These two ideas (plus one I was forgetting) sit on a text file for a lot of time. They aren’t anything impressive, just two “quality of life” features that I believe would improve the game and be well accepted by all the players. They don’t add content or depth, but I believe they shouldn’t be too complex to implement and would be used extensively by everyone, instead of just a minor feature than noone will ever use much.

Here are my thoughts:

(ship model browser)
– One of the fundamental problems I think the game has and that contributes to make the accessibility hard is about the presentation. Often the game is hard to figure out because its structure is not well presented. I’m not saying that the structure should be changed, I’m just saying that it could use a better presentation. The first idea is a tiny step going in that direction and it comes directly from the frustration I had in the game. The icons of the ships when you delve informations from the market really don’t do justice to the models. They aren’t good enough to give you an idea of the ship you are browsing. Often the icons aren’t even centered and oriented properly and it’s simply impossible to understand the scale. This makes all the ships really hard to recognize at the first glance.

The idea (but it would be only the first part) would be to add an option to the window with the detailed informations of a ship. A button that you can click and that would open a window working like a “3D model browser”. You could then see the ship, rotate it and figure out its scale (shown in a corner). This would help not only to see what you are buying and going to fly, but it will also accustom the new players to the different ships in the game, helping them to recognize them instead of just stare at counterintuitive numbers. Having a precise idea of the scale would already help to compare the role and purpose of each ship.

(more accurate graphical combat representation)
– The second idea is one I already hinted (at the end). Eve doesn’t feel that different from those browser-based managment games (here’s one) and could really use better its graphical possibilities. Right now it’s mostly an evolved interface and all the gameplay pivots around it more than the simulation itself. I already wrote at length about moving past the interface for a better immersion. In this case the “technicisms” are part of the setting and the type of game, but there’s still some space to make the graphic reflect what is actually going on.

The graphic representation seems rather rudimental, when it comes to combat. Sometimes it is out of synch and I’ve seen missiles just vanish in the space. All these quirks aren’t really problems because what you see is only an approximate representation of what is going on with the numbers. You react to these numbers, and elements of the interface, not to the action on screen iself. This could hardly change without a complete redesign of the game. But even here a better presentation could do wonders. For example, it is already known that if you shoot a tiny missles to a Titan (those HUGE ships) the impact will make the ship shake violently. This because the graphic representation is hardcoded: for every missile you shoot, the missiles will land and shake that ship with a strong explosion. The client knows only one pattern and repeats it in every situation. It doesn’t factor anything else, like the damage, size of the ship or even a ‘miss’. The same for the turrets, you fire them and they display their effect. This effect is NOT a representation of what is going on.

The graphical combat just doesn’t recognize a difference in damage and doesn’t even distinguish between a ‘hit’ or a ‘miss’. This is why I’d like to see some more accuracy implemented that could also be helpful to understand what is going on. In Eve the turret mechanics are rather complex and the possibility to hit while invulnerable to enemy attacks is a viable and absolutely normal tactic. The point is that with this type of graphical representation you’ll still see your ship being hit by the lasers and shaken violently by missiles. Even if those lasers aren’t even hitting you and those missles doing zero damage.

So what I’d like to see is an implementation of the “misses”, so that I could clearly see that the laser is missing my ship instead of watching it hit, while the combat log says it missed. And also the feedback tuned and scaled accordingly based on the damage. For example making the ship not move if the missile isn’t doing any damage, or shake it heavily in the case it is getting almost one-shotted (concretely it would be about matching and scaling the graphical effect with a % calculation on the damage done to a ship).

Of course this would require some coding on the client but I believe it’s definitely needed and would be another little step forward for the game that I believe noone would criticize or rant about.

(make the right click menu sticky)
– The right click menu is what I use the most to interact with the game. It’s rather small but I wouldn’t like to have it changed (and it already was with the last patch). Still it’s rather frustrating when you have to navigate through multiple sub-menus, for example to do a warp or, even worst, in the heat of combat, then move the pointer slightly outside it and lose the selection, so that you have to navigate again through all the nested menus from the start.

The idea here is rather simple. Right click to open the menu (as right now) then left click on a sub-menu to make it ‘sticky’ so that you don’t lose the selection if you move the mouse pointer away, at least if you don’t click again to select something else. That’s all. I believe it could really make the navigation of the nested menus easier and more precise, in particular where you are trying to issue a command during combat and continue to lose focus because you are trying to do it too quickly.

I think this feature could have saved my ass in the game a couple of times if it was implemented.

NOTE: The first idea ties to what I wrote here. In particular about a reorganization of the ships to make the classes more defined and understandable. Again this doesn’t mean that I would like to see the statistics of those ships changed. It’s still about the presentation, not the content.