Littlethings4lyfe | EVE Online

Littlethings4lyfe

2011-05-17 - By CCP Soundwave

It’s time for more little things!

Actually, that’s not entirely true; they aren’t all little this time around. We ended up doing some larger changes we felt would have a greater impact on a higher number of people. Some of these changes just made too much sense to pass over and should positively impact the EVE experience considerably for a lot of people. Anyway, enough of me rambling, here are the changes:

  • There is now a single history tab in the fleet finder with a filter. This makes me happy because it’s much better usability, but sad because we’ll probably not win the world cup of number of unnecessary tabs in a single feature. Sadface.

  • Probes now scale around their center if you drag them while holding down “alt”. This is another victory in the war on clicks, and should make the experience less annoying.

  • BPOs and BPCs now look different. BPCs are lighter and look a little more like copies (it’s because they’re copies you see? Hahaha it’s so clever). We put this change in because it makes more sense than anything I’ve ever seen and should probably just have been like this from the beginning.

  • We’ve made some changes to the onboard scanner (not the directional scanner). The range has been increased and the duration has been lowered. Basically this is to segment exploration into an easy and accessible part (anomalies) and a more complex part (signatures/anomalies). Simple exploration won’t require probes, but complex exploration will. This is literally the push button, receive bacon change.

  • Attribute ID’s have been simplified in some instances. There are a few of these and I can’t outline all of them, but it basically involves changing some text to plain language. So instead of you seeing 1 and 0 as a true/false indicator, it actually says true and false now. In other places, like skills, we’ve made them more descriptive. In the sovereignty skill for example, the corp member bonus now has a + before the number, so it’s clear that it’s an addition, and not the total.

  • We’ve removed the landing-page on the fleet finder. When you open fleets, you’ll be taken straight to the finder itself. Now with improved better!

  • The show info page won’t show another players standing to EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE. From now on, it will only display standings relevant to you. This basically limits your ability to be a creepy stalker that keeps an eye on other people’s standings to random agents. It also simplifies the UI.

  • When you try to start a manufacturing job but don’t have the required materials, the window tosses you back to square one. It’s now possible to add the materials to the relevant input location (such as a hangar) and update the screen. Hopefully this will make industry 7% less annoying.

  • Automatic re-setting of a scroll position is the devil, and it no longer happens in the fleet view. When people inevitably get tired of you screaming at them on EVE-voice, at least the UI won’t continually re-set when they ragequit. It will still move slightly, but it shouldn’t be functionally disruptive like it is today.

  • Agent quality has been removed. All agents will have a barrier of entry set at -20, and a payout ratio of +20. Hopefully this will let people live where they want, instead of crowding into Motsu. On a sidenote, hundreds of agents rejoice at the thought of their life finally having meaning.

  • Agent divisions have been simplified. Turns out asking for a combat mission and receiving a mining mission annoyed people, who would have thought? Instead, each division will give a single type of mission, so you actually get what you ask for.

  • Bookmarks can now be added to overview. Hopefully this should allow you to get to your safespots quicker so you can mock people in local from relative safety. Edit that will make everyone including myself very sad: We're going to have to move this back to the patch after this one. It won't be in a good enough state to release Thursday. The good news is that we're fixing it right now and it will go in the first second release after this one.

That’s it for now. Toodles,

Soundwave