Despite the varying opinions on what is fun and what is not, I don't find it unfair to claim we can all agree that Elite Dangerous has terrible menu navigation and UI utilization. It's fine that there are things we need to press a button to do and functions that should have our attention on the menu when appropriate, but as it stands, there are far too many little "nuances" that absolutely no one would miss. If fdev ninja patched them out most folks might not even notice some of them were gone. Before you say "if they're not important, don't complain!" I say "that's how little we actually need these things."
Let's run down the list, shall we? Got your popcorn? Make sure the butter's unsalted. By the way, for all cases assume I'm talking about using keyboard navigation here. Mouse clicking obviates SOME of these issues, but if we want players to use cool things like a HOTAS or a VR headset (and I'm confident in assuming that fdev does in fact want that, given how much work they've put into making these things function and how many keybindings are available) then as a famous meme once implied: AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT!
Just remember folks: I like Elite Dangerous. I say these things not with venom, but with passion. I care about these things because I care enough about the game to want to see it break out of its boundaries and grow. How do we grow? by admitting our faults and correcting them. Buckle up, buttercups!
1: On the main menu, why is "training" permanently locked above "start?" We do our training missions one time, if that, then we never need to again unless we want a refresher or want to show someone the game. The other 99.999999999999999% of the time, we want to START THE GAME. Switch these. Default cursor on START. Basic stuff here.
2: The nav panel needs an option to NOT shuffle the in-system objects around based on our proximity. If you're not using a mouse, you're CONSTANTLY scrolling to find the object you want to lock onto and it's not even a consistent amount of scrolling because EVERYTHING KEEPS MOVING unless you're at a complete stop. Make this a toggled option so we can have a static list of objects ordered by their distance from the main star. With this option toggled, the ONLY time anything should move on that list is when a USS shows up.
3: In the transactions panel, missions need to be visually rearranged so that the pertinent data, including locations, factors and rewards, is IMMEDIATELY VISIBLE. WITH NO SCROLLING. Having to scroll down to see how many ships I still need to massacre or exactly what station I needed to hit is a purely negative experience. It's unnecessary tedium and it needs to go.
4: Why isn't there a keybinding to request docking with a button press? We're guaranteed to have the station targeted when we drop in, so why don't we have this keybound? Why must we go into a menu every time we want to dock? I fully embrace the need for us to actively request docking; that doesn't mean we should have to go into a menu to be able to to do so. It's just extra clicks for the sake of extra clicks and it can be discarded in favor of a simple key.
5: HERE'S ONE OF THE WORST OFFENDERS IN THE ENTIRE GAME: The social panel. Upon hitting 2 to bring up our social panel, we are immediately entered into chat, forcing us to hit Esc or another key to exit chat and navigate the rest of the panel. STOP. THAT. I should hit 2 and the panel comes into focus, then I hit enter to chat. This menu ASSUMES we want to jump in, regardless of our intent and more often than not it assumes INCORRECTLY. You'll notice a pattern here soon.
6: The helm panel, brought up by 3, is only used when working with SRV's or multicrew SLFs, but boy does it need some work. First off, when we bring our SRV underneath our ship and align with the loading column properly, nine times out of ten what we want to do is board our ship. So why is "board ship" the THIRD OPTION DOWN? Why is this not configurable at the very least?? Why is "dismiss ship" at the top?? If we want to dismiss the ship we don't have to get under it to do so and we usually won't bother because we're in a hurry!
7: The "transfer cargo" option is a ludicrously clunky screen. Not only do we have to move UP to the cargo we want to move, then back and forth clicking on ALL TWO TONS of what we want to transfer, but if we accidentally leave the screen without clicking "confirm" then NOTHING HAPPENS. MY GOD this is an obscenely unnecessary waste of time! Transferring cargo from SRV to ship could easily be automated by simply stopping under the ship for a second, then driving the F*%&^ off. It's an absurd number of extra clicks and interactions for an insultingly minor task. If we're going to have bigger SRV's with more cargo or more features that call for transferring cargo OUT of the ship, then fine. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it but for now, CLEAN THIS S&%$ UP.
