Brisc stated that he’d only seen 3 people complain about eye strain. He later admitted that number was almost 100. Being generous, I’d say there’s been easily 100+ people making such complaints.
Similarly, there are several hundred people who have voiced their opinions about issues with photon across the pre-existing photon beta testing topic and this one. We’ve also been told (here and elsewhere) that the active playerbase in EVE is around 100,000 users, so that gives us some useful numbers to work with.
It’s generally considered a sensible rule of thumb that more than 95% of users with problems don’t actually complain. When you get a complaint, especially one with multiple users making the same complaint, you can realistically assume that at least 20x as many people are actually having the problem in question (it’s often claimed to be as high as 30x).
This means that the 0.1% of the community complaining about eye strain represents more than 2% of the community actually being affected in such ways. And that’s ONLY counting the people complaining publicly, not all people making complaints, and public complaints are a significant minority of all complaints made about any product. You’re much more likely to get complaints through direct contact than public forums. So I think it’s safe to say there’s a significant probability of photon being physically uncomfortable to use for over 5% of the playerbase.
While that’s still a small minority of people, that’s a HUGE portion of a game’s community to be causing harm to with your game. It’s well beyond the point where taking steps to fix it is appropriate. Of course, even the 0.1% of the active playerbase who have spoken up in the forums specifically citing issues with eye strain are more than the limit I’d consider reasonable to dismiss as too small a minority to worry about.
I get that there are problems with back end and front end being tied together, and with the photon UI being necessary for the devs to be able to move forward with new features and game content. I’m not going to pretend those issues aren’t factors to consider here. But so is the literal physical health of players in addition to the more game-related concept of the health of the playerbase. Pushing 2 or 3 players away from a big tight-knit corp because the UI is causing them harm, is likely to make more than just the directly-affected players quit or reduce their playtime (and often also spending). Pushing players out of the game by pushing things that aren’t harmful in such an extreme sense, but impair playability or enjoyment, will often push more players out than just the ones upset by the change. Because this game is a social game, it relies on groups of players, and if someone in a strongly-connected group leaves, they’ll often take others with them.
And on this point, I think it’s important to clarify something relevant to more than just this comment. There is a very distinct diffrence between something being “objectively” bad (which many elements of the photon UI’s design are) and having “universally” negative impact (which nothing in photon does). Something being universally seen as bad isn’t the same as it being objectively bad. There are demonstrable facts about UI design for which many of the complaints about photon are based on objective facts about the UI. These complaints are objective, not subjective, and they hold the weight of objectivity. There are complaints about design elements in photon which can be objectively proven to be bad design from a medical standpoint because they disregard known facts about how the human eye operates, and about colour theory and other factors which tie into readability and accessibility of information. There are objecive facts about information density and how to present information in a compact manner which the old UI was better at respecting than photon is, and this is why there are so many complaints about the lack of information in photon compared with the old UI.
The photon UI is getting much closer to being ready for the removal of the opt out functionality. It’s close enough that, as I’ve said elsewhere, if they do bring back the ability to opt out (and I remain hopeful that they will), I won’t be opting out any more. But denying that there are objective reasons to call the new UI worse than the old one is at best unreasonably dismissive, and potentially rises to willful ignorance or worse. Dismissing these complaints isn’t appropriate, and trying to deny their basis in fact is stupid and actively harms any claims you might make going forward.
