nice job spotting the horrific lack of tooltips
YES, please make 3D model collapsable as it was!
Character portrait and its model are whole different things.
When doing portrait you can customize face expressions to make character feel alive.
Not even mentioning a pose and lights.
3D model with its neutral face feels just empty or even grumpy.
It makes no sense to make this window mandatory at this point of time.
For reference - compare my character portrait with its default 3D model. The model is just aweful by comparison!
1 Like
Where the actual ■■■■ did I say it was better?? I said it’s not perfect, and I was pointing out that the info is still there.
After a bit of testing of these skill plans I can say they add comfort to creating skill queue according to player’s individual needs and more practical use of skill training at all. Very nice element is increasing skill queue.
However, I propose that not only items or ships should be set as milestones for skill plans. Please enable blueprints to be used as milestones in order for industrialists to know what skills they need to be able to produce/copy/give TE and ME efficiency to items they chose to produce. And one more thing - I suggest to try to include as much materials as possible as milestones like ores/minerals, for instance: adding plagioclase-made minerals will put skills giving the best available effects of reprocessing of these into skill plan content, so players can know what is required for improving effects of what they do, in this case they will realise what’s needed for them to be able to harvest and reprocess plagioclase with maximum efficiency.
Additionally, you could add sections(sub-milestones) to some milestones like ores/minerals mentioned above, for ex: adding plagioclase would consist of activities connected to this ore
-harvesting (this section of milestone will consist of all skills needed for perfect harvesting of this ore)
-reprocessing (here, player finds out what skills are used to perfectly reprocess this ore and receiving as much profit as it can be received)
Another example is blueprint with proposed sections:
-manufacturing (what is essential to manufacture the item output)
-TE/ME efficient requirements
-copying
-invention (skills for maximizing invention chance)
And doing so just reinforces the believe in CCP that they don’t have to do a better job because the info is “still there”. So maybe next time think before you point out a convoluted method to circumvent CCP’s bad UI design.
(sorry Skirata, this was not meant as a reply to your post)
2 Likes
To be fair, I think another good addition to improving milestones complexity and versatility would be adding sub-milestones for ships that player cant use due to lack of powergrid and cpu.
Ex: When player tries to make good fit for his favourite activity but lacks powergrid, sub-milestone (let’s call it ,functionability’’) will show him what are all existing skills that are able to upgrade his powergrid, it will depend on his fit, so if player tryes to use fit with weapons and armor repairers which will overcome his powergrid, he’s supposed to see what is the list of skills (including prerequisites) needed to gain best available powergrid using this particular fit, like weapons will require level 5 of power grid management and advanced weapon upgrades in order to get everything out of powergrid capability(maybe something else too, what I forgot about, but I hope you know what I mean).
First impressions:
- The oversized icons and windows do not help anyone’s game time in terms of effciency or understanding, new or experienced, they only eat valuable screen space.
- Complete focus by the UI on skill plans interface for no good reason, with the training queue, arguably the most important aspect of EvE Online, being a visually sidelined afterthought.
- Functionality of Personal skill plans is absent. No link with e.g., a ship hull, weapon type or a Mastery level (provided these are correct and complete). An rclick functionality “create personal skill plan” on items and mastery certificates would make the personal skill plans relevant as a vet player experience, in stead of mostly being an exchange element with other players as it looks now. An “Import from Clipboard” function for personal plans could make it easier to interface with external applications that create skill plans as well.
- The Certified plans i.e., the real NPE factor in this: I understand they are meant as guidance for new players. You made them the focal point of the entire Skill Plans AND Training queue interface. That is at the very least quite annoying for more experienced players who simply want to get to their training queue and a reasonably condensed list of skills, for efficiency’s sake. Gearing the UI in general towards NPE only, as you did here, is not a solution but a new UI problem that will fester for years.
