CSM 17 Summit Review

I had a tooth problem. I’ll be okay. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the concern, though!

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The entire contract page hasn’t really been touched, I went over it with them during the summit - hardly a bug - just prioritizing which window/system gets done next - but yes - it needs work

again - not a bug

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I really don’t blame CCP for not posting in the forum. Considering the high level of grief the community gives to the developers on basically everything produced, I have seen people hurl personal insults, and even call for developers to be fired on a regular basis. Yes players communicate a lot, but much of that communication is quite toxic. If I were a developer here, I would be quite demoralized with the content of the chatter in the forum. So duh, they don’t post as much as griefers.

A lot of the comparison of old verses new is a reflection of the " Mere-exposure effect" ( Mere-exposure effect - Wikipedia ). This states that people have a preference for what they are familiar with over what is unfamiliar. People have been playing this game for a long time, and they have developed strong opinions on how things should be. If you ask 100 people how the interface should look, you’ll get 120 opinions. My “opinion” on what you showed is that I prefer the Photon UI version over the old one. The fact that there is “recurring and persistent criticism” reflects as much on the community as it does on the design.

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And yet CCP makes this new UI mandatory, even though they have not touched and optimized large parts of the UI. That’s naturally the best course of action if you believe some voices here.

The funny thing here is that you make the same mistake as Brisk. You talk about the style and visual design. That is decidedly not what I am talking about. I talk about issues that are independent of visual aspects.

I have no preference for either or design. I point out issues. Input fields that cut off text even though there is tons of space to make the field bigger, that’s just is an issue, not a visual design thing you can like or not. It has nothing to do with a style preference. The only thing it has something to do with is that the old UI does not cause this issue because it’s better optimized than Photon. The things that I point out have very little to do with how likeable the design is. Everything I point out are problems with cut off text, not enough space for text, too much empty space with no function, interfering UI elements, inconsistent button designs and so on. For all I care, they could make an ASCII character UI or a Star Trek UI. As long as it does not have more issues than the old UI.

That flak is fully justified because CCP has a proven track record of delivering utter crap utterly regularly with little to no regard for the consequences. CCP developers that do not deliver bad features receive overwhelming praise and appreciation for their work. Most notable among those is CCP Karkur who has not disappointed with her work in over a decade. If more CCP developers would work like her, they would immediately receive a ton less “toxicity”.

I find it quite striking that constructive criticism and pointing out bad work is even called toxic. It is not the unpaid (and in fact paying) pre-alpha testers fault that the useable features are so bad and full of glitches, bugs, lacking polish and bad quality. :person_shrugging:

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Thank you Brisc et al

m

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I for one couldn’t give a fig about Photon.

I want more reasons to undock, more reasons to go into low and more ways for divergent gameplay amongst players.

Give those missioners a reason to jump into low and give those pirates a reason to hunt them down.

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I said “people have a preference for what they are familiar with over what is unfamiliar” This statement is not intrinsically about “the style and visual design”, rather it is about perceived functionality. So my statement still stands.

Regardless of “trackrecord [sic]”, hurling personal insults, and calling for people to be fired in a very public forum is just trying to shame people. This is never acceptable, it’s just bad behavior. That’s fine in the game, but is counter-productive in real life. Constructive criticism is fine and should exist, as long as the criticism doesn’t cross the line into personal attacks. I would hope that is something we can all agree on.

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Mystic is still there? Cool.


Pull yourself together, Fal ol’ mucker.


@Brisc_Rubal - Thanks I guess…we’ll see what actually happens…

If someone deliberately, in full knowledge of the negative consequences and against better knowledge from actually knowledgeable people introduces mechanics and features to the game that almost kills the game, it is in my opinion very much justified to call for the resignation of said person/people. Terribly bad features that jeopardized the game have happened at least 3 times in the last 6 years. Every time actually knowledgeable players, not just shrieking idiots, told CCP that it would be awful for the game, and it was awful for the game. In one of these instances, CCP even resorted to blaming players for using their terrible game design against the game, blaming the players for the terrible imbalances and out of control economy – years after players told and had been telling CCP how bad this feature was. Not calling for the resignation or firing of these developers would be stupid.

