Here is the best and most concise report I can do without resorting to excessive graphical explanations c:

Reasons why engine-scaling the old icons wasn't so bad:

• Crosses and brackets do not have curves, meaning much less apparent blur when scaling.
• Curved icons were mostly circle based, meaning that scaling wasn't so bad either, as it retained the same base shape.

New Icon BENEFITS:

• Ability to separate frigate from destroyer and Cruiser from Battlecruiser.
• Noticing Capital ship differences by icon.
• Adding icons to things that previously had none.

New Icon FLAWS:

• Scaling is obviously terrible because icons are so detailed now.
• You do not use enough icon space on the side for bigger ship icons and you do not keep consistent with the "upgrading triangle / arrow " theme. The distinction is not enough. Especially not when you start scaling things.
• There are too many icons which barely look different from another. Examples: Batteries. Drones. Containers. One Example to change: put extra icons on batteries elsewhere for better distinction. turret: right. Missile: left. Navigation Ewar: bottom. other Ewar: top.
• You relied too much on half-transparent fills for NPC entities, which is not a good distinction, especially not when scaled. Tiny abstracts like that are an all or nothing thing. A better choice would have been to increase line strength to fill icons more by 1px, either for NPC or player entities, or completely fill one type out. Same with sun and planet distinction. Even at 100% scaling, the rays don't matter. Old: Sun was fully white circle, Planet an empty circle.
• Red-blind people cannot rely on a shape distinction between NPC and player ships any more. The minor transparent fill is not enough.

Design Choice MISTAKES:

• You have not been consistent with the themes.
• You put too much detail where it was not needed. Examples: Who needs to know if it was a player or NPC wreck? Who needs to know the exact difference between all those containers? This is what the "type" column is for.
• You do not use enough "fills" in your geometries, and your base shape variety is poor.
• You don't use asymmetry properly and rely too much on (bi-)symmetrical icons.
• You have re-used existing shapes which were a common sight for something completely different that was common too. I don't understand why you have been doing that, when you avoided the uses of crosses and brackets completely.
• There are only two diamond shaped things now, which are carriers and asteroids. This means the difference between containers and batteries and other small square / rectangular things has become too muddy.
• If containers are squares, why does a wreck with loot have not a square on top of it? Why did you even go away from a filled wreck having loot? That was perfect.
• A mobile depot should have more similarity with a storage-type icon. In this case square with horizontal "appendages". Or, when reverting, diamond with appendages.
• Icon association is lacking. Example: Asteroid belts should look like BELTS (horizontal icon emphasis) and not clusters of things.

Development MISTAKES:

• You knew the engine scaling limitation and did nothing about it. It would have been better to design for 90% first, and then craft the other 3 sets by hand to remain crisp and avoid blur. If that is not possible, then you needed to check why it wasn't. Is the overview legacy code? Then you should have fixed that first, having more flexibility for the future. I'm not getting tired of posting this poopy little mockup that outsources targeting information and colour tags to the sides of the icon.
• You have not responded to the feedback from months ago with enough information (this is a general problem, by the way). You did not explain to us well enough why certain suggestions or other things cannot be done. You did not provide good enough arguments some things should be kept as planned. You did not talk to us about other obstacles you have to face. The more constructive interaction and knowledge we have from your side, the better we can adapt our suggestions.

Untapped potential of OLD ICONS:
Most shapes were bi-symmetrical. A half of Gö+ is Göñ and half of that is Göÿ
This allowed for easy memorization, but they also could use the same base icon three times for three different things, as demonstrated. You could even cut the Gö+ Icon in 8 different ways, for a total of 9 symbols of one base shape.
Add to that different lengths of the bars. You only used were three different sizes of crosses. If each of those sizes would have been used to it's fullest potential, that would mean you had 27 different possibilities to chose from, excluding the mixes.

I understand the bottom right corner often has a colour tag which cuts down the available possibilities. You never saw the bottom right player ship bracket.
However, you have missed two things: Line thickness and extras inside. A destroyer could have had the same bracket size as a frigate, but the lines would be twice as thick, meaning 2 pixels.
Or, you could have "raised" the top and bottom brackets, doing the reverse you did with the industrials, which "widened" the left and right brackets". The same "raise" would work with old NPC crosses. Or you could have added extras INSIDE brackets.

I always wondered why you never did that.


"Just don't expect any knee-jerk reactions from us so soon."
Can I ask about improving opportunities then? It has been 6 weeks :c