8: In the inventory section of the functions panel, brought up with 4, split manufactured materials and raw materials into their own headers. Small thing, but cleans things up, especially for those of us who use the material traders (read: basically everyone who uses materials for anything at all.)
9: On to starport services! I won't speak to the layout of the primary station menu on the left because some people use some services more often than others, but an option to reconfigure that order WOULD be appreciated by all, I'm sure.
10: The commodities market needs better controls for filtering, sorting, searching and scrolling. Collapsible sections would be nice (with memory, so we don't have to keep doing so.)
11: the "trade data" at the top is a great idea, but clumsily designed. If I know the precise name of the station I want to view, I should be able to type it in (with precise spelling, of course) and boom, there's my data. We can type in a system and then click it to show all its stations, which is functional, but we can take that further. Some systems are automatically suggested because they're easy names like Rhea or Gende so you get them even if you misspell them, but if it's some number-dash-letter-dash-sector name and you're not sure precisely which one? Good g luck. If you know the station name you should be able to look up the station specifically, plain and simple.
12: Buying and selling commodities should have a few simple things: First off a "buy max" and "sell max" option. What we have now is, you guessed it, more scrolling. It would also be useful to include a field to simply click and type a number. I want exactly, say, 576 of a commodity? I shouldn't have to "get a feel" for how fast the scrollbar accelerates when I hold down the button so I can stop it right on the amount I want. This is Elite Dangerous, not "Braben's Pro Scrollmaster."
13: When you select the mission board, your cursor defaults to the bottom of the screen for some ungodly reason. It should default to the first faction selectable so you can immediately start looking for missions. furthermore, each faction's missions should be visible when we scroll to them, rather than having to click them first. At the very least a small preview should popup giving us a quick glance at what they're offering before we click in and get more details.
14: Speaking of mission details, here we go again with the srcolling! All the pertinent data for the mission should be available at a glance, with as little scrolling as possible. This point is just a case of inefficient use of screen real estate. We could pack a lot more info into a lot less words and use up a lot less screen space for a LOT of missions. the "recommended rank" box could be cut entirely and that little bit of info squeezed into some other part of the briefing. We don't need to be reminded that "higher ranked missions come with higher rewards as your reputation increases." We KNOW this. Even a day one, fresh-out-of-training player can figure this out. CUT IT. A data delivery, for example: we could just cut out the "this will not require cargo space, you will be paid on delivery, good luck commander" lines entirely. They serve no purpose, immersion or otherwise, and just take up lines of space we could be putting to better use.
15: Passenger lounge: Why does this exist? These are clearly missions for the same factions and follow most of the same rules; they just require cabins to take them on. We have mission type filters on the mission board; why not make use of them?
16: When we select the contacts menu, the cursor immediately jumps into the authority contact menu. Stop it. Much like the mission board and social panel, the game assumes we want to jump into the first menu on the list AND doesn't show us any other menus UNTIL we jump into them. Viewable on scrolling, no automatic jumping please.
17: BEFORE I FORGET: There are times, primarily when you receive a popup about fire groups or not having any illegal goods to sell on the black market, that you MUST close this popup before finishing your business. The problem comes when you try to hit a button to dismiss the popup. Is it enter? Is it backspace? Is it spacebar? WHO KNOWS? IT SEEMS TO CHANGE EVERY TIME! Worst of all, if it's NOT enter at that given time, guess what happens? Your chatbox pops up and starts taking down your further button presses! THIS. IS. INFURIATING. MAKE. IT. STOP. I am here to fly spaceships, not MEMORIZE WHICH KEY IS "DISMISS POPUP" for EVERY INDIVIDUAL POPUP! If it's spacebar, MAKE IT SPACEBAR FOR ALL OF THEM. Or, better yet, GET RID OF THE POPUP ENTIRELY. "You don't have any illegal goods to sell." Thanks; I would never have figured that out by seeing an empty black market screen. "You have made changes to a weapon that needs to be in a fire group." Thanks; I would never have figured that out when I deployed hardpoints and nothing popped out. I appreciate that you might want to let players know about important things before they launch, but THIS IS NOT THE WAY.
