Team Psycho Sisters here with a quick update on what we are working on for January.
There will be a dev blog out at the start of next week, around the 18th December 2017, with more details.
Quick list of changes:
The Agency is getting Factional Warfare, Incursions and Expeditions added to it along with some new cards for Ice sites and Epic Arcs
The Journal is being stripped back to a couple tabs with all the removed functionality going to The Agency or other appropriate window like Contracts or Planetary Colonies
The Agent Finder is being removed and finding agents will be handled by The Agency
This is still work in progress but these are all live now on Singularity.
If you find any bugs with the above changes, please report them through the F12 menu in the client.
We look forward to hearing your feedback on these changes.
While I think updating the journal is an extremely smart idea, I see 2 problems with killing it off entirely:
fragmentation. EVE UI is already a software disaster. scattering little chunks of useful utility from a centralized window to random otherwise useless windows just makes things worse.
terminology. Grab a day-0 player and ask them what āthe agencyā means, and theyād likely assume itās an NPC faction, most likely hostile or else CIA-like. Ask what a ājournalā is, and itās obviously going to be the place to keep track of everything. Thatās literally what the word means. Which also suggests a revamped journal should be the central hub of a playerās day to day experience rather than killed off entirely.
I agree that the UI is not in a perfect state but I disagree that keeping the Journal in the current state is a smart choice. We are not entirely killing it off at this point, more details will be in the devblog but most of the tabs being removed should be in other windows that you are probably already using if you are using the tabs in the Journal, otherwise expeditions, incursions, and epic arcs will all be moved to the single point of contact which is The Agency. The Agents tab is not being touched at all, it is one of the few that will remain.
There are plans in the works to address this. The initial release of The Agency was always planned to be released without much notice or introduction to it as we were not removing any of the functionality you could do elsewhere. That is now changing and we are looking at how we introduce The Agency to a new player. This is not on my team so I am afraid I can not go into more details.
Does this mean I can turn off the map? Because I donāt need the map to slow down finding agents or checking my missions or expeditions.
I would also greatly appreciate if we could jump directly into the Agent Finder or Mission Journal from the icon in the sidebar (ie via a radial or right click menu) and not cumbersomely via the main agency window.
You disagreeing would be acceptable if the entire Journal would be properly transferred over to a fully developed Agency and not a WIP. Please stop putting the cart before the horses, this is not good development practice.
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One thing thatās already bothering me: Why does the range limiter in the Agency window limit the range in which I can search agents. I mostly use the Agent Finder to look for Locator agents. If I now have to change range settings every time I do something just to get a fuller picture of the available agents, thatās kind of defeating the purpose of the search.
Not to mention that it takes several seconds to load agents for 10 jumps, while the Agent Finder itself takes a split second to find agents in the entire universe.
The Agent Finder also finds Agents near me first regardless of the settings. The Agencyās agent finder finds ā¦ something. Just tested on Sisi with Any Distance and the closest Locator I got from Curse was 20 jumps away, while I am in a system in a station with a locator agent. If you turn of the Agent finder, please stop curating results that CCP thinks are interesting to the players and instead please show the data as it has always been the case.
Most of Null Sec does not need or want your Agency window. I can accept opening it occasionally to find out where my escalation is, like I do with the terrible journal window.
I understand that these changes are designed to keep noobs longer in hopes they will catch on with a corp and get addicted.
But I beg you please do not make a change that will require me to open this window everyday. People in Null Sec do not want huge obscuring windows blocking important things like a ship that might be trying to kill you. For example, the changes made to the scanner completed ignored this. Sure, we can adjust it back to usability, But the fact that it happens at all shows that you spend ZERO time in spaceships that can and will blow up if you are not paying attention.
Your Agency windows is huge, It is wasting a massive amount of screen area. Again, it brings to question how āin touchā you are with the null sec playerā¦
Do we also become able to warp to an expedition via right click in space just as we can do to warp to missions or do we still have to open the journal and right click on the expedition?
