Improving the Default Overview

Council Of Stellar Management Assembly Hall
21

Some good ideas here. But please keep in mind we are talking about new players who are already being hit by information overload. Eve is complex and the learning cliff is still there.

I agree with the concept of better labelled and useful tabs. Violence, mining, Everything, travel

But what I would like to see is that CCP takes ownership of the new tabs so we are not worried about a specific new npc not showing because a player has not yet done an update.

What needs to happen is a lesson, not always a ‘mission’ but even a link to video or text page that shows what a well set overview can be, how to change size, later it on the fly. I know a LOT of player are not aware that CCP has ingame video lessons, now (f12, second tab) and maybe pointers to THOSE will help. If CCP is feeling overwhelmed or understaffed then put out a call to the players to make lessons for specific small topics, Overview, UI rearrangement, Neocom editing, that sort of thing.

A few aids to learning may be a rope that helps a few more players scale that first cliff.

m

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22

I think the biggest thing is that the customization UI is clunky and hard to use, and there is no instruction on how to even use tabs, let alone set them up correctly.

Lots of games ask you to tweak settings to get it exactly how you want it, but most make that process at least practical for the average user.

23

This. It was the biggest problem when I interacted with the game for the first time (third actually, first time I uninstalled after I saw how bad UI was in this game).

It’s polishing the turd if you just want to change it for new players. You have no idea how many gamers are rejected by only the looking on the EvE UI. It’s really bad and last “bubble” upgrade only shows that devs resposible for UI/UX have no idea what to do here. Jin, instead improving default focus on convincing CCP to upgrade UI.

1 Like
24

One thing that I always found conspicuously missing was a fleet pvp tab which hides fleet members, and maybe a companion “my fleet” tab. Ignoring all the discussions of tabs that hide blues or don’t hide blues, a tab that hides fleet members will solve 95% of the accidental ally targeting problems without hiding potentially-dangerous corpmates in newbie corps. Yes, it’s possible to get scammed into joining a fleet and then attacked, but that feels like a significantly smaller problem.

25

Game has bigger problems than something that impacts a very small group of players who try eve in 2018 and continue to play for more than an hour.

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26

I have a simple suggestion. Make the default overview window bigger.

I created a class that explains and helps newbeans set up their user interface. Half the class is spent on the overview and one of the main points I push is to make the window bigger. It’s the most important window in the game and it starts out smaller than the chat box. So many new players fail to grasp this until it is pointed out to them. It should be the largest thing on your screen when you are undocked.

Another thing is to add columns, and space them enough to show relevant information while they are making the default window bigger. I think basic columns should be: Icon, distance, name, type, corporation, and velocity.

Velocity might be too much information for a new player, but I think showing that other players are in Corps flying around together, might get them interested in joining one.

As far as basic tabs I think you are on the right path.

Main - Show pretty much everything. players, stations, gates, rats, citadels, events, and so on. Everything needed for combat. Hide wrecks, cans, planets, belts, and stuff. Basically the default tabs for Sarashawa and Z-S. The problem is that every new player starts out in a NPC corp, and your corpmates are not exactly your friends. So showing the difference between them and other players might not be the best idea. So I think showing everyone as “neutral” is good idea. I don’t think a new player needs a specific PVP tab. Also enable all brackets for the main tab if ccp can.

Mining - Main tab with belts, rocks and stuff added onto it.

Loot - A tab specific for wrecks and boxes. This stuff can clutter up and get lost in the current general tab.

Travel - Gates, stations, citadels, bubbles. No players.

Maybe a…

Drones/PVP - The only thing I can think of that may be useful to a new player in a pvp situation is having a drones tab. You could just add them to the main tab or this could be a reason for, and part of, a PVP tab. It might just be better to add them to the main tab.

Good luck with this. It’s way overdue.

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27

Think back to when you first started playing Eve. You had no idea how this overview window worked. Try to remember the first time someone walked you through some settings or handed you an overview pack.

For me the game became simpler as I was able to focus on the important things. Yeah there is plenty that CCP should work on, but their NPE overhaul was far from complete, and this is something simple that would make a big difference.

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28

What i personally have as a older player and link new ones when they ask

= tab with only friendlies ( for fleets and see the exact distances etc), can be swapped for a capital or support/fighter overview

= tab for gangs, (I see my blues and my enemys)

= dsout, a tab where everything that hints activity is shown: Players, wrecks, drones, fighters, probes etc

= pve , a tab with everything that is pve related but also has player ships on (so i see them on dscan and in the overview when they get ongrid)

= pvp, classic hostiles only tab with warpable objects etc.

