Hey, thanks for sharing your experience. And keeping in mind color blindness :) I agree NPC distinction is rather nuanced with the new icon set - NPC icons have a faint inner fill compared to players ships.

We also color hostile NPCs red by default, but we don't allow players to change this, or set any color for the icons themselves besides background and colortags.

Anyone else think a custom "icon color" would be a good option to expose to aid in situational awareness?

That is nonsense. There were blogs, and the new icons were around long enough on Singularity. There was no "sneaking in". Besides, some players like the new icons -- I do -- so don't assume you speak for everybody.

It would have been better to use lettering instead of icons in the overview. You can fit two letters into that small space pretty elegantly. I'm not sure if I already suggested this in the original icons thread so apologies if that's the case.

Ships (always in capitals):
F
D
C
BC
BS
DR
CA
SC
T
CD (combat drone)
ED (ewar drone)

Celestials (always lower case):
s
p
m
ab
co
cf

The lettering instead of icons would allow for more or less instant recognition of what the overview entry is.

Straight out no.

Veteran: "Since we are in a fleet, and you're in a small ship, you need to shoot at the enemy frigates first"
Newbie: "Just to be sure, frigates are the small triangles?"
Veteran: "No, they are small crosses."
Newbie: "But I never saw small crosses on the overview?"

Uh, no. Newbies will have a sensible default overview provided to them either by the game, or an overview pack from their veteran FC and alliance. Obviously.

Any guide, any screenshot, ... anything really, with those kind of options are going to be a really hard thing to take in.
Deal with it. This is too important to have literally everyone play exactly the way you think they should

Please do not fall down into being self-righteous. It is more important to get a set of icons straight than developing a multitude of them, which takes even longer
But for the sake of the argument, the most important thing for CCP is our money, and many of the recent changes have not only been frustrating the old playerbase, but also have done a horrible job with getting new players to the game.
So if you want to start weighing importance of things? Opportunities and new player experience should be top priority right now, since it is utterly broken and in the worst state of existence since 2007. If you don't keep new players, and continue losing old ones, then that doesn't bode well for any of us.

Oh you would be surprised of some of our new players. But that is the joy of being in a starter corporation, and seeing what is happening there day-in and day-out, right? c:

But sure, I agree my example was not one of the best, but it was one in the realm of possibility. Refer to the post before that where I am making a lot more objective conclusions on the subject of icons c:

I have make bold one small detail you have completely missed reading his post. He has 'COLORED' all the players.

So now we NEED to use SPECIAL settings to OVERCOME unneeded change IGNORING new UI ideology: "colors are not needed" (look at Neocom).

You really think it is ok?

Yes, even though both use different systems (vector based versus fixed pixel based), in both cases it is better to expand than contract. But the issue here is a bit more delicate due to the tiny resolution. Even if this was a vector based system, we would still suffer from blurred edges because the differences simply don't fit on the pixels on the screen properly. This is why hand-crafted icons for each scale are inevitable in the long run.

Well, the icons don't look good upscaled either. The answer most likely is; their recorded demographics told them that the majority of players use 100% UI scale.
Maybe less nice people would say they used the majority of what devs use in the office. I prefer thinking the statistical demographic thing, which is also the default for players to start the game with.

Well after a few small-gang engagements, I can confirm that the new symbols are great at quickly distinguishing between ship sizes. I can imagine this being even more useful for newer players that are unaware of the various ships in EvE. It's a million times more useful than the previous method, which I just ignored and focused solely on the type of vessel. Nice work CCP!!!

I always enjoy how every. single. patch. is followed with a wave of revulsion. How is it that EvE players are the least adaptable to change?

My only question is why the original symbols that were floated in the dev blog here weren't used. They were a lot cooler, and I'm sure would have prompted (slightly) less disagreement. Perhaps you should try to change to them?

That's not true. We're definitely still keeping tabs on this thread and assessing the situation. Just don't expect any knee-jerk reactions from us so soon. For now keep the feedback coming, keep it constructive. Thanks

Yes, it's subjective, and it comes from someone who has been enjoying space PvP for 5 years, every other day or so. Have you?

In order to make it, I didn't look at pictures, I warped into a PvP heavy grid on Sisi, where all the things were moving, stopping, disappearing and appearing again. I imagined I was trying to report it in a live fleet on TQ. I was terrified by the amount of different shaped which basically mean the same. 8 shapes for ships, 8 shapes for drones, plus wrecks. Sixteen odd shapes to recognize against two (!) with old brackets, only to make a count of ships and whether they have drones out or not. Where's clarity in that?

So you are saying you had to use the type column in the overview. Well you should have, because the idea that you can put all the tactically relevant information into an icon is silly.

But make the NPC ships distinguishable by something other than colour. Colour AND something else fine, but not colour alone. Up/down arrows could work, I'd have to see it in-client to know.

Instead of forcing me to repeat myself, why don't you go back and read my post more slowly.

Also, you haven't the slightest idea what my brain is or isn't capable of. Colour blindness isn't the only disability that these UI changes need to be sympathetic to, those like me with learning difficulties would also like the odd consideration.

The open brackets were an ideal class of icons because they were not only internally consistent as demarcating ships in space, they were also very different and thus distinguishable from any other class of icons. In order to create greater distinction between ship class icons and provide closed line icons, you increased the similarity of ships in space to virtually every other item in space (such as FW outpost, for example). So to recognize that something in space is a ship rather than some other object has become more rather than less difficult. So whereas before I might have had the problem to distinguish a destroyer from a T3 cruiser, I now have the problem to distinguish a ship from a FW outpost, a container from a customs office, etc.