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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

A Quick Look At The Unified Inventory

On my home from work last night I did a little surfing of the internet.  Bioware restructuring and laying people off from its Austin studio, the home of Star Wars: The Old Republic?  Expected, but yesterday was the launch of Inferno and I wanted more news about Eve.  So after surfing both the official Eve Online forums and several botting sites, I learned that CCP had made a fatal mistake, one that would doom Eve Online to the dustbin of history.  That's right, the unified inventory system.

Anything that produces tears from botters can't be all bad, so I decided to wait to unsubscribe from Eve until after I had actually logged in and seen the carnage that CCP's UI designers had wrecked on the game.  I know, I'm a bad person for not trusting what is said by players on the official forums.  I blame CCP for making me paranoid and distrustful of other Eve players.

Anyway, I logged in and sure enough, the buttons for both my ship inventory and my corporate hanger were missing.  I was robbed!  Well, no.  When I opened up the station inventory, I could see all of my ships and contents of my corporation hanger there.  The inventory now looks like Windows Explorer, except cooler because it has Eve stuff in it.  I can work with that.

Once I figured out how to switch ships, I tested out what happens to the inventory after you undock and redock.  A lot of the OCR bots require that the inventory stay open in the exact place.  After my little experiment I discovered why botters were crying so much.  Upon redocking, the inventory is open to view your ship hanger, not the station hanger.   I haven't actually run a bot in Eve, but from the tears I read I guess that type of behavior broke bots and required updated bot software.  But not a problem for me.  All I had to do is click on the station hanger entry.  An extra click gets me tears for a day or two?  I can live with that.

One thing I was concerned about is how the system would act when I picked up my planetary interaction products from custom houses when I was carrying giant secure containers.  I'll use GSCs to expand my cargo capacity so I can do things like fit a damage control unit and nanofiber internal structures.  So I made a quick trip to one of my colonies and discovered that I prefer the new unified inventory system over the old one.  I like the fact that I can just click on each cargo container to see what is in it and then drag and drop my product into it like I'm used to.  I was surprised how easy it was, especially after reading how much extra clicking is supposedly required with the new system.

The feature that made me happiest is the filtering options.  I played around and made filters for blueprints and T2 items.  Up until now I was using my corporation hangers to keep my objects sorted.  Now I don't have to do that.

So after actually looking at the feature, I will have to respectfully disagree with all the players who said the feature is a disaster.  I like it.  So I guess I won't unsubscribe after all

7 comments:

  1. It is quite a bit different, and it'll take some getting used to. However its an improvement over the old method. My only wish is that it would only show pos modules in range and not all of them. Maybe there is a setting for that I haven't found yet.

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  2. Yeah, I messed around with the unified inventory a bit last night.. and I have to agree with you. It's really nice.

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  3. In theory it looks like it's gonna be nice. I haven't used it much but when you're working out of a POS it's a bit of a nightmare. It shows every single container in space even if they're aren't in range.

    At my POS it shows 4 SMAs, a CHA, an X-Large Assmebly array, 2 Mobile labs, a silo, 2 bio silos, a polymer reactor, another assembly array, and then 18 different lasers.

    So that's 32 things including my ship. Which makes it a bit more difficult to navigate. Now I didn't do much last night apart from refill the reactor so I'm not sure how it'll work out in the long run but my initial impression was not a good one.

    If they could change the filter to only show What's in range that could make a huge difference.

    And I'm also waiting to see how salvaging a quad escalation is going to work as well.

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    1. Those problems will be solved soon (not tm). Apparently you will be able to see modules in/out range (or filter), as well as renmame them (plus grouping of module groups).

      So for POS operators this will soon become a boon, instead of a nightmare.

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  4. Wormhole Ninja, look at the latest dev post. You will very soon get grouped POS modules and the ability to rename them (everywhere!).

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  5. Very good that you don't unsub. I really like your bot tear posts :)

    I might start using GSCs again in haulers and to put stuff into them you don't need to open them. Just draging on the tree entry is enough.

    It has some flaws and bugs but it is a good system leading into the right direction. A bit of smothing, bugfixing and iterating and it will be best feature for UI :)

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  6. I never used bots and i wont use.
    But this Unified Inventory it's a crap horrible nightmare.
    Unusable,not user friendly and hard to handling. A CCP mistake.

    Enough to read this:

    "CCP Punkturis wrote:

    I was working on War Dec and Kill Reports this release - hope you like that stuff!

    WolfSchwarzMond answer:

    This was on the 1st page of the EVE Online: Inferno - Feedback thread. Post number 10. This tells me that CCP knew we'd hate this new Inventory. There a is Dev going "Don't blame me. I was working on something else.!"

    So after 25 pages here and 50 pages in the Feedback Thread, 90% of them saying this thing is "CRAP" or "junk" or "Stupid" or that is just "SUX" the question is simple. Why can't CCP learn from it's own mistakes? We've been here before......]

    "Red flags raised by very smart people both at CCP and in the community went unheeded because of my stubborn refusal to allow adversity to gain purchase on our plans." -Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO

    And so CCP have repeated the same mistake. Making a change, testing it, getting feeback from players that said "THIS SUCKS" then ramming it down the player's collective throats anyway.

    "The greatest lesson for me is the realization that EVE belongs to you, and we at CCP are just the hosts of your experience." -Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO

    Well Sir, this was a lesson you didn't learn. You are proving it. The new inventory has made Looting from Wrecks, Player Owned Station operations, Jetcan Mining, Corporate Hanger Ops, and dealing with large amounts of items into a tedious, time wasting, torture sessions. The new system lags. It in some cases makes it harder to find things. It makes you repeat the same actions over and over and over where before it was once. Your people were told time and again during Sisi testing that this change was not a good idea, but you did it anyway. Again....

    I would humbly suggest that you either Rollback this change or make it optional as you did with the whole Captain's Quarters fiasco. Let us not take this latest lack of good judgement and turn it into International news.
    Prove to us you can learn from your mistakes. And stop repeating them.

    Quotes taken from here http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=2672"

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