For the first time in a few days I checked the dev posts on the forums . I was greeted by three recently Falcon-closed threads about chat bubbles. The sheer bitterness and rage in those threads alarmed me enough to log in and see for myself this horrible new “feature,” worried that CCP might have done something of delete boot.ini magnitude.
I gotta say I’m kind of disappointed in the folks who are raging. Of all the things to lose your mind and biomass over, this change is an… odd choice. It’s a minor change that makes it easier to do the thing I’m most likely to try and do when I click on another player’s name. It cuts out a slightly laggy menu and saves a click.
After playing 9 years I think I can call myself a bittervet. So as one bittervet to another I’m asking all my fellow old space-salts to save your rage for things that deserve it. Because they actually engage with the community the devs have all kinds of rage directed at them from all kinds of places. Over time excessive rage tends to blur together into background noise. Players losing their ■■■■ over something like chat bubbles and making arguments that boil down to “keep the interface un-intuitive because Eve should be hard to play” only makes us all look absurd.
Remember, we rely on Eve for fun (except miners). Devs rely on it to pay the rent. They don’t want the game to fail any more than a player like me, who met some great friends on Eve and still gets goosebumps when D-Scan shows somebody about to land in my bubble. The game has its problems and I think players often have essential information on how to fix those issues. The last thing we need to do is numb our audience, the people who would actually implements the changes we propose, to anything we might contribute by flipping out over things with minimal impact. Please, save it for the next walking in stations.
It’s because they are wasting time on rubbish that nobody wanted or needed, and now it’s actually having a negative effect.
I’ve been accidentally convo’ed 10 times today by other players because of this feature, CCP have been warned by the community about this issue and still make the change anyway because they aren’t actually interested in whether we want it or not. They want it so we get it, which is not a good sign.
It’s the principle of wasting time on useless changes while there are actual serious problems with citadels and SOV. Sure this change might not take a lot of time but it’s sending out the message that CCP aren’t listening as usual.
I think it’s rather the fact that the feature was poorly implemented, that CCP did not include an option to turn it off, that there were already two other simple ways to accomplish the same task and, most importantly, that feedback to the change while it was on the test server was almost entirely negative. The bubble is just another in a line of bizarre design choices that CCP implements after ignoring player feedback, for seemingly no reason other than to accomodate those players who don’t have the mental capacity to either double-click or right-click on a player’s name.
It’s also wrapped up into a patch with some other negative changes, like the absolute neutering of the Agent Finder tool as part of its incorporation into The Agency. The bubble just happens to be the symbolic transgression that the discontented latched on to.
On the plus side, the bubble broke those Nyx bots that got slaughtered, so it’s not all bad.
That assumes dev time is a universal resource. It’s not. The interface people aren’t the same ones designing ships or creating new PvE content. Maybe folks don’t know this?
From where I’m sitting the interface is actually hugely better than when I started playing so maybe I’m just not inclined to get worked up over a small thing even if it’s not great or really needed.
And it’s that wrapping up that I think is the big issue here. I don’t use agents so I haven’t got an opinion on the finder, but it sounds like it did take a brutal hit. But when people go nuclear on something annoying because they are upset about something critical it only hurts everyone’s chances of getting a quality fix or improvement implemented.
If the UI people have enough time on their hands to be implementing things like the chat bubble and removing perfectly working app’s such as The Agent Finder in order to create work for themselves replacing it with the (not fuctionally equal) Agency then I think there are too many UI developers.
Since other area’s of the game are suffering from a lack of development perhaps some current UI developers should be re-tasked.
If I understand how the game is developed correctly they have different skill sets. It would be like telling landscape painters to become auto mechanics. I could be wrong though; if somebody know different please say so…
This is going on for years. Many players have lost patience. Chat bubbles were the last straw for them.
Also, the bubbels caused bugs in botting software which revealed massive bot farms (they probably make trillions per month). Another problem that adds fuel the the fire.
There are other ways of reducing the number of UI dev’s to increase the number of (insert other speciality here) but I did not want to be too harsh and actually say.
What interests me is that, over the nine years, I have seen changes that cover the spectrum from great to terrible. Also CCP is reasonably receptive to feedback much of the time. Yet it seems that people focus on the terrible to the exclusion of all else and pretend that everything this always ignored. To pretend that nothing changes or all changes have been terrible is to pretend that everything used to be great (it wasn’t) and that a solution exists for every problem that would please everyone (it doesn’t).
I get the long term frustration; I have it too on a number of topics. But there is a right way and a wrong way to make that frustration heard. Some people chose the wrong way today.
we don’t want no stinkin chat bubbles… I mean who is coming up with this mess? I cant believe they waste this amount of time on stuff we never asked for.
Yeah, that sort of thing is of… questionably merit anyhow. I remember when I started playing the UI almost got me to quit a couple times. It’s still awkward in a lot of places so I think that even if the dev team on it screws up occasionally there is still plenty of good work to be done. I mean seriously Eve before radial menus was just… ugh.