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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

New Tool Tips

I listened to BigCountry's show on EVE Radio last night and heard Dirk MacGirk admit to getting a little "bitter vet" since he's started reading the EVE Online forums.  Well, duh!  Reading any game's forums is a bad thing to do because they are generally so toxic. I usually tell players not to visit any forum.  Yet, I do it anyway.

The latest outrage is the new set of tool tips released yesterday.  Reading the posts, this change was the worst thing since the Star Wars: Galaxies NGE (although not as bad as UO's Trammel) and would result in players shooting monuments in Jita in a few days at the latest.  Given the outrage on the official forums, I figured that the new tool tips were causing troubles for OCR bots. Visiting the H-Bot forums showed I was right...

13 May 2014
olaf:  "there is a prob when ship is aligning to bm and new baloon tooltip show with speed ..."

H-BOT (forum admin):  "Attention! The new baloon [sic] tooltip shown when the mouse hovers an item in overview can cover crucial parts of your drones window and cause problems to H-Bot (if drones window is positioned on the left of your overview). Leave some space between drones and overview to avoid such problems." 

Causes Bots Problems

I'm gathering that the last bit of advice is also useful for real players to know.  I would not have run into the issue, though, because I've moved everything away from the left of the overview so the icons for the ships I've targeted will show up there instead.

When I got home, I had a full night ahead of me as I had neglected my industry and needed to catch up.  I'm happy to report that I didn't notice any new tool tips getting in the way of creating manufacturing jobs, renewing the gathering on my planetary interaction colonies, gathering the materials from the customs offices, transporting my goods into Bosena, or creating sell orders.

I'll admit I did not run any data or relic sites last night, but that was only because, due to bad luck, I only scanned down wormholes and combat sites.  I would have run the combat sites, but the time was getting late and there were neutrals in system.  They were faction warfare dudes, so where I would have risked a Cheetah in a data site or a Procurer in a belt, I wasn't about to risk a Cyclone in a DED site.  Why tempt anyone?

Tool Tip Combined With The Radial Menu

One thing I was a bit concerned about was groups of celestial objects.  The ones that appear so close together in space that they stack.  After a brief search I found a cluster and was pleasantly surprised.  Not only are the letters easier to read (no more text getting washed out by the sun) but I now have a wider area to place my cursor in order to pull up the radial menu.  Before, I had to click on the icon.  Now, I can select anywhere along the object's line.  Very cool addition.

I still need to find a data or relic site to run and mine in a belt, but given what I've seen so far, I don't expect to have any issues.  I might even travel to high sec just to run a level 4 security mission (ugh!) just to exhaust all possibilities of problems.  Sometimes people complain just to complain.  Others will complain anytime something changes.  But for now, I have nothing to complain about and some things to like.  Looks like the feature is a win for me.

5 comments:

  1. Im digging the new feature as well. Way to go CCP!

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  2. I agree that the change is good... Except I DID manage to do a Data Site today.

    I'm sad to report that it does indeed make it harder to run a site. The static tooltip, with its "wider area to place my cursor", means choosing the correct can is extremely difficult. Two cans, right next to each other, are very difficult to differentiate with the tooltip in the way. Before, you needed to only move a couple of pixels to get the can you want. Now however, the tooltip area won't get out the damn way, meaning its a hit-and-miss on whether the first can to come up is the valuable one, or a Scrap can. The great Combined Tooltip feature you mention regarding grouped celestials doesn't extend to scattered cans exploding from a Site. I ended up picking up a lot more Scrap cans, and then a lot fewer cans in general, simply because I wasted so much time trying to get the can I wanted. I made maybe 30% of what I normally would have picked up.

    I only ran one site out of frustration. I mined gas instead.

    Perhaps that is working as intended? I don't think so; I suspect its an unintended, cascaded effect.

    However, I DO like that hovering over a rat will tell you what effects (if any) it has upon you: scrammed, pointed, disrupted. Very nice.

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    Replies
    1. +1
      Exploration is annoying as hell at the moment, even worse then the blinding clouds in some sites :)

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    2. Remember that can loot spew is getting remowed alltogether "soon".

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  3. After reading the forums, I expected something completely unplayable, but I was pleasantly surprised. I haven't run any anomalies since the patch, though. I'm planning to try that in the next day to see what happens.

    Hopefully they'll come up with a checkbox or ini setting that'll let people dial back the level of help.

    ReplyDelete