Dim out MWD button when scrambled

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

Hi,

can you pretty please dim out (or X or slash or something, needs to be distinguishable from “offline”) the MWD module icon / button when it can’t be used due to a warp scram?

This is both confusing and very frustrating for people who’re new to small gang PvP in particular. Yes, at some point one (like I) will learn to understand when one is scrammed and can’t MWD, but - honestly this is just an UX bug.

I don’t need to tell the CCP devs, but for my fellow players: you don’t make a game challenging and rewarding by making the UI cumbersome to use or by hiding important information. No, it’s not about skill cap or something to be able to tell when you’re scrammed. Buttons have states, e.g. running, runnable, passive, offline, overheated. When a MWD indicates itself as runnable even though you are scrammed, and the user (player) clicks on it repeatedly and nothing happens, that’s a strong UX (user experience) bug and needs to be fixed as such.

(The way to make a challenging and captivating game is to pose problems to the player that are interesting and rewarding to solve. Fighting with the user interface is not that.)

And, honestly, it’s a few man hours tops to draw, implement, regression-test & ship this.

Cheers,

-equi

2

The icon appears above your hp bars.

By dimming out the mod its going to look similar to a burned out mwd.

3 Likes
3

The icon appears above your hp bars.

  1. You have completely missed the point. Please re-read the original post: When a MWD indicates itself as runnable even though you are scrammed, and the user (player) clicks on it repeatedly and nothing happens, that’s a strong UX (user experience) bug and needs to be fixed as such.
  2. The icon does not tell you whether you are warp disrupted or warp scrambled. You can probably find out by hovering, but that’s seriously cumbersome.

By dimming out the mod its going to look similar to a burned out mwd.

Again, please re-read the original post: dim out (or X or slash or something, needs to be distinguishable from “offline”)

-equi

Add.: a very easy (for the art department) way would for example be to just tint the button red.

4

yes it does they are two different icons.

2 Likes
5

I’m very happy this works for you, and good for you to have the ability to recognise a slight distinction between blue and teal.

Unfortunately, the game UI needs to work for as many people as possible, which includes people like me who can’t distinguish the two icons in the heat of a spaceship battle. It also creates an artificial hurdle for newer players who are just learning the mechanics.

Also, it’s great that you’re explaining how the information can be otherwise acquired through the UI, but nothing from either of the 2 reply posts diminishes the UX bug in any way. Again:

When a MWD indicates itself as runnable even though you are scrammed, and the user (player) clicks on it repeatedly and nothing happens, that’s a strong UX (user experience) bug and needs to be fixed as such.

UX is a well-defined field of engineering with good tenets and rules. For example, you should never move the mouse pointer from the application side, because the user not only expects to have control over their mouse and the pointer to follow, but they also frequently have their eyes centered on the pointer and will be momentarily confused if the application jumps the cursor to another location.

This is very much the same. As an user, you are interacting with the application in a specific way; you’re trying to click a button that is indicating itself as ready to be clicked. Your eyes are likely centered on the button (even if only for a fraction of a second) and you expect it to light up with the green halo that the application has taught you it provides as feedback.

It does not matter in the slightest bit that there are other locations on the screen that provide information on why it’s not working. The user experience is:

  1. see button indicating MWD can be enabled
  2. click button or Fn
  3. continue spaceship fighting
  4. notice MWD isn’t on
  5. click button again
  6. wait for green halo
  7. click button again
  8. check warp scrambling icon
  9. notice warp scrambler
  10. die

Which again brings me full circle to the original statement: When a MWD indicates itself as runnable even though you are scrammed, and the user (player) clicks on it repeatedly and nothing happens, that’s a strong UX (user experience) bug and needs to be fixed as such.

And, as said there as well, you don’t make the game “harder” or raise the “skill cap” by creating a bad UI. The game becomes challenging and fun by creating interesting and enjoyable spaceship fights, not by annoying the user with nonresponsive UI.

