[2019] [October] Further QoL & New Player Focused changes

Greetings Tenacious Testers!

The EVE Dev team have been working on another package of tweaks, fixes and improvements for the October release, which have reached the our public test server Singularity in today’s update.

As with the last package, these changes are primarily focused on improving the experience for pilots in their first few hours and days in New Eden, but of course many of these will be generally useful for pilots of all ages and experience levels. At this time this list is incomplete, and more changes may be added over the coming weeks or make it into the final patch notes.

If nothing significant turns up during the testing period these changes will be released in the October patch. As always, if you wish to help, head on over to Singularity and get involved!

Changes

General:

• Un-packaged (and undamaged) items can now be sold without any need to repackage them first. Doing so will automatically repackage the item. In the case of non-empty ships or containers you will receive a confirmation message.
  * To prevent item exchange scams relying on changing the trade’s manifest at the last second, trading now has a confirmation window listing the trade’s item and isk contents. UPDATE: This feature will be delayed to a later release while we iterate over the User Experience

User Interface:

• Added a suppressible warning when in a station and attempting to buy an item located in another station
• Help Pointer links can now be pasted into chat
• Added a filter box to the Shortcuts tab of the settings menu to allow you to more easily find a specific shortcut
• Added a default “Launch Drones” shortcut (Shift + F) for anyone that had not yet set a shortcut

Tutorial:

• Updates have been made to the rewards in the Tutorial and how those rewards are claimed
• Adding active states and animations to the Mission and Tutorial info panel buttons

Known Issues:

• TBC

Thanks and happy testing!

CCP Lebowski for the EVE Dev Team

As noted in the post, there will be an option to set this to auto accept, making it act exactly like it does now

New players would get hit by these particular scams, and when they do it can be incredibly impactful to their early experience in New Eden. As we state above, our objective has been to improve the early game experiences of new players which is why we’ve made the choice to make these trades clearer, especially to someone not familiar with the Item Exchange UI.

Nope this is only a subset that we wanted to notify people of today when the patch was deployed to Singularity.

We have some internal data on how often players report these issues to our customer support team yes.

We could certainly add a tutorial explaining trade more clearly, but in this specific case the scam involves using a UI that doesnt fit our modern standards for UX. We tend to give clear information to pilots when they are making a trade (see the messages in the market, the finalize step of the contract window, etc) and in this case this UI wasn’t meeting those standards. As such in this case it made more sense to improve that UI rather than build a tutorial specifically to warn new players about why the UI is bad.

No, we talked about it at the CSM summit, but this was an internal proposal.

Scammers have got incredibly good at predicting their targets behavior and making changes to the contents of the trade at the last second. They are a smart bunch.

I like to ride bikes too but I also used stabilizers when I was a kid and didn’t know what I was doing.

Clarity is the exact intention of this change, a window that appears and clarifies the action you are about to perform.

That’s been revisited, and is a trifle misleading.

Being ganked is an inflection point in retention statistics.

If you’re ganked, and stick around, you’re more likely to stick around for longer. This is what the stats show. There’s a survivor bias.
If you’re ganked, and leave, well, you’re gone.

And when you’re ganked, a fair number of people just leave.

This is actually part of what the ‘grief counselling’ thing is about. It’s the major loss which, if you ‘survive’ it, means (statistically) you’re more likely to stick around. So they’re going to try and help people survive it. Let them know why they died and so on. Provide the social support that many newbies don’t have at that time.

Do you have a bug report number for that?

Yep.

I have no problems with proper scams. I’m less keen on the interface being the issue. Like the margin trading scam. The interface shouldn’t lie.

Hey all,

Quick update for today, as we’d like to improve the user experience of the Trade Confirmation Window, we’re delaying it to a later release for now.

For one, other priorities have meant that we’ve not had sufficient time to convert the confirmation window from a simple text based placeholder into a more appropriate window that meets our quality standards, so we’re going to hold off until we can do that.