As many of you will be aware, I have now announced my candidacy for the 8th Council of Stellar Management – you can read that here. One of the main pillars of my platform is a wish to see the client itself improved in various ways that I term “Quality of Life”. Improvements that take some of the hassle out of dealing with particular aspects of the client.

The improvements & changes discussed below are as detailed as I can do in type. If I was in any way gifted in the use of photo-shop and the like, I would have produced imagery to demonstrate my points in a much clearer form.

Character Selection.

While CCP has come a long way with our ability to switch between same account characters over the past few years, there is just one final step for them to take. Log off actually returning us to character selection.  Now, I am sure there are technical issues that could prevent this from CCP’s view point, but given that you utilise the log-in server to get to character selection, then surely there is no need to kick you back to it to simply switch characters?  

I know this is a small thing considering how the nature of EVE lends itself to the use of multiple accounts, however it would be useful for those who do run single accounts – including newer players, or those of us who run multiple useful characters across an account.

Corporation Chat Channels.

Chat channels. We all know these are easy to set up and maintain for pretty much any need in game. Corporations & alliances especially make good use of them, from public channels to intel channels and beyond.  However, at this point in time they rely on a member of the corporation or alliance to create them & then add operators. This is open to potential abuse if the character is sold, or can lead to issues if the member just stops playing without adding operators – who are even them limited in what they can do compared to the channel owner.

What I would like to see is an option – maybe included inside a one day revised corporation user interface – that allows channels to be created directly by a corporation, with the Communication Officer role being necessary to act as Operator.  This would then reduce instances of channels needing to be recreated should a character go dormant for a long period of time.

Additionally, allowing a corporation to have an internal blocked character list that automatically applies to corporation owned chat channels & member applications, would be especially useful for larger organisations like EVE University & RvB, for whom the daily recruitment process can be a herculean task.

Fleet User Interface.

I have been leading Fleets in EVE for around 3 years now, and over that time I have become very familiar with the Fleet interface, but at the same time I have kept a mental list of little nuisances, and I think now is as good a time as any for more to air them!  Now before I start it has to be said one of my mental list was recently implemented by CCP during Retribution 1.1, so I have some hope that they are thinking on a similar line to myself.

The Fleet Finder should be a permanent addition to the Neo-com, rather than being buried under two levels of the EVE menu.  This would make it easier for players to find and join fleets, enhancing the social aspect of this game.

As someone who leads EVE’s “premier” public drunk roam, to create fleets that ANYONE can join regardless of standing from me at a personal level would be my number one wish.  Having to grab invites all night long, or find wing commanders who will do it can be a little tiring when you want to just explode things.  

While CCP has recently allowed Fleet Commanders to drag & drop fleet members around, extending this to squads could really help with fleet reorganisation & consolidation.

Allow people to move themselves in & out of the Wing Commander positions. Sometimes as boss or FC you can be too occupied to do that and suddenly a wing is missing out on the boost chain.

Give a fleet boss an option to limit who can abandon wrecks: Fleet Boss, Wing/Squad Commanders or everyone (as it is now).

Overview.

I only have a few things I would like to see done with the overview, as mostly it does what I need it to. Even if at times it feels like I am playing the overview rather than the rest of the game when un-docked!

First one is the unlinking of the “Pilot has NO STANDINGS” state from the new states introduced in Retribution: Criminal, Suspect & Limited Engagement.  Right now, this particular state being linked to these new states means that anyone that uses specific overview settings – for example I provide a set of overviews for RvB (that have been downloaded some 10,000 times) – which omit that state, will not see Suspects, Criminals or those with a Limited Engagement against them.  

Remember we got promised Bookmarks on our overviews a while back? Yes? Well that is something I would really like to see make a return to the UI teams activity list. If I remember rightly the reason we did not get them was that there was an issue with having them display as brackets. I would hope that after a year or two they could revisit this and solve it. I am not technical but when you consider you can see stations on the overview and bookmark those, then it has to be a step or two away from a similar result for bookmarks.

Final Point.

This is not everything I would like to see – you can see more of this in this thread on the RvB forum – just the ones I consider important and/or easily added based on recent changes & improvements.

Saying that, it has to be noted that I do understand the relationship between the CSM & CCP is such that no matter what platform I run on, should I be successful I will not be able to say “MAKE IT SO” to CCP on any of the above. I do however promise that should you elect me as a delegate to the 8th CSM, if CCP bring to us a set of revisions to the client that dovetail with items such as those discussed in this post, I will put these onto the table for consideration by the relevant teams.