8 June 2015

New Icons

Just about a week ago the new overview icons landed on Tranquillity. With any change to the EVE client there tends to be a lot of bitching and whining and these new icons were no different. I caught a bunch of it on release day from our alliance Jabber server and thought nothing much about it. I just filed it under the same category I file most posts from the official eve-o forums, namely 'waa-waa-somthing-changed'. Let's face it, online gamers like to bitch a lot.

Later last week I logged on to be told to get myself into some dps quickly as there were a trio of Myrmidons running sites in our 3a1. A little bit of questioning later and it turned out there had been some to-and-fro with the guys running sites. We fully expected a trap but the only way to be sure it's a trap is to spring it. Mustering the few people we could at a relatively early time for us we went in. Comically, we warped to the wrong bookmark for their MTU at the first attempt. We then re-warped as a single group and landed in the right place on the second attempt.

As I landed on grid I was looking for the ships to call targets on and I couldn't see any. I knew they were there but I had no idea I relied so much on the overview icons to distinguish between things. In my head I thought I used the names column. Eventually I picked out a name and called primary on the basis that was all I could see. Our scout on the gate counted in the six ships which jumped in to spring the trap on us and when we realised we wouldn't even get a single kill we did our best to leave the field. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

It was around about now I joined the holy-shit-these-new-icons-suck club. I am still sure a large part of the problem was lack of familiarity but I also now know a huge part is that I run my UI at 90%. Switching to 100% scaling I could see the icons much clearer and actually distinguish between different ones. OMG, CCP, did you even test this with UI scaling?

And yes, I do feel bad for asking that question.

3 comments:

  1. And our group ran C5's last night and EVERYBODY was all in all very happy with the new icons... I run 3 screens, laptop 17" and x2 22"s and all are at 100% and I not only have no issues with telling things apart on either size now, it is hands down better IMHO.

    Like you I am good at filing forum rage and blog tears under 'waa-waa-somthing-changed'... but this is getting a little ridic. I can USE what I see on the screen so much more now... I didn't use the OV to determine whatinhellisthat once last night...

    I swear I just don't get people sumtimes...

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  2. Try it on 90% and tell me they even considered people who want to see more than tables and boxes...

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  3. Yeah, I can't get the hang of these icons. Not been online that much so its not been an issue but I think they are needlessly complicated. Do I really need to visualize between all different drones in a firefight? I personally the entire reason for changing the icons was misguided - even if the icons are ok.

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