Then you are not paying attention at all. Bugs and glitches have nothing to do with familiarity of a feature. You cannot, or rather should not have to, get familiar with a buggy feature. A UI that does not display numeric values completely when a previous UI version could do that just fine, is just bad feature design. It is completely irrelevant whether I am unfamiliar with a new UI or super familiar with the previous UI. This above problem and many other issues happen in places, too, that have already been optimized to Photon, so it is not an issue of lacking optimization or shoehorning a window into the UI. It is deliberate and intentional.

Unless you can explain to me the offered functionality of cut off text in a text input field that relies on me knowing exactly what I enter and what has been entered in the past in order to know what I am doing. I would really like to know the functionality behind that so that I can overcome my “unfamiliarity”.

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You need to chill out.

Some of the numeric values in EVE can exceed text box width in a pretty substantial way, even given more space. They overcome this issue by providing hover tooltips that display a summary of the value typed into the field.

When I looked at the example posted further in this thread, the only “Bug” or under-optimised thing that stood out to me was the focus on the ‘end’ of the number, rather than the beginning. e.g.: for “1,350,000,000.00” showing “…,000.00” instead of showing something like “1,350,00…”.
In any case, if something is hundreds of billions/trillions, it’ll still exceed available space, and the tooltip is a handy solution that augments the limitations of available screen space.

Forest for the trees, if the new thing is “better overall”, with some deltas on worse/not as good compared to old, it’s still “better” than the old one. Being a revised/new UI, it probably also provides the eng team efficiencies with advancing it. Including resolving bugs. So again, calm the farm, provide useful and objectively constructive criticism - not just criticism and breathless condemnation - and work with them.
E.g.: I dislike the new Fleet Window, as everyone has that “thin”, yet the new tabs and drop down menu to access them is incredibly unwieldy. There’s limited space to click+drag things like fleet window/drones around on UI dynmaically as well. So there’s a lot I don’t like, and I’m hopeful are addressed.

I haven’t enjoyed reading how you’ve been conveying your frustrations, and if you want people to listen to you, berating them isn’t going to get you far. Especially the ■■■■ where you’re calling for people to be fired. You’re being absurd. Get a grip.

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@Brisc_Rubal (or any CSM) - can you share parts of the Pochven Roundtable or Projection Meta that you specifically spoke to, or what you may have said about those things? Interested in what the standout things were that you wanted to make known to CCP.

The UI as it stands does not seem to do that because, as it stands, it constrains the development much more than the old UI. It appears much less flexible, much less optimizable and much less clear than the old UI, based on all the bugs that I found.

I have so far only found 1 single positive feature in Photon, and that’s the drone window. And even that initially positively perceived feature set with the new buttons was muddled later on because the implementation prevents me from dragging drones when I click on the health bars. The implementation of the buttons makes 70% of the drone row useless and requires you to move the mouse to narrow spaces or tiny buttons to manipulate the drones. That is worse than in the old UI where you could click anywhere to drag drones around.

I can only ask again: what has gotten better with Photon compared to the old UI. People like you never provide any examples of an improvement beyond “it looks better”. If that’s the only improvement, that’s really poor.

Even you only named negatives of Photon and not a single positive to have your post contain “- not just criticism and breathless condemnation -”.

This is the case in the old UI as well. The difference between the two is that you don’t have to use the tooltips to use the fields and see better what you entered. In Photon you have to use the tooltips, which causes more wasted time due to tooltip delay, less comprehensible UI, more UI clutter, less accessibility and user-friendliness. If a work-around becomes a mandatory action to use a feature in the first place, the feature itself should be replaced by the work-around.

Speaking of your tooltip: I just tried this in the Reward field of the contract search with a very high reward.

grafik

The tooltip says “20 thousand” when it actually should say “effective reward: 20 billion” because that is the actual reward I am looking for. Due to space constraints, you enter multiples of millions in the filter box (as indicated in the filter title). However, the tooltip has no space constraints and if it tells you, that you are looking for contracts with rewards up from “20 thousand isk”, it is confusing and requires more thought processes and more time spent checking because the “million” is largely obstructed by the tooltip.

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While there are definitely a few things that need ironing out in photon, the obvious massive improvement was the fact you can have multiple overviews active at the same time now

Its extremely hard to overstate how insane that single change was in terms of information density and customisation that was made available to players from that one feature alone

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Multi-Overviews have nothing to do with Photon and could have been done with the old UI’s Overview as well.

