Robdon
Darkwave Technologies
Initiative Mercenaries
   |
Posted - 2010.12.28 11:29:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: CCP Atlas
Originally by: Catari Taga
Good changes. Re private contracts: I don't see why you would want to keep 2 different interfaces around, that just makes no sense. Sounds like code could be optimized to point to the same backend and client code for both types of contracts instead of currently apparently using separate code bases.
That is a good observation, but when looking at the usage patterns we found that treating the two types of contract availabilities separate gives us a lot of benefit.
The public and private contracts are two very different beasts with different needs and optimization opportunities. For example, most public contract searches are made from a single place, Jita. In contracts, private contract searches are made throughout the cosmos. Public contract searches are most often made on a particular category, group or type, whereas private searches are almost exclusively done on 'show me all the contracts for me/corp/alliance' basis. From the metrics gathered from TQ it seems like the advanced search capabilities of the new search would hardly be used at all for private contracts.
So these are very different usecases. I don't think people would appreciate having to search for private courier contracts and private item exchange/auction separately as an example, which is something that is a pretty big part of the public contracts search.
There are more private contracts than public ones, but within each search 'realm' (particular alliance, person, corp) there are only a handful of outstanding contracts at any one time. In almost all cases all your contracts will fit on a single 100 entry page. Just using the new search for public contracts allowed us to take some important short-cuts and use resource quotas we could not have otherwise.
We will probably give the old interface a little make-over when it's transitioned to a 'private contracts' tab. We'll bring over what we can from the public contracts search.
Maybe we're wrong and maybe the new search is very useful for private contracts. Let us know! :
Hi,
All looks good, but I really think that there should only be 1 'type' of contract search.
It should be a standard interface for contracts, not 2 different types. Thats just bad UI design.
We have enough different types of UI design in Eve over all the areas and windows, please don't increase the count :(
Whatever 'optimisations' you need to do depending on the 'type' should be irrelevant to the user and done in the background.
Rob.
|