- You took the Certified skill plans too wide and too deep to be able to present them in an efficient, visual way. There is no overview, neither visually nor by explanation. There is too much overlap between the certified plans for that to be possible. It results in an unwieldy interface that confuses, with icons and diagrams that attempt showing some level of progress (question mark) but are not clickable ? This part of the interface requires an interpreter to teach you how to interface with the interface and is my biggest concern with this new feature… The heart of Certified Skill Plans really should be the fitting (or core) skills, gradually building up, with an efficient addition - stepwise - for specialization as explorer, enforcer, etc as higher level certified skill plans.
A few extra suggestions to make the skill training and planning interface both NPE and VET friendly:
(1) make the certified skill plans part of a tutorial and explain why they are the way they are, why they are mixed with core skills etc - for which you should have a separate certified skill plan btw…
(2) ditch the blue and red colored icons in the skill list. Use blue and red font instead on the skill names. That will automatically reduce the size of the list, and doesn’t lose information. Undo the redesign of the Skill Catalogue, make it more condensed and efficient (for example, a horizontal layout, and the currently existing condensed form for the skill groups with only icons)
(3) one option could be to use something akin to the Activity Tracker interface to establish a clearer overview of Certified skill plans, building up from a Core and branching out to specializations ?
tldr
Although I’m not a fan at all of the visual aspect of most interface changes of the last 5 years (icons, fonts, bloated windows, loss of color etc), there’s real potential in the skill plans IF (1) you couple them efficiently with the tutorial and especially the career agents (but you plan on ditching these ?!), in the way of explaining at least the basic reasons, where the NPE is concerned, (2) by coupling them to skill requirements on items and to mastery levels where more seasoned players are concerned, and (3) if possible a future import functionality to connect with external applications.
o7
4 Likes
you can have as many skills as you want. the 5 limit is just to milestones
1 Like
Font size is far larger, there is far more empty space and the entire thing is just more bulky not to mention the inability to functionally resize anything,
2 Likes
Three years ago, I did a presentation on Role Specialization I would hope that we could aim pilots at picking a role early, rather than late. Right now, these plans are super generic, super short, and don’t show the long term goals of them.
Multiple groups have Skill plans already, which push their pilots in the right directions. And why you don’t have a Magic 14 skill plan yet is silly.
Edit: Please please please fix the neocom bar. It needs a couple things on it by default:
- Fleet
- Contracts
- People and places
- Industry
- Corporation
2 Likes
I’ll not be wasting any more time or energy on a company that solicits feedback just to ignore it
6 Likes
The idea to have skills plans is a very good idea but my problem is more to do with the UI styling itself and the quality of it. This new UI style is starting to creep in more and more and is a bit worrying as it’s not a good design/look.
For example, if you double click the top window boarder in the ‘old’ UI rolls up the window to only display a small bar, in the new UI it maximizes the window… No window in EVE benefits from being full screen (which is also incidentally how the new Skills window opens up) and the docking function seems like an iPad OS type function. The F9 map could greatly benefit from being able to be rolled up in the way the old windows could but again, if you double click this window you get full screen…
Some other windows (‘The Agency’) that are using the new UI don’t do anything when double clicked and is just static and can’t even be resized at all. Completely inconsistent UI design.
As for the changes to Character and Skills window it’s the same mixed bag.
Character Sheet - for some reason I can hide the useful part which is the Character/Interactions/Pilot Services etc. by pressing the ‘<<’ button but really what should be hidden is the character model which has no real use unless you want to sell more vanity items perhaps. Just let us remove that needless character model and focus on the useful section.
Skills Window - The NeoCom button doesnt look great, I hope it is temporary but I would also like to see the option to ‘Remove Shortcut’ here to remove clutter on the neocom.
The window itself feels bloated with wasted space. A lot has to do with the font and there seem to be many different sizes of fonts all over the UI in general not just the Skills Window please but make it smaller and/or tied into the choice of small/medium/large font in the ‘Settings’. I’m on a 3840x1600 and it still big enough to read from across the room in the current state. The new UI treats everyone like they are vision impaired for some reason. I imagine most people are on 1080p or maybe 1440p and the big font seems out of place.
