The placement of some of the interface seems a little odd, at least in the Station interface. These aren't things that are really important, but I figured I'd give my thoughts on them.

'Buy Ship' seems to fit on the Buy menu, but it's placed next to the button and input box where you would be buying goods; that seems odd placement. I'm not really sure what to suggest with that, tho.

Having the Buy Ship button also on the Sell and Repair tabs is a little confusing, since it doesn't seem to fit on either one.

Having to go to the Character Info tab, then hit a seperate Char Info button seems a little odd. Perhaps seperate the information on the current tab from the information you get in the button to seperate tabs? It'd make more sense that way.

It would be nice if something on the screen somewhere had your current ship health/ammo info, so that you would have a visual reminder that, yes, you limped away from that fight. I have more than once launched in a non-combatworthy state because I forgot to repair. Perhaps something in the top left or top right corner? Flashing, if you're below a certain threshhold (you know, you REALLY should repair. No, really.)

It'd be handy to have some sort of quick-glance indicator of your progress towards the license qualifiers. Maybe somewhere on the station interface, outside of the tabs (and -possibly- available as a toggle for the combat interface?) have a set of four small bars, to indicate progress, perhaps shifting in color as they get more full. It wouldn't need to be accurate, just so that we have something to see while running these missions that, yes, we are progressing. It's much more gratifying than looking at a stat sheet and seeing some numbers.

You guys might already be planning this, or working on it.. But hopefully we can get the right pane on the mission menu to show the mission info? It'd be nice to be able to just go through the list without bringing up a dialog.

Moving onto actual combat interface.. Could we have some sort of timer visible? Maybe even two. One that's settable by missions (so that you can -see- that six minute transport limit), and one that's player controllable, as a simple stopwatch, giving options for stop, start, and reset (as seperate actions, so that you can stop a timer, then resume it later, without it resetting).

Maybe when you aren't in a mission, the 'mission' clock could fall back to real world time, based off of the server. This would make coordinated activities easier. If you've got a bunch of people doing time delayed strikes, then having a 'universal' time mechanism amongst all the players helps, and it'd be easier than requiring the players to synchronize through some out-of-game method, particularly when there's latency issues with things like Teamspeak, and I know I don't like giving people the move-in order when I'm trying to dodge shots. Being able to go "At 21:04, team 3 move in", is more fun.

I'm loving the heck out of this game. Most of the things I mentioned are just minor things, but the gameplay could be smoothed a bit by them.

There is a "/time"
Try it in the chatbox. It will give you GMT

This is exactly why they let in more people - to get a wider range of impressions like these.

Good points, I agree with them all. The interface was always low on their development priority list, once it was functional. I'm sure they'll concentrate on it more once the core features are added and/or debugged.

<This is exactly why they let in more people - to get a wider range of impressions like these.>

-Yea, we're all just so used to the interface we don't notice.

I do know the station interface is only temporary and will be replaced with something prettier. Soon™

Thank you for the hint about /time, I'll probably make use of that. I'd still like a dashboard clock, tho, and a timer. :)

For now, I'm using a physical stopwatch I have on my keyboard. But it's weird, and only has hundreths of a minute, instead of seconds. :P

Id like to see a picture of your ship in the docking bay in the background and a less crowded interface- how about...
all the tabs stay on the top, the chat stays on the bottom, however when you dock you just see the tabs, chat, and your ship in the background in the docking bay. And a window pops up when you click on a tab. click on the tab again, it disappears, plus, take the buttons out of sections where they make no sense.

Wow, octopusfluff, you have a stopwatch on your keyboard? Cool. What keyboard is it or did you just glue a stopwatch to your keyboard? I've always thought a stopwatch app should be something that comes with the OS. There've been many times I wish I had a stopwatch in debugging.

Hmm, having your ship in the background would not be a bad thing to do.

It's just sitting on the keyboard, sadly.

Heh, ah well.

Anyways, apparently eve-online already has a ship behind the menus when you're in the station.

Yeah, something similar to Eve's station windows is cool, where you can see the ship in the dock, then al the options are on a tool bar at the side, which expands when you select it for more information :-)

Ideally, we'll be able to get out of the ships on stations one day and have npc's we can talk to for the options, or computor terminals we can walk too (pipe dream) :-)

I definatly feel that the skins could be tweaked a little, I'll have a play in photoshop later to see what I can give an idea of what I think would be cool.

And yes, I understand this is beta, hence the suggestions, I love the game so far, just coming up with pointers(only saying that as a few peeps seemed angered at my comments when i made them in game as though I was bashing the game) :-P