=warpout, planets and belts to get your pod somewhere save
(= belts, if you are into ratting, pve tab with belts shown as well)

only hostiles shown on the pvp and the pve tab

my fleet overview settings have no blink on (to see the redboxed)

gang, pvp also have the basiscs for warps; the sun, gates, beacons

29

I think previous posters have covered most of the useful tabs already. However, IMO, the problems with overviews extend far beyond not having certain default tabs. Is there room for discussing a more significant overhaul of the overview configuration? In my opinion, some sections could be improved a ton.

I will go over the settings tabs in order. First up is “Overview Tabs”. This one generally does its job pretty well, the only (small) problem with this tab is that you have to do some nasty things to the “tab name” field to get basic formatting:

What I consider to be the largest offender is the “Tab Presets” tab.
Inside this tab, there are 14 expandable menus: https://i.imgur.com/DeIfh6M.png
This place is frankly a mess. Here are the categories, and my commentary on them:

  • Asteroid
    ** Is fine!
  • Celestial
    ** Seems to be a catch-all for anything that didn’t fit in a different category. A complete mess, and it is not very straightforward even for me as an experienced player to figure out what many of the entries in this section actually refer to. This section needs some major work.
  • Charge
    ** No problem here.
  • Deployable
    ** No problem here.
  • Drone
    ** I very much doubt anyone will ever want to specifically enable a certain type of EWAR drone (which are split up into three entries), but it’s alright overall since it’s such a small list.
  • Entity
    ** Oh boy, here we go. This is the big one. This one is a mess. A ton of NPCs are in here, and they’re not sorted or even named in any helpful way whatsoever. I doubt half of these even exist in the game anymore. This section is awful and needs to be completely revamped. What most people care about is being able to toggle all hostile NPCs. You can’t just toggle this entire section on, because it also for some reason contains things like billboards or cosmetic mission doodads/structures (such as LCOs), and the old-school highsec NPC convoys (do those even exist anymore?).
  • Fighter
    ** I see no reason for this section, which has only three entries, to not be merged into the Drone section, while maintaining the current separate groups for fighters and drones of course.
  • NPC
    ** The NPC tab looks pretty much exactly like it should. Unfortunately, most NPCs are actually under the “Entity” tab instead of the “NPC” tab for some reason. As far as I can tell, this category is completely defunct for all new (and I use “new” loosely here) NPCs. Move all entities into one of the existing six options under “NPC”.
  • Orbitals
    ** As far as I can tell, this is used for like one or two pretty unusual objects in the game. Why does this need its own category? Literally just delete this and merge it into whichever structure they correspond to.
  • Ship
    ** A simple version of this would be split up into ship size, i.e. frigs, destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships, capitals, and supercapitals. This would make it very easy to create for instance capital only overviews, which are very popular in nullsec. However, it is important that such a simplified selection exists side by side with the current granular settings for this category.
  • Sovereignty Structures
    ** I would argue that, once celestials are cleaned up, these entries should go in there instead.
  • Starbase
    ** This entire category should obviously be removed soon™
  • Station
    ** Literally just one entry. Should be merged with “Structure” category below.
    ** Structure
  • Ontop of player upwell structures, this one for some reason contains hostile strongholds such as Blood Raider sotiyos which IMO should definitely fall under a more generic “hostile NPC” category as described above.

Now, I know that from a technical POV it’s not as simple as moving around a bunch of UI code. I believe each group within each category are the actual categories and groups that determine how the object/items interacts with the rest of the world. However, this is something the user needs to somehow be shielded from, in order to not make this tab so insanely convoluted.

Another problem, which would also be solved by a more generic “hostile NPCs” approach to configuring your overview, is that existing overview profiles play really poorly with patches which add new content, such as new NPCs or structures. They will not show up on overviews by default. This, as many of us have seen on reddit, has proven fatal even to the most experienced pilots. All in all, even if you do manage to create a set of really fantastic overview tabs that suit your needs, they will be unsafe to use unless each tab is reviewed and updated frequently. Most players, even veterans, are force to rely on 3rd parties to create usable overviews for them.

Ontop of all this, I propose this entire tab be replaced with a much simpler version with the option for advanced users to go back to the old one. A new player who wants to create their own overview tab may be given the option to select the following:

  • Celestials (All / Only Structures & Gates (Default!) / Only Planets)
  • Players (All / Only Friendly / Only Hostile / Only Fleet / All but fleet)
  • Drones (All / Only Drones / Only Fighters)
  • NPCs (All / Only Hostile (Default!) / Only Police)
  • Lootables & Wrecks (All / Only Wrecks / Only Containers)
  • Harvestables (All / Only Asteroids / Only Ice / Only Gas)

The rest should be given sensible default values, and advanced users can tweak the existing options if needed. I just wrote these off of the top of my head, so maybe I missed something, but I’m pretty sure these few options would be enough for the vast majority of players. For this simple setup process, most things like deployables (cyno inhibs or warp bubbles) should be opt-out, not opt-in.

