Just one click away | EVE Online

Just one click away

2009-08-03 - By CCP Murinae

One of the things our sprint team is tackling is player corporations. EVE is a social game, and the best way to get people involved is through player corporations. So we want to make the corporation interface more intuitive, make it more functional for the people who use it and remove the confusing data overload for the people who don't. Corporation advertisments, recruitment, application... the whole process should be made better!  Rearrange the tabs to bring the most relevent information to the foreground, and also filter that data based on roles so you don‘t have to wade through information that‘s not relevent! Yarrr!

Can we do it within a sprint? Errrr...uh...no, not realistically. Yet we realized that if we tried to tackle the whole feature regardless, we could get bogged down after six months of developement and might end up with a jumbled mess of half-completed functionality, the very thing that the two-week sprint developement process is designed to avoid! This called for changing our plans into bite-sized pieces of functionality that we could tackle in stages.

Ok, then, what are we trying to do? Our focus here at Team Fibonacci is the New Player Experience.  By focusing on that, we scaled down the story to focus on the new player. From that perspective, it was obvious: make a better way to search for potential corporations and apply to them. Changing the way a player searched for a potential corporation is a lot more complex than we originally envisioned, so, in the mean time, we work on improving how players apply to a corporation.

We didn't quite know how this should be done. Right off we all felt that when you're trying to join a corporation, you shouldn't have to fly half-way across the cluster just to hand in your CV. It is 1) a waste of time, 2) boring, and 3) not inviting.  Solution: make it possible for someone to apply to a corporation when they‘re not at the corporation's office. Ok, good start... but how?

Could it really be this simple? Apparently, this one was. Brilliant!

By adding an "apply to join" button to the info window for a player corporation, it allows players to apply to a corporation without having to visit their corp office in specific stations. It's like one-stop shopping: you browse for a player corporation, look over their information, and the button to apply is already right there!  It has the same functionality as the in-station button, but you don't have to fly all the way to visit that particular corporation's office. You still do have to be in a station, though; no applying to corporations from the vacuum of space. This doesn't remove the function of the old "apply to join" button in the stations, so if you see their office listed, you can still apply from there.

Now back to the rest of the corporation management facelift. Time to break it down so we can tackle the whole feature as many, many mini-features. If only all improvements could be as simple as "just add a button"...

Cheers!