I just saw that on Reddit. I don’t share the same enthusiasm as people over there for this feature. With these lines you make it harder to see information and use it appropriately.
- The Drone bar does not tell you if a drone gets attacked so that you could recall it before it gets destroyed.
- The Dscan does not tell you what is new. Same for the Probe window stripe.
- In the Inventory, Loot all is – at least for me – never the preferred action because I always only need certain things from loot cans or wrecks. Loot all would only stuff my cargo full and leave important things behind. And you don’t see how much ammo you have left or how many cap boosters are remaining.
- Selected items lacks important information like distance.
All that info would be hidden behind tooltips, if at all, or weirdly expanding windows.
The only good stripe that I see is Local chat. However, I am quite surprised that CCP moves away from the argument that more granular information in that chat would help bots become better, especially in busy environments. Quite interesting.
The Micro Widgets can be quite useful to have in certain situational environments. For instance, I could totally see me using a Dscan and Probe Stripe in a fleet fight because I don’t need the windows in full size there and instead could make my Overview or Watch List longer.
The problem is that I would have to manually adjust my UI every time I need those situational changes. On top of that, I would have to leave the space available anyway because otherwise I’d have to adjust window sizes after a fleet, too, to accommodate the bigger scanner windows again.
To fix this, when CCP introduces these Micro Widgets, they should also make it possible to store and load different UI setups like we can store and load different Fleet Broadcast settings. This way, you could quickly switch between a compact striped combat setup with minimized local, minimized probe scanner but larger fleet window, watch list, overview or those in different places, and switch back after a fleet to your more comprehensive PVE setup where I see who actually comes into local, what the new signature is and what is actually going on in the Dscan.
If we get more customizability, we also need to get good ways to manage and use this customizability to its full extent.