Don’t drag alphas into this.
Bad design is bad design for all players.
How you choose to play the game doesn’t affect input on a poorly designed menu.
It’s not okay for anyone not just omegas.
All players are equal regardless of alpha or omega status that’s why status is not publically displayed on player profiles in game.
As it currently stands on TQ we have the following tabs in the journal and the % of how often they are opened compared to all windows in EVE:
Incursions – 0.5%
"Some of the only access or information about these features is in the Journal
or through external 3rd party information.
The Incursion Tab is [even for Incursion runners] under used.
Why? The current tab is rubbish, lacks a LOT of information and is quite inferior to 3rd party websites.
Don’t you find it sad that a 3rd party’s website using YOUR OWN DATA not only shows more information then the current tab, but also has better interface?
I sincerely hope that moving the incursion tab to the [already buggy, slow, unliked, big windowed] Agency monster will bring some of that nice 3rd party information along with it.
Also, where do you plan to stuff the additional incursion sub tabs showing the information about the individual systems [HQ, Assaults, Vanguards, Scout] and their sites?
LP Pool tab = LEAVE IT ALONE.
Move it next to the LP tab or something, but please do not remove/mess with it.
The Contracts tab in the journal:
Good bye, nice knowing you, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.
Personally, I use the contracts tab in the neocom and can’t stand it when I get redirected to the journal’s contracts tab.
Perhaps, making the contracts tab a default item on the Neocom, [or just easier to find to begin with], will greatly improve the [young and old alike] player experience.
I had this dream where I was lost on a vast white plain with millions and millions of small tiny things strewn all around. Small dwarves with big noses and bent knees, wearing corporation marketing paraphernalia and holding clipboards, would pick up random things, turn them upside down, blow on them, laugh in a less than stable way, and then nod at me furiously, proffering the shiny thing in my face i though I must want it more than anything in the world.
Then they would suddenly pause, as if seized by some inherent sense of doubt, and wander off to stare hard at other small things.
This bizzarre cycle continued and I became increasingly aware that there was no water, or purpose, in this wild and efficient badland. And then I woke up thirsty.
i just tried out to find the nearest locator agent. any corp, any level.
8 jumps, it said.
i set it to within 2 jumps, and wee, we have one 2 jumps out.
i set it to current system, and suddenly: there are agents with locator function in my system, yay.
Why do you want to remove one of the least existing compact, functional, fast interfaces? 
How to get rid of loyal and satisfied customers?
Take lean and functional features out of the product (like the agent finder) and substitute them with a lesser version (less user control, slower, less intutitive and, most importantly, with borderline garbage results).
Where is the complete result list ordered by jumps, filtered by security and availability?
If this can’t be done as easily with the agency as it can be with the agent finder right now, the agency is a significant step backwards.
Not here to spread depression or anything but looking at the track record of CCP I think it is safe to stay that nothing surprising here and this is yet another of countless factually bad decisions made by them. Don’t see much chance they will change it and probably will just make it even worse over time.
Tested it myself a few minutes ago and i don’t think that the agency window in it’s current state is able to completely replace the agent finder by any means. There are strange results all the time an it is compared to the agent finder entirely confusing and unintuitive.
Look, CCP introduced free to play to increase revenues, but at the same time realized that Alphas were for the most part not interested in walking the learning curve – the Omega path. So now we have the Agency, skill extractors, etc. The Agency is designed for the Alphas. The only use I have for it to see how many points I need to get the next reward. I use the journal and all it’s aspects, same with the agent finder. My guess is that alphas don’t use either. They use real money to buy isk and the items they need to play the game. Now all they need is easy to find content, ergo Agency. Perhaps CCP should just put an isk price on the Alpha skills. Let the Alphas buy skills outright. They want easy content, let them pay isk for access to content. At any rate, CCP should stop screwing with the existing functional menu items.
I’m an alpha, i played for several months until around feb or early march maybe and since saving up my first month ive paid my way in game with isk for almost a year now and I’m out of game with a broken laptop so I’m back to alpha with a frozen queue atm. The agency was not made for me, it was poorly designed to try and make a hub for casual players. Alpha does not denote casual. Alphas don’t buy isk with real money, i have plenty of isk currently and omegas are the ones who largely buy Plex with real money to sell for isk much more than any alpha ever will. If alphas were out dropping tons of rw money on isk in game or for content in general we would just get a subscription and then we wouldnt be alphas.
Again this isn’t an alpha or omega issue. It’s a CCP forcing bad game design again issue.
Agency is just a bad design period and there’s no reason to try and force it on alphas as a punishment when you’re clearly biased saying you know it’s bad and as an omega you shouldn’t have to use it but they should.