Canāt say Iām happy with the removal of things from the journal.
Right now the agency window is just too big and clunky to be used.
Additionally I have the problem that every time a signature in system changes the left-hand items seem to be rebuild. In an active FW system this happens quite often making any searching on the map really annoying.
That wasnāt the point. The point is that EVEās UI is a dumpster fire of fragmentation, hidden options, inaccessibility. Shuffling the mess isnāt the same thing as cleaning up the mess. And the point isnāt that the journal should be untouched. The point is that the journal could have potentially been a good universal point of contact for whatever you want to do in EVE. It wasnāt succeeding in that role, but it could have been. Turning your back on an experience-centric UI design is just telling me that EVEās UI is just looking for new ways to suck. Imagine instead if the journal was designed around the eve-wtd image thatās been floating around.
Iām going to go with ānot-invented-hereā symdrome. The Journal has been around for a while and probably pre-dates the current devās. Rather than go poking around someone elseās old code it is easier and quicker to write new stuff.
That is fine. And itās kind of necessary. But please do it in a wholesome way and not a patchwork of changes here, abandoned projects there and lack of coherent structure all over. This Agency window has such a huge scope for things that can and should be included in it, that its features and development should warrant its own release.
Problem with throwing more stuff into the Agency is that The Agency is still not there yet. Not even close TBH. Oversized, clunky, and IMO feels childish and completely out of place compared to the rest of UI. Icons donāt match UI icons in terms of color (Lego Friends colours instead of white) and what bothers me even more is that background hue is matched with icons and well ā¦ I didnāt set my hue to black because I love pink. Iād love a minimalistic b&w variant matching UI theme.
When shrinked map gets covered with expanded info panel and HUGE icons that donāt shrink with the whole Agency window. You can schrink UI icons so why not those? Lots of wasted empty space. Space that covers important stuff under.
Range limitter doesnāt work. With range limit set to 10 jumps it shows me stuff 18 jumps away.
Since I donāt have any expeditions atm - where will they show up? Sites or general combat?
I also presume active missions will follow sooner or later. Theyāll be under āAgentsā or get their own seach?
Since you asked for feedback - Iām not completely against The Agency. Iāll most likely adapt and maybe even like it but please finish it first before You move other stuff to it. Make usefullness a priority over bling, not the other way around. Make it customizable and match it with the game and theme. Project Discovery is fairly new feature and yet it blends in - why The Agency canāt?
It does not appear there is a āsort byā function for results (i.e. agent list). Please tell me that I am merely unobservant and you do not expect us to scroll through results with no distance ordering.
You cannot tell whether you can use an agent until you actively click on his/her ācardā. Please find a way to highlight agents you have standing for without making us click each card or click the filter ( āhighest availableā, Level 4, etc).
Any way to cut down on size of the window? On second thought: Please let us disable the map and ācardsā format. If i interact with the Agency I want densly packed info in a small window. Lines of plain text is actually ideal.
Could you guys work on making the Angency window not lag as badly as the industry one? Thatād be a major QOL improvement if itās supposed to be used. There also should be a working filter for event stuff, it seems all you can do atm is āsuggestedā whatever that means.
It is important if you are removing ālight system loadā information sources, and introducing them into the Agency window, to significantly improve the performance of the Agency window, and have a high information density view option. If these were present and effective the majority of resistance you are seeing would evaporate.
We currently have this issue with the industry window, that responds so slowly, it is almost quicker to log off, fire up an out of game tool and check the state of ones industry Jobs. Coupled with the fact on opening the industry window, you have absolutely no idea if you actually have any jobs, or if it is trying to load and display them, eventually, one day.
The Agent Finder is being removed and finding agents will be handled by The Agency
As long as The Agency gives us all the same filter and search functionality of the Agent Finder then itās good; IF it CANNOT give the same level of filtering then it will be a major P-Off for those of us who use it. Please donāt ruin it :\