18: See how the galnet news articles change according to where the cursor is and you don't have to click just to see them? Yeah, do that with everything else in the station, please.
19: the "repair all" option needs to REPAIR. ALL. Paintjob, ship integrity, ALL OF IT. Otherwise, we're not really repairing "all" now are we? This usually means that if we want a TRULY fully repaired ship, we have to hit repair all and STILL go into advanced maintenance (and there's nothing "advanced" about it,) then move over twice to our integrity, click that, then move down, right and double click to get our paint patched up too. My god it's pointless. Repair all means repair all. If there's something we DON'T want to repair, like our gloriously scarred paintjob, then fine, we go into advanced maintenance and hit everything BUT the paintjob! Hell, if it's THAT important to anyone, make a checkbox that says "do not repair all" so it doesn't repair when we hit repair all! but for F*%& sake, why is our ship integrity not restored to 100% when we hit REPAIR ALL?!
20: If you (Fdev) are absolutely married to limpets as cargo, then PLEASE put some option right on the main station window to restock limpets directly with one button. Let us go into the "restock" submenu to set how many limpets we want that ship to restock to and then from that moment on, the "reload limpets" button on the main screen INSTANTLY gives us precisely that many limpets in that ship so long as the cargo space is available! A few clicks to set a preference and then ONE CLICK for the rest of our lives!
21: When selecting a hardpoint or utility point on the ship, PLEASE find some camera angles that don't zoom in so close. Several ships have external points that make it impossible to tell where they are in relation to the ship when we're zoomed in so close we see the GUNSHOT RESIDUE ON THE BARREL, for crying out loud. BACK. THE CAMERA. UP.
22: Moving modules and weapons on and off a ship takes an obnoxious amount of extra time and button presses beyond what it should. Transferring modules from storage is particularly groan-inducing. Go to stored modules, go down the COMPLETELY UNSORTABLE and UNORGANIZED LIST of over a hundred modules to find what you want, click it, the cursor defaults to SELL for some reason (?!) move up to transfer, move to the hardpoint/mount you want, click, HIT TRANSFER AGAIN, then get shown a window that tells you the transfer fee which is zero unless you NEED to transfer it from another station, click transfer AGAIN, then wait for the deploy animation to finish before doing it again. GOOD. LORD. We could cut out literally half those steps. Stored modules, find module, transfer, select point, DONE. The "transfer fee" window SHOULD NOT BE POPPING UP IF THE MODULE IS ALREADY ON SITE. Sorting the list of stored modules and organizing it in some way should be a given as well, but MY GOD PEOPLE, come on now.
23: Related point: when we go to store a module, why is there a "storage fee" window when there's no fee to speak of? If a module's dirty and storing it's going to cost us, then fine, but if it's a clean module and it's never going to have a fee for storing it, GET RID OF THE WINDOW.
24: When viewing a ship in the shipyard, it's far more useful to us to know what actual module slots the ship has than whatever garbage E grade stuff that's thrown in. Every ship seems to come with two class 1 fixed pulse lasers (which are almost universally discarded the instant we buy the thing) but it would be much more useful to have a little column right with the equipped modules that delineates the actual SLOT class. Just a little number is all we need. 1, 2, 3, etc. Maybe a little M for military slots or things like that...just a little bit of practical and useful conveyance, aye? Maybe a little less reliance on third party sites to convey basic info, yeah? Also, why is the COVAS displayed at the bottom in the "livery" section? Unless you plan to start making ships with a different COVAS as standard fitting, this entire line of info is completely pointless and could be removed. I promise no one will miss it.
There you have it. A list of things both big and small that regularly contribute to the annoyance of thousands of players, regardless of whether they will admit it. Fdev, you have to realize we the players appreciate what you've created here and we want to see it thrive. I realize that one of the ways to make a thing thrive is to make it more user-friendly. I don't want to put the game on autopilot or nerf everything or copy No Man's sky's easier gameplay; I just want the supporting tools and functions of the game to work more fluidly so they don't cause quite so many micro-interruptions and speed bumps between actual play. Navigating menus is not gameplay. We're here to tune and fly our ships to accomplish cool stuff, not develop greater finger dexterity than is required to play a twelve-string guitar at 300 BPM. We're here to fight pirates and thargoids, not our UI.