@CCP_Dragon has tried to fix some of the event aspects like greatly reducing the awful daily timers which was a great improvement but it’s by and far inferior to current menus and doesn’t offer any improved functionality.
It’s a basic rule of tech that anything that is hard to use and doesn’t offer significant improvement over existing options will always be eschewed in favor of the existing options. You can’t reinvent the wheel as a square and expect people to enjoy a bumpy ride. And you want to force alphas to use the square wheel simply because they’re alphas and you want to keep the circle for yourself.
I agree with CCP not screwing with functional menus, that’s not a valid excuse to force something disfunctional on someone else and justify it with a paywall.
So far, I am not a fan of the Agency window. It is a step down from other methods of doing the same thing. When I go exploring, I don’t use or need the agency window to do that. I just use the probe scanner window and go for a drive. When I am mining, I just use the probe scanner window. When I am ratting, I just use the probe scanner window. How does having any of this in the agency window help me any?
The Agency window is huge and bulky with oversized “cards” for each item. It has no filtering like the probe scanner window. The probe window is tiny and I park it on the side of my screen - always open.
Right now, the only time I open the agency window is to check progress in some event I am working. Nothing else it does is relevant.
If PVE were updated such that all such activities were mission based and personal to each player, having something like this might be OK, if it had a mini-view that only took up a small footprint on the screen.
Removing the Agent Finder sounds like a bad idea in general, but there is a feature in particular that could be a deal breaker for me, namely the ability to find locator agents closest to my current location while flying around.
The Agent Finder is responsive and takes up a very convenient little amount of screen space to provide that very useful info. Please don’t move that functionality elsewhere if that’s going to make it more cumbersome to use because of performance, screen state, or whatever other reasons.
I just logged into the test server to try out the new Agency window for locating agents and after using it I totally agree with what others have said; the Agency window is SLOW, it’s filtering options are POOR, the display of information is INCOMPLETE and UNORGANIZED, the window itself is HUGE and in general it now takes MORE STEPS in order to find LESS INFORMATION.
Please, don’t remove the current Agent Finder until you’ve addressed the above issues.
Please keep the old agent finder. It is much quicker to use. Not to mention The Agency Window indeed takes a noticable amount of time to open, especially when the filter is set to a long range (btw: let it open on “System” by default).
And you really cannot replave the agent finder with The Agency agent finder, because The Agency lacks several agent types, R&D, Storyline and Factional Warfare among them.
What, what?
What happened to your good evolutionary concept?
It’s no longer good enough when it affects you personally?
I really don’t know what is worse: The Agency’s lag, the removal of Agent Finder & LP tag, the fact that we only have 55 comments or the fact that no comment is posted by CCP (or all the options together)…
@CCP_Falcon please???
It doesnt look good, its too big, and it is like the experimental map, useless!
Personally I think it would be a good idea to keep the agent finder as is. The Whole concept of putting these Things into one Interface was a good one in theory, but in practical use it is not good.
Keep the Interface for the agency, and maybe iterate on that to make it perfect for those that like the events. I would find it fustrating if i need to open a multi window when i just want to check my journal fast.
So patches are every 6 weeks. Last patch was Dec 5th. So we are do a patch in the next week or two. From what I can see and tell
CCP has stopped listening to this small choir of voices.
We are going to loose the Agent Finder and Journal and get left with a beached whale that does not prefer 100% like the two we are loosing.
Then again - with the recent ESI API dev blog CCP says they now match every feature of the XML/CREST API … except for the stuff they said they where not going to do; but a large part of what the stuff they left out helped players no the state of their accounts. The dev blog post by one CCP member said he wants to get account status attached to the launcher (that new new improved one that 
The player base most days and we were told it would be 
(huggable))
Yeah. I have lack of faith in CCP.
You all want the agent finder to stay. Get your members and community leaders to stand up for it. The Agency is still - 
The Agent Finder was not the prettiest interface, but it was responsive and, once you INVESTED THE TIME LEARNING TO USE IT, it got the job done without lots of waiting around.
This has now been removed to make way for a piece of software that has been almost universally condemned by the suffering user base as unresponsive, inadequate and of no real appeal.
The most vexing issue is not why the new interface is unresponsive. That is a code design question about loading what assets when, and it has clearly been botched, but these things happen.
The truly difficult question is how the new software came to displace the older version when nobody in the user base liked or endorsed the replacement. That means dev leaders are not comprehending what is going on around them.
That’s an ordered set of disasters, coming our way.
I guess that tonight I’m gonna bookmark several lvl4 and R&D agents just in case…