More Sisi

Well, I've been playing around with Planetary Interaction on the test server. After a lot of forum reading, spreadsheet viewing, pin dropping, I can say that I am thoroughly disappointed.

It seems that the round circles are in fact the graphic for these Planetary Command Centers, Extractors, Processors and Storage facilities. Yeah, you can click on them and up pops a nice floating view of whatever you happen to be working with, but overall it is meh. Linking these circles (pins) are dotted lines that, once routes are set up, move in the direction the route is going.

Hold me down, I'm getting blown away!..........or not.

I guess an argument could be made that we are still too far away to view the planet surface that close up, but still.

On top of this, the UI went from fairly straight forward to pretty damn complicated. Right click is no longer your friend (even though Eve is almost entirely based on this one mouse button!), and menu selections are hidden from the obvious place to look. Eve gets quite a bit of flack about their poor UI, but this is not a step in the right direction at all.

One more annoying feature is the dreaded time delay for everything. Like changing ships in station, if you want to do anything quickly, it will not happen while managing your colony. Currently, there is no session change timer indicating the amount of delay left, so you find yourself spamming the submit button (which is still poorly placed!) to see how long it will be before you can continue on building, scanning, linking, and routing.

Speaking of the submit button, why the hell do we have to confirm all of our actions? Sure, some actions would be nice to confirm, like pin placement, but linking, routing, really?

I don't think that I will participate in PI when it goes live. It is dull and tedious. I am just not interested in more tedium. It isn't even fun to look at. Being promoted as something akin to SimCity, it falls flat. Tyrannis? The only tyranny here is the fact that CCP is forcing someone to partake in this because it is going to replace the NPC seeded items that are necessary for many other tasks in Eve.

On a brighter note, the new Scorpion model is beautiful, and hopefully Eve Gate will deliver it's promise to be an efficient communication tool outside of the client.