Let's run down the list, shall we? Got your popcorn? Make sure the butter's unsalted. By the way, for all cases assume I'm talking about using keyboard navigation here. Mouse clicking obviates SOME of these issues, but if we want players to use cool things like a HOTAS or a VR headset (and I'm confident in assuming that fdev does in fact want that, given how much work they've put into making these things function and how many keybindings are available) then as a famous meme once implied: AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT!
Just remember folks: I like Elite Dangerous. I say these things not with venom, but with passion. I care about these things because I care enough about the game to want to see it break out of its boundaries and grow. How do we grow? by admitting our faults and correcting them. Buckle up, buttercups!
1: On the main menu, why is "training" permanently locked above "start?" We do our training missions one time, if that, then we never need to again unless we want a refresher or want to show someone the game. The other 99.999999999999999% of the time, we want to START THE GAME. Switch these. Default cursor on START. Basic stuff here.
2: The nav panel needs an option to NOT shuffle the in-system objects around based on our proximity. If you're not using a mouse, you're CONSTANTLY scrolling to find the object you want to lock onto and it's not even a consistent amount of scrolling because EVERYTHING KEEPS MOVING unless you're at a complete stop. Make this a toggled option so we can have a static list of objects ordered by their distance from the main star. With this option toggled, the ONLY time anything should move on that list is when a USS shows up.
3: In the transactions panel, missions need to be visually rearranged so that the pertinent data, including locations, factors and rewards, is IMMEDIATELY VISIBLE. WITH NO SCROLLING. Having to scroll down to see how many ships I still need to massacre or exactly what station I needed to hit is a purely negative experience. It's unnecessary tedium and it needs to go.
4: Why isn't there a keybinding to request docking with a button press? We're guaranteed to have the station targeted when we drop in, so why don't we have this keybound? Why must we go into a menu every time we want to dock? I fully embrace the need for us to actively request docking; that doesn't mean we should have to go into a menu to be able to to do so. It's just extra clicks for the sake of extra clicks and it can be discarded in favor of a simple key.
5: HERE'S ONE OF THE WORST OFFENDERS IN THE ENTIRE GAME: The social panel. Upon hitting 2 to bring up our social panel, we are immediately entered into chat, forcing us to hit Esc or another key to exit chat and navigate the rest of the panel. STOP. THAT. I should hit 2 and the panel comes into focus, then I hit enter to chat. This menu ASSUMES we want to jump in, regardless of our intent and more often than not it assumes INCORRECTLY. You'll notice a pattern here soon.
6: The helm panel, brought up by 3, is only used when working with SRV's or multicrew SLFs, but boy does it need some work. First off, when we bring our SRV underneath our ship and align with the loading column properly, nine times out of ten what we want to do is board our ship. So why is "board ship" the THIRD OPTION DOWN? Why is this not configurable at the very least?? Why is "dismiss ship" at the top?? If we want to dismiss the ship we don't have to get under it to do so and we usually won't bother because we're in a hurry!
7: The "transfer cargo" option is a ludicrously clunky screen. Not only do we have to move UP to the cargo we want to move, then back and forth clicking on ALL TWO TONS of what we want to transfer, but if we accidentally leave the screen without clicking "confirm" then NOTHING HAPPENS. MY GOD this is an obscenely unnecessary waste of time! Transferring cargo from SRV to ship could easily be automated by simply stopping under the ship for a second, then driving the F*%&^ off. It's an absurd number of extra clicks and interactions for an insultingly minor task. If we're going to have bigger SRV's with more cargo or more features that call for transferring cargo OUT of the ship, then fine. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it but for now, CLEAN THIS S&%$ UP.
8: In the inventory section of the functions panel, brought up with 4, split manufactured materials and raw materials into their own headers. Small thing, but cleans things up, especially for those of us who use the material traders (read: basically everyone who uses materials for anything at all.)
