Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Faction Warfare - Why Is Our Special Map So Useless?

There's nothing quite as useless on the special faction warfare window as the map, which takes up a third of the main tab. It's just a bunch of coloured dots, some pulsing, some not. The maps shows you were you are, and that's about it.

There are no system names. No lines that show the jumpgate routes between systems. The map will not show you any routes to waypoints you have set.

It seems very much half-finished. As you can see below. A map should tell you something at a glance. You should not have to roll our mouse pointed over dots, to find out what systems they are.
A bunch of pulsating dots. Information overload does not live here.
Why are there not options for the faction warfare map, similar to those of the F10 star system map? Not all the options, but some useful subset.
Of course, all the systems should be named, not only the ones in your vicinity.
Why not allow us to see the connections between systems? List the system names next to the dots? Maybe even show our planned route, if said route passes through any of the faction warfare systems? It's not like CCP would be writing this code from scratch. The code already exists for the F10 star system map.

Why give us something that looks half-finished? During the meetings when the faction warfare window was being designed, did someone offer up the suggestion that "maybe we can give them some useful, at-a-glance information for this map." And he was shot down with a "Nah, a bunch of pulsating dots will do fine. These people already expect, and get, too much."

3 comments :

  1. My guess... After they started making the map someone at CCP had the same idea you did,they then dived into the F10 Map and quickly discovered what they have about every other system over the past year. It's got 10 years of build time on it and is a cludgy mess that needs to be re-written instead of using it somewhere else. Re-writing the map's code is probably a huge task far far far down on the back log, so the FW map suffered because of it.

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  2. As a new recruit to Faction Warfare only a few days ago, the map definitely baffled me with how unclear it was. Instead I use the table underneath to find systems to plex/find fights in. And that's just sad...

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