Of course, selecting preset categories like this means that new patches would automatically update your overview. Combined with tweaking the “advanced” (current) tab preset categories as described earlier, this would allow new players and veterans alike to very quickly create overviews to their liking.

It is my belief that a setup like this would make the overview infinitely more accessible for newer players in particular, who are probably completely overwhelmed by the current overview settings. It would also mean that a new player can quickly jump into fleets with their corporation without having to fiddle with the very granular “states” tab, which a new player would not have any idea what to do with. New players are currently pretty much forced to download an overview from someone else. I have not seen a corp where “download this overview” wasn’t among the first things said to new pilots.

I was planning on discussing the other tabs a bit, but this turned out to be a lot of text. I hope you’re able to take some of what I said into consideration. Maybe not the exact details so much as the more general idea of making it accessible enough that, regardless of your skill level or knowledge about the game, you should be able to create your own overview in a very short amount of time. It’s such a central part of the game. It can’t afford to be as user-unfriendly as it currently is.

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30

Yo Jin my man. I think a good overview would be:

Travel + PVP + PVE + All + Wrecks + Mining

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31

Whilst I can try to do that, there’s no harm in improving the default in the mean time :slight_smile:

32

Brought this up at the summit funnily enough! Unfortunately the problems here are (I’m told) rooted in how typing works in EVE and I’m not code-savvy enough to figure out an elegant solution.

33

Sure but this is a positive change I can potentially make. Whataboiutism for other problems isn’t accomplishing everything.

34

Something I’ve wanted for a long time which would improve overview functionality in many different cases:

Stacked overview tabs. Instead of switching between tabs, have it so you can insert tabs onto the overview so you can see different tabs at the same time, So for example you could have standard pvp at the top, then further down have one that just shows logi ships etc. This would make fleet fights alot easier and other aspects of the game too since you wouldn’t need to switch between overview tabs as much.

I’ve drawn up a picture for what I mean (im terrible at describing):

image
qouR6j0.png401×871 116 KB

So essentially you can stack up different overview tabs.

35

I’m surprised no one has mentioned priorities yet. As a fw pilot, this change is pretty important, even if it comes at the cost of some complications with negative players in NPC corporations. Maybe negative sec pilot can not qualify for npc corps. Either way, I would love to see friendly, fleet, and ally placed above negative standings and security status and criminal status. Since all tabs share priorities, there is no option to have this present in a fleet or pvp tab only.

Also, I don’t think it’s necessary to have more than four tabs for a new player. Warp, general, enemy, mining.

Warp should have gates, sun, wormhole, planets, stations and dockable Citadels.
General should have gates, cans, wrecks, most default npcs, all player ships, deployables and drones, stations, and wormholes. Brackets should be on. (It is easy enough to temporarily remove one thing like drones and later reload the preset or default than require an additional tab.)
Enemy should have all non ally, non fleet, non corp/alliance members. Neutrals should be on it.
Mining is pretty self explanatory, but add stations and up well structures.

36

Nope, I didn’t but I found the setting very quickly. Took some time but after some fiddling I had a basic idea of how to add or remove something from and to the overview.
I think most people can figure this out too.

37

Fair enough, more power to you.

1 Like
38

I actually really like this as a breakdown of the different overview ‘packages’ people tend to use outside of very specific ones (like my target calling overviews). Having a ‘loot’ overview is definitely something I missed in my initial look over what things a new player would need to have access & understanding of :slight_smile:

Would be amazing if we could see something on the level of the rework you talk about here, but as I’ve explained in other posts, it’s unlikely that we’ll see that level of work put into it in the near future due to the roadmaps constraints, unless something shifts in the future.

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39

Hey all, back again. I’ve set about getting an initial version of the overview sorted and intend to go through the tutorial with it to check if that works this weekend. If you’d like to try it out the channel name is “Improved Default” and the link is in the MOTD of the channel. If you have any suggestions/can see things I missed, bring them up in the thread here!

The only ‘major’ change from the default apart from having a few more tailored tabs is in the background priority list, which I took the liberty of changing so that (at long last), being allied to someone’s millitia trumps them having -10 sec. Hopefully this will help all the newbeans in FW not shoot friendlies.

2 Likes
40

Thanks for doing this- it will be a big help for new players and your efforts are definitely appreciated.

I’ll check it out when I can get on again.

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