There is also inconsistency in how the sections inside the ‘Skills Window’ scale when making the window bigger/smaller. The skill group section scales vertically and horizontally (almost to a fault) while the ‘Skills’ themselves do not scale at all. If you make the window as small as possible as I imagine most people do to maximise usable screen space, then you get a mismatch of crushed ‘Skill Groups’ with bloated ‘Skills section’ and then on the right we get the ‘Training Queue’ with a completely different font i.e. the fantastic sharp old font that CCP is now trying to phase out. It just ends up looking rather… slapdash. To top it off you also get some UI element overlaps but I assume those things will also get sorted as they are very obvious but add to the unfinished look.
TL;DR is that there are fundamental problems with the new UI style/font and functionality of UI itself that end up being really negative for the great idea of allowing EVEMon functionality inside the client. The quality of this first pass is far below the mark. I hope it’s 6 months away from being pushed to Tranq but I expect it will be out in 2 weeks.
4 Likes
Ok. During futher testing, I noticed an issue with adapting skill queue to skill plans. I suggest that skill plans should be able to prioritize by moving all skills in chosen plan on the first places of queue, current system of moving skills one after another is significantly inefficient and exhausting. We should have possibility to move whole skill group over skill queue back and forth.
hey,
Interesting stuff, checking it out on sisi now. I have played over 7 years, Ill be honest and say I’ve never had a problem with the skill que, it’s been one of the more understandable parts of the game especially when I was new, but I can see how these plans could be very usefull, another one of those things that once in game you think why was this not here before eh 
Traditionaly we could sometimes point to the ship mastery for clues or a rough guide to give direction for skill plans, this could be a great idea. hope it works out.
On the subject of the ship mastery tab, isn’t this a great time to update that too? As It ties into many peoples skill plannings.
I’ve always felt the mastery of a ship should include the ship skill itself, this often comes up, not from new newbros, but players a few weeks in and gettting settled. Often the ship skills themself have significant benefits to the use of the ship, and as “Mastery” implies… well mastery… the lack of the ship skill itself in those mastery levels means it is not fully incusive. Could this be a good time to update that?
Would be fantastic to also get a golden ship aura, you can toggle on/off for reaching the mastery level V 
Currently on sisi, when you open the skill window full screen, an swap to floating, and back etc, the hud refreshes and so does the sensor overlay, is that intentional as its going to be anoying over time.
edit: the tooltips for the skills dont have the time untill trained or the traning rate (sp/min) please add those.
need to be able to fold all that (marked orange) plan stuff away please, so we can just see the training que. The sizing of those floating windows isnt great, if you make it small the training que just squashes up.
Can you make that detatchable? Like when you changed the scan window, we could detatch all the parts.
edit: total skill points is also not shown
4 Likes
This is a superior UI to
this. It is not only smaller, it also presents much more information at a glance ( number of skills and current training times on the skills, for instance, which show up in this more condenses menu but can’t be included in this bloated, space wasting new window for some reason), it does not cramp important aspects of the UI into a niche of the window, the entire window offers more options and cross-use to different related features like augmentations and jump clones.
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This is another instance of requiring useless UI clicks. Why is this left portion collapsed? Why do I have to click on another button to see the included skills? Is it possible to compare two skill plans in this menu? And even if, it would be more important to see the skills of the plans right away instead of having to click more buttons. What is the reasoning behind this useless click?
Moreover, why do I have to click on the tiny X to close the plan? Why does it not close when I click outside the hovering frame like literally anywhere else on the internet where people use this feature?
5 Likes
I was just doing something similar, in regards to screen space 
Current skill window
…more of the screen free for other stuff.
New skill window
It uses almost the entire screen to see it all effectively. (grey box areas are just dead space)
The orange area - skills are not listed alphabetically. That needs sorting or keep the list order we currently have on tq (top pic)
imho please consider moving the amount of skill you have to the top of the training que (indicated in yellow) So we can pull all that into half this window size, as I posted above.
It’s all so big!
edit: amendment
5 Likes
Will you support API/ESI to share Skill Plans via third party apps/websites?
Overall I feel quite positive about these changes. but I do have one question.
will the skill plans be able to be arranged by main and secondary attributes to allow resetting of them for time saving?
or will you be looking to remove the hideously long one year wait between respecs?
2 Likes