Compare this with how ECM works. You get the icon as well, this tells you there is an ECM attempt. If the ECM is successful, your locked targets in the target list/bar disappear. This is clear and direct feedback in the exact place that you look for your targeting, there is no chance of confusion whether you lost your target locks.

Imagine your targets instead stayed on the list, but your weapon modules would just deactivate and you couldn’t activate them anymore. That would be closely analog to the current MWD UI, and it’d be horribly annoying, would it not?

-equi

6

Should weapons and targeted modules (ewar, and logi) be also dimmed out when you have no targets locked?

[EDIT] What about passive modules that can’t be clicked, period?

7

No, because clicking them does something useful (pre-enabling them for a target to be locked). And there is also a clear distinction between a pre-enabled module (blinking) and a running one (white circle running around indicating cycle time.) You have direct visual feedback on what’s happening.

This could be done, but isn’t particularly valuable because this is not a state that changes in the moment. A passive module is always passive, and as a player you learn that “forever.” You’re not going to try to activate them because you know (or learn) they can’t be activated.

A MWD is different because its inability to be activated is a state-of-the-moment thing. You do expect to be able to activate it, and there is no direct feedback that allows you to tell the difference between “key didn’t register” and “failed because of scram.”

-equi

8

So what about scrams and webs? Targeted modules that don’t activate outside of a predetermined range?

9

If you believe this is a UX problem, please by all means make a thread about it… (I wouldn’t post in it as I have not formed an opinion on it.)

Come to think of it, there is another module which is non-activatable situationally: cloaks. The same blocky-ring that is used to show the reactivation countdown for them could be reused for MWDs (without counting down, just showing the full ring.)

-equi

10

Tens of thousands of people had no issue with how it worked in the past. Tens of thousands of people have no issue with how it works now, which makes it even easier than it was for the tens of thousands of people who played before the UI changes. When you’re complaining about something which a significant amount of people had no problem with, even under worse conditions than now, then the problem is you.

11

And tens of thousands of people have cancelled their subscriptions over the past few years.

Also, thank you for making this an ad-hominem. Please go back to playing games under MS-DOS. Billions of people had no problem with that in the past, surely it will be great for you in 2017.

I’m very happy to say this thread has developed exactly as I expected. I believe we have exhausted all the “this is not a problem because” arguments now, and I’ll wait and see whether CCP does anything about it. Coincidentally, this is also why I didn’t post it in the QoL thread; this train of “arguments” is better contained here.

-equi

12

Has no rational connection to the topic.

Stating that the problem is you is not an attack.

Has no rational connection to the topic.

It’s called a “self-fulfilling prophecy”.

You are incapable of understanding that the problem is you, and you misinterpret critique on your person as an attack, further underlining that the problem is you and not the game. Is it just me seeing things, or do most people who behave this way choose to play Amarrians?

Always sign your posts, otherwise no one could tell who wrote it.

  • z0rberg
13

They also have different visual effects in space.

Perhaps the colour/icon could be more clear. I’d prefer that to dimming/crossing the icon.

2 Likes
14

The issue is, the only other effect that involves ‘marking’ the modules is module damage/overheating.

To mark the module because you are scrammed is inconsistent with the rest of eve ui (like someone explained you’re web isn’t dark when it can’t be used. Things don’t go dark when you’re jammed and stuff like that).

1 Like
15

How would you feel about this? (Photoshopped the cloak non-activatable effect on it)

mwd-dis

[edit: slightly better version]

16

Id say it’s still in the wrong place.

When my ship is affected by outside forces, it appears as an icon above the hp bars

17

That’s exactly the UX problem I see here, the module is being affected by outside forces (as well as the ship.)

18

So instead of working like every other module and UI-part in the game does, the MWD needs to break the rules and have it’s own way to inform the player about this? That’s not bad UI-design then?

19

Sorry, can you clarify that?

20

CCP made the effects-bar above the capacitor-readout to concentrate all the EWAR-effects that are being applied to your ship. Now you want to break this by adding a different way to give that information for a single module. You claim you want to make the UI better by making the UI less consistent.