EVE Online's main website - Can we please go back?

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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I can’t help but feel that website design has taken a downturn in usability somewhere over the years. Take a look at the new, modern main website. It is like any other modern website, that is to say, tries to cater to mobile devices too much and involves way too much scrolling to get anywhere useful. Not to mention it is also cobbled together from over 15 years of website redesigns; Of the 5 links deemed worthy enough to be placed to the top, 3 link are separate websites from 3 eras of the website evolution.

Well, lets start scrolling down and I can see a whole lot of screen real-estate is used to say very little. Small overviews about EVE as a game, blinks of the most recent expansion and link to the EVE mobile app. Quick glance of a few ships in EVE. After quite a bit of scrolling we get to the bottom of the page, where most of the other links are; account management, community, forums, support, starter guide for new players etc. etc.

I’d like to also point out that EVE’s Fiction Portal (https://fiction.eveonline.com/) is curiously absent from the group of links. Odd, considering the current Triglavian Invasion game expansion, is very heavily story based, yet you can’t even find anything about the game’s lore from its main website. In fact, there is NO visible link to the current fiction portal anywhere that I can tell besides here on this forum.

This is not the main point of this post, but I’ll mention it regardless; I’ve heard that devs have said only a miniscule amount of players care about EVE’s lore. But I’ll counter that with; how do you expect people to care about something they don’t know even exists? When the only way to find anything is by google, and knowing what to search for in the first place?

Now, back to regular programming and what got me to write this whole post in the first place: Take a look at EVE’s webpage from 2005. It is not flashy, it isn’t in your face like the current one is, it doesn’t involve scrolling on and on to get to the point - But it has one MASSIVE advantage over the new ones: Everything you need to know about the game, its community, its background story, fan works, everything you need is right there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050125184524/http://eve-online.com/

I don’t know about you, but I’d want that old websites clarity and most of all, usability, back. CCPls!

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:red_circle:

Only a minuscule number of players cares about the Abyss, yet CCP keeps pushing that crap hard. Numbers of interested people shouldn’t be a reason not to do something reasonable when they are being ignored for unreasonably bad things.

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When I was doing web design (back in the '90s) we didn’t have mobile but we did have competition for eyeballs. Your landing page had basically the same criteria as a newspaper headline. You had about 10 seconds to capture the visitors attention, convince them you offered something they were interested in and guide them deeper into the site. Your value proposition needed to be “above the fold” in newspaper parlance.

By that standard the Eve site is a bit of a disaster. The landing page tells you nothing unless you are already familiar with the game. 20 years ago, you had no right to expect people to scroll further unless they were already a customer and were looking for something specific. I’ve been out of that business for a long time and the world has changed so maybe the new format works with its intended audience - but people haven’t changed so I imagine a site that clearly states its value proposition on the landing page would work better.

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It was the Eve fiction that convinced me to start playing the game. It boggles the mind that CCP still produces fiction (sort-of), but doesn’t even link to it from their webpage. How can people be “interested” in something that is so well hidden?

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As said when this came up elsewhere, I wholeheartedly agree. The old website was stellar, and the backstory/chronicles being right there may very well have been the main reason I stuck with Eve at the time. Let’s face it, the initial gameplay is not much of a hook, and without the depth of fiction/setting, I would probably not have lasted past the two months of training Learning Skills.

Today, the only reasonable way to find the fiction is to know exactly what to Google for, and that is absolutely atrocious. The New Eden setting is vast, it’s deep, it’s intriguing and it’s fun. And it’s all but non-existent in the modern iteration.

The old website had it all right there. No matter what I was after, glancing left got me there. Account fiddlin’ and subscription settings? Right there. Lore/background/prime fiction? First click. Whatever I was after was available without going on a damn treasure hunt through an impregnable modern mobile friendly horseshite dispenser. If I was just browsing/looking, the right sidebar had cool stuff I could spend some time on.

The old website earned Eve a sub, which eventually became ten. This new one? It would have been the straw that broke the trial’s back. While my reasons for not subbing these days extends far past the website, it most certainly is a solid part of why I suspect CCP has lost sight of the playerbase’s needs and wants.

Edited to add: Decided to give it a shot, and I literally can’t find the new fiction portal from the main website. I eventually found a link near the bottom to a ‘Community’ page with some old fiction options, including one listing the Jove as the fifth Empire. Now that’s abandonware if I’ve ever seen some. Good grief.

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Just something to keep in mind: websites can load a different version when somebody is viewing it from a cell phone.

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FIFY - HTML/CSS responsiveness is far more robust than just mobile detection now. The pages I support for my company have a minimum of three different iterations for average desktop, average tablet, and both portrait and landscape modes on average cell phones, with the content layout tuned to the point at which it becomes difficult to read and/or interact with regardless of actual device used. This accommodates scenarios like someone having their desktop browser window not at full screen, for example.

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Sometimes I reminisce about the good ol’ days when any slob off the street could be a web developer. Now the medium has gotten so advanced that I fear it has passed me by. They don’t even use Flash anymore. When they finally kill off the pdf file format, then I will truly feel old.

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Honestly I’m not a huge fan of this older style of website. My favorite iteration is probably this one from late 2014: EVE Online is a Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Space Game - EVE Online

However, the more I look through the different website iterations, the more I notice a recurring theme of not enough information being immediately accessible. The focus is always heavily slated towards the visual aspect rather than functionality.

The current iteration of the website actually has a good amount of information, but the way in which it’s displayed (namely the size of the text and images) means it takes a lot more scrolling and effort to read it all than it should. The Forums and Backstory Page should also really be on that top bar, and a portion of the front page dedicated to news would be good to see.

Also agreed in regards to what Archer linked; kill the old community News Channels page and completely merge its functionality into the newer Articles page.

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What’s this thread doing all the way down here? Come on people, voice your opinions and thoughts on the current versus old websites, and how they can be improved. The current one desperately needs a mercy killing for its severe and terminal case of modern web design.

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Bring back GeoCities and AOL Instant Messenger (before Triton, that’s what killed it). EVE Forums should also be made to be easier to use on Lynx

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