can keep some similar design philosophy, but making the icons be different should help people who are scanning those sites down without forcing them to ignore the results of the anoms. Not only does that take extra clicks, the player might not want to ignore the results in the first place.

Moving on, while Homefronts don’t necessarily need to have different icons, there should be a way to tell the difference between 5 and 3 man either by the icon or the name. This will become even more important if frigate and battleship homefronts are added.

So… either we go this route…

… or just use a generic Homefront icon and copy the fw complex naming convention of adding a 5 to the end of the name of the relevant site. Or … we could split the difference… and have an icon that programmatically changes with a text field based on the optimal number of participants.

All in all, I do see your point in not putting useless stuff in the window… if there’s a change in color / icon, it should add clarity, not diminish from it by making it a loud mess, which to be fair, was always my goal.

Edit: A final note:

This type of thing is also a possibility. Iconography to indicate the raid size, and a character indicating the classification of ship allowed in the site.

or

Instead of using the central character, use a frigate, cruiser, and battleship icon to distinguish between the small, medium, and large.

[Andlaust]

I’m still not seeing why all this is needed. Is reading the name of a site too difficult all of a sudden?

Here’s an old engineering principle that seems to have gone away, KISS.