9: On to starport services! I won't speak to the layout of the primary station menu on the left because some people use some services more often than others, but an option to reconfigure that order WOULD be appreciated by all, I'm sure.
10: The commodities market needs better controls for filtering, sorting, searching and scrolling. Collapsible sections would be nice (with memory, so we don't have to keep doing so.)
11: the "trade data" at the top is a great idea, but clumsily designed. If I know the precise name of the station I want to view, I should be able to type it in (with precise spelling, of course) and boom, there's my data. We can type in a system and then click it to show all its stations, which is functional, but we can take that further. Some systems are automatically suggested because they're easy names like Rhea or Gende so you get them even if you misspell them, but if it's some number-dash-letter-dash-sector name and you're not sure precisely which one? Good g luck. If you know the station name you should be able to look up the station specifically, plain and simple.
12: Buying and selling commodities should have a few simple things: First off a "buy max" and "sell max" option. What we have now is, you guessed it, more scrolling. It would also be useful to include a field to simply click and type a number. I want exactly, say, 576 of a commodity? I shouldn't have to "get a feel" for how fast the scrollbar accelerates when I hold down the button so I can stop it right on the amount I want. This is Elite Dangerous, not "Braben's Pro Scrollmaster."
13: When you select the mission board, your cursor defaults to the bottom of the screen for some ungodly reason. It should default to the first faction selectable so you can immediately start looking for missions. furthermore, each faction's missions should be visible when we scroll to them, rather than having to click them first. At the very least a small preview should popup giving us a quick glance at what they're offering before we click in and get more details.
14: Speaking of mission details, here we go again with the srcolling! All the pertinent data for the mission should be available at a glance, with as little scrolling as possible. This point is just a case of inefficient use of screen real estate. We could pack a lot more info into a lot less words and use up a lot less screen space for a LOT of missions. the "recommended rank" box could be cut entirely and that little bit of info squeezed into some other part of the briefing. We don't need to be reminded that "higher ranked missions come with higher rewards as your reputation increases." We KNOW this. Even a day one, fresh-out-of-training player can figure this out. CUT IT. A data delivery, for example: we could just cut out the "this will not require cargo space, you will be paid on delivery, good luck commander" lines entirely. They serve no purpose, immersion or otherwise, and just take up lines of space we could be putting to better use.
15: Passenger lounge: Why does this exist? These are clearly missions for the same factions and follow most of the same rules; they just require cabins to take them on. We have mission type filters on the mission board; why not make use of them?
16: When we select the contacts menu, the cursor immediately jumps into the authority contact menu. Stop it. Much like the mission board and social panel, the game assumes we want to jump into the first menu on the list AND doesn't show us any other menus UNTIL we jump into them. Viewable on scrolling, no automatic jumping please.
17: BEFORE I FORGET: There are times, primarily when you receive a popup about fire groups or not having any illegal goods to sell on the black market, that you MUST close this popup before finishing your business. The problem comes when you try to hit a button to dismiss the popup. Is it enter? Is it backspace? Is it spacebar? WHO KNOWS? IT SEEMS TO CHANGE EVERY TIME! Worst of all, if it's NOT enter at that given time, guess what happens? Your chatbox pops up and starts taking down your further button presses! THIS. IS. INFURIATING. MAKE. IT. STOP. I am here to fly spaceships, not MEMORIZE WHICH KEY IS "DISMISS POPUP" for EVERY INDIVIDUAL POPUP! If it's spacebar, MAKE IT SPACEBAR FOR ALL OF THEM. Or, better yet, GET RID OF THE POPUP ENTIRELY. "You don't have any illegal goods to sell." Thanks; I would never have figured that out by seeing an empty black market screen. "You have made changes to a weapon that needs to be in a fire group." Thanks; I would never have figured that out when I deployed hardpoints and nothing popped out. I appreciate that you might want to let players know about important things before they launch, but THIS IS NOT THE WAY.
18: See how the galnet news articles change according to where the cursor is and you don't have to click just to see them? Yeah, do that with everything else in the station, please.
