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
