CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
1914
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Posted - 2013.05.27 16:19:00 -
[1] - Quote
Hey everyone,
I've been meaning to catch up with this thread for a while, but I went on vacation for a week the day after it was posted, and didn't manage to make time last week to sit down and have a nice long read 
What's on SiSi now is (unsurprisingly) pretty close to being final, and it's been nice to see reading through this thread that at least some of the initial concerns have been resolved. Some of those we even planned to do all along  The one remaining substantial change is that, as Masterplan just mentioned, we're always initially setting the "signal strength %" in the tooltip to either 0% (signatures) or 100% (anomalies).
This achieves two things. Firstly, we remove the confusion caused by the initial probe scan on higher-strength sites invariably resulting in a signal strength decrease, which is ugly and unintuitive. Secondly, it allows us to claw back some of the efficiency gains inherent in the new system.
Clearly, this makes the sort of DSP look-up tables that advanced explorers are used to somewhat more difficult to leverage, as there's no longer a handily-exposed variable for this (the information can still be largely derived from the [clamped] range deviation visible in the tooltip, but you'll have to do a bit of math in your head to figure it out). The new "spread formation" allows this to be somewhat mitigated by acting as a poor man's DSP, but it's nevertheless a reduction in available information at this specific stage of the process. Given the efficiency gains elsewhere, though, we're of the belief that this shouldn't, in practice significantly disadvantage probers relative to the current TQ system.
There are some elements of the feedback to date that we're not currently planning to address.
The first is the impact on wormhole intel. Obviously this is a change to the status quo, but it's still not obviously a particularly destructive one. The intel that this system provides can already be obtained by launching a bunch of probes and regularly mashing "scan", and we're not huge fans of systems that require tedious and repetitive manual busy work (yes, the d-scanner, we know), so on the face of it we regard this as a straight-up improvement. We are of course waiting to see how this pans out in practice, and if it ends up making wormhole space materially less interesting, we'll make changes. We'd like to give the more creative members of the community the chance to play around with it in a live environment before jumping the gun, though.
The second is the jump-in scan and lack of options surrounding it. There'll hopefully be a blog on this feature soon that goes into more detail, but a major part of the feature brief was to find a way to make exploration possibilities more naturally visible to players of all ages (including new ones, obviously). The jump-in scan is one of the main ways we're hoping to meet that goal, by opening a permanent window into the hidden world of EVE. We're also, as a general goal, trying to gently cut back on the number of options that we expose in the client, both because it allows us to spend our "user complexity budget" more efficiently and because it's expensive in terms of development and maintenance. Our goal, rather, is to tune and target the jump-in scan so that it becomes a natural part of the jump sequence, rather than some outlandish imposition. We're going to be evaluating its intrusiveness on an ongoing basis both prior to and after release, to try and ensure that we hit that goal.
(Frellicus is also trying to find time to make the always-on sweep more intermittent, but it's not clear yet whether that'll make it in prior to release.)
Finally, there's obviously a lot of other things that seem like reasonable fits to show up in the overlay (bookmarks, mission locations, the directional scanner...), and we have sketch plans for various extensions to the feature in the future that may or may not see the light of day. If it gets expanded significantly we may even need to invest in some more robust filtering options.
If anyone has any outstanding questions not covered here, please ask
-Greyscale |