However, since you mention it. It is without a doubt a very cool addition to the UI. Sadly, it causes issues due to poor implementation. Every time I undock, my secondary Overview window is focused and primaried by the UI. Since the settings in that window are usually empty, dscan is also empty as a result (I use Active Overview for the dscan). The problem is that you have to click on the tiny tab of the other overview window to make the UI recognize that this overview is now the primary data source for the Dscan. Every single time you undock or log in. I consider myself lucky that it’s not after every gate jump as well. :cold_sweat:

This leaves me with 2 options: Either do the above every time, or close the window and cumbersomely create a new window with the settings every time I need it. Neither is a great UI experience.

To improve the Multi-Overview, there should be a toggle which of your overview window is the primary window.

But this is why I mostly see Photon as a net-negative. There are some good aspects about it (more unified UI, good drone window functionality, multi-overview as part of new features for the UI) but every good aspect is muddled and held back by a multitude of troublesome details and flaws in the UI.

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Multi-Overviews have nothing to do with Photon and could have been done with the old UI’s Overview as well.

the devs disagree with that assessment, it was one of the advertised possibilities that photon allowed

dscan is also empty as a result (I use Active Overview for the dscan)

it depends what you use it for but why not just have a settings tab just for dscan? i have multiple for what i need at a given time that isnt bound to the overviews

This leaves me with 2 options: Either do the above every time, or close the window and cumbersomely create a new window with the settings every time I need it. Neither is a great UI experience.

or just do as i detailed above

But this is why I mostly see Photon as a net-negative

it has some small details that need ironing out but it is by far better than the old system now that all of the horrific bugs and terrible margin sizes have been fixed

drone window is also good in photon, allows for individual drone control without needing to right click each drone

That would make using Dscan more cumbersome in return since I’d have to fiddle with the dscan settings every time I want to dscan something different and not just the overview. I’d have to do even more management work of the UI to overcome one poorly implemented UI feature. Surely that can#t be considered a good UX.

And while it does allow that with tiny buttons, dragging individual drones around has become much more troublesome than before, for no good reason.

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That would make using Dscan more cumbersome in return since I’d have to fiddle with the dscan settings every time I want to dscan something different and not just the overview.

no it wouldnt? you can have multiple settings saved for what you need and you can just swap between them using the drop down menu on the d-scan, its extremely easy to do once you have it set up

dragging individual drones around has become much more troublesome than before, for no good reason.

i can’t say that ive had issues with dragging drones using the new menu so i cant really comment on that

Yes, it would because I do not use the drop down menu in the dscan window at all. Using the drop down menu to manipulate dscan requires tons of scrolling or specifically naming the overview filters to have them appear at the top of the list. That is much more work to compensate for a poor feature implementation that could be fixed by simply allowing players to set a specific window as primar overview. I manage my dscan via the overview tabs. Requiring me to use the dscan menus is more work that is unnecessary.

Try dragging them around by click-dragging them on the healthbar portion of the row.

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Using the drop down menu to manipulate dscan requires tons of scrolling or specifically naming the overview filters to have them appear at the top of the list.

so you already know the optimal way to do it, but refuse to because you want to make the feature harder to use, in order to complain that the feature is hard to use?

to each their own but thats cutting off your nose to spite your face

Try dragging them around by click-dragging them on the healthbar portion of the row.

will try later when im back from work (and in a ship that has drones)

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More work to achieve the same results is not the optimal way. Click-switching between 2 tabs is way more optimal than opening the dscan window’s drop down menu and scrolling through tons of settings to find the right setting. Not to mention that it requires additional work in the form of specific overview settings with specific names so that they appear in the 2-9 hotkey range, which in turn means even more work when something new is added to the filter items. This is the antithesis of optimal.

But even if it were the optimal way, it’s irrelevant to the problem. The problem is the “Active Overview Filter” setting that breaks with the current poor Multi-Overview implementation. Your cumbersome way to use the Dscan is at best an even poorer workaround for the issue, but definitely not “the optimal” way.

Just another instance of someone who doesn’t want to understand the problem at hand, similar to Brisk and Faldor Tivianne…

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