19: the "repair all" option needs to REPAIR. ALL. Paintjob, ship integrity, ALL OF IT. Otherwise, we're not really repairing "all" now are we? This usually means that if we want a TRULY fully repaired ship, we have to hit repair all and STILL go into advanced maintenance (and there's nothing "advanced" about it,) then move over twice to our integrity, click that, then move down, right and double click to get our paint patched up too. My god it's pointless. Repair all means repair all. If there's something we DON'T want to repair, like our gloriously scarred paintjob, then fine, we go into advanced maintenance and hit everything BUT the paintjob! Hell, if it's THAT important to anyone, make a checkbox that says "do not repair all" so it doesn't repair when we hit repair all! but for F*%& sake, why is our ship integrity not restored to 100% when we hit REPAIR ALL?!
20: If you (Fdev) are absolutely married to limpets as cargo, then PLEASE put some option right on the main station window to restock limpets directly with one button. Let us go into the "restock" submenu to set how many limpets we want that ship to restock to and then from that moment on, the "reload limpets" button on the main screen INSTANTLY gives us precisely that many limpets in that ship so long as the cargo space is available! A few clicks to set a preference and then ONE CLICK for the rest of our lives!
21: When selecting a hardpoint or utility point on the ship, PLEASE find some camera angles that don't zoom in so close. Several ships have external points that make it impossible to tell where they are in relation to the ship when we're zoomed in so close we see the GUNSHOT RESIDUE ON THE BARREL, for crying out loud. BACK. THE CAMERA. UP.
22: Moving modules and weapons on and off a ship takes an obnoxious amount of extra time and button presses beyond what it should. Transferring modules from storage is particularly groan-inducing. Go to stored modules, go down the COMPLETELY UNSORTABLE and UNORGANIZED LIST of over a hundred modules to find what you want, click it, the cursor defaults to SELL for some reason (?!) move up to transfer, move to the hardpoint/mount you want, click, HIT TRANSFER AGAIN, then get shown a window that tells you the transfer fee which is zero unless you NEED to transfer it from another station, click transfer AGAIN, then wait for the deploy animation to finish before doing it again. GOOD. LORD. We could cut out literally half those steps. Stored modules, find module, transfer, select point, DONE. The "transfer fee" window SHOULD NOT BE POPPING UP IF THE MODULE IS ALREADY ON SITE. Sorting the list of stored modules and organizing it in some way should be a given as well, but MY GOD PEOPLE, come on now.
23: Related point: when we go to store a module, why is there a "storage fee" window when there's no fee to speak of? If a module's dirty and storing it's going to cost us, then fine, but if it's a clean module and it's never going to have a fee for storing it, GET RID OF THE WINDOW.
24: When viewing a ship in the shipyard, it's far more useful to us to know what actual module slots the ship has than whatever garbage E grade stuff that's thrown in. Every ship seems to come with two class 1 fixed pulse lasers (which are almost universally discarded the instant we buy the thing) but it would be much more useful to have a little column right with the equipped modules that delineates the actual SLOT class. Just a little number is all we need. 1, 2, 3, etc. Maybe a little M for military slots or things like that...just a little bit of practical and useful conveyance, aye? Maybe a little less reliance on third party sites to convey basic info, yeah? Also, why is the COVAS displayed at the bottom in the "livery" section? Unless you plan to start making ships with a different COVAS as standard fitting, this entire line of info is completely pointless and could be removed. I promise no one will miss it.
There you have it. A list of things both big and small that regularly contribute to the annoyance of thousands of players, regardless of whether they will admit it. Fdev, you have to realize we the players appreciate what you've created here and we want to see it thrive. I realize that one of the ways to make a thing thrive is to make it more user-friendly. I don't want to put the game on autopilot or nerf everything or copy No Man's sky's easier gameplay; I just want the supporting tools and functions of the game to work more fluidly so they don't cause quite so many micro-interruptions and speed bumps between actual play. Navigating menus is not gameplay. We're here to tune and fly our ships to accomplish cool stuff, not develop greater finger dexterity than is required to play a twelve-string guitar at 300 BPM. We're here to fight pirates and thargoids, not our UI.
