CCP Considering Mobile Apps For EVE Online 52
Massively reports on statements from EVE Online developer CCP Games indicating that they'll be working with MIT students to see if they can create mobile applications that will interact with EVE . They specifically mention things like skill trainers, route planners, and transaction viewers, but they leave the door open for other apps as well, saying they are "eager to hear what ideas MIT students might come up with."
EVE Online is really just crap (Score:2, Interesting)
Your first 6 months are spent training to get into decenttly-fitted Tech2 frigates, or (if you're the smart type that actually plans your skill training), maximizing all your support skills so you'll be doing OK in a Tech 1 cruiser and plowing through missions.
It's incredibly hard to make decent money to get your fittings, unless you're a market wizard or you have a second account where you have characters dedicated to be either market whores or invention monkeys. Missions and mining are just too time-consuming to justify the rewards.
As a single player, you're toast, so you end up joining a corp, which more often than not, ends up having some kind of drama or similar bullshit.
PvP is the only redeeming factor in EVE, but unless you have decent skills and/or the money to replace your losses, you'll quickly burn out. Yes, you can go ratting in low-sec or 0.0 to get the bigger bounties, but good luck not getting popped in one of the choke-points or hunted by whatever corp/alliance controls the system(s), unless you bring friends.
I had a couple of characters (one PVPer with max skills in Gallente HACS/Command Ships/BS and almost dread-ready, and a Caldari invention whore) with about 65Mil SP between (40mil PVP, 25 on market/invention), and after watching all the drama with the CCP dev helping out his in-game alliance and a few other episodes of blatant in-game bias, I just decided it wasn't worth it.
But hey, if you feel the need to have a second job where you're the one paying to get shat on by the company, go right ahead.
Re:EVE Online is really just crap (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone is probably going to mark the AC as a troll, but his assessment is quite similar to mine. EVE is an extremely long-term investment. You don't just jump into EVE, you have to actually *work* a long time to get anywhere. It's great for really hardcore number-crunching players that are hooked on the metagame (spying, so forth) and PVP wars than anything else. But to have to play so long to compete at all--and do anything of value, other than slowing other ships down? It's really not worth the time.
Worst of all, EVE's skill points system, while it does clearly have some really big upsides, unfortunately encourages the worst type of min-maxing imaginable. Want to specialize in a few things, maybe work a bit in production and fighting? Waste of time. You have to specialize completely to really start off on a good footing. They don't separate ship production or item production etc against fighting skills, so you can't really be a producer or inventor and a really effective fighter unless you joined a long time ago and blew points into them anyway, and even then you'd be less effective than if you'd just gone into specializing one of them from the get-go.
And, of course, the infamous fact that CCP devs have been known to buddy up to certain guilds and give them freebies, as the AC mentions as well.
OOG Client: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:EVE Online is really just crap (Score:3, Interesting)
I have heard many people say what you're describing. That it takes years to get equal to players already in the game. I have two Characters that are several years old (one PVP+Capital, the other a Carebear), what you describe is exactly true. But i also think people are stuck in this mindset of "He's older so he's rich and stronger and i can never beat him." Which is very untrue. EVE is like rock-paper-scissors with spaceships on steroids. Get into a BlackBird (t1 cruiser) and your buddy in a Rupture (t1 cruiser) and you can take down more than you thought possible.
Anyways, I very much like the fact that someone can't max their PVP skills AND max their carebear skills... that adds so much to the game.. actual character Classes that aren't selected as much as created over time. Honestly, i PVP with my Carebear in a rupture far far more than with my PVP alt in his Battleship (lvl5) & T2 everything ships.
Re:EVE Online is really just crap (Score:4, Interesting)
There are worse (or better, depends upon your point of view) than EVE, for getting a second job where You pay to get shitted all over you.
It's called Second Life, a virtual world of "ultimate freedom" and kind-of real currency, and demands a HUGE time investment, and eventually money investment to get anywhere, and all the skills you use are your own personal skills.
You work for Second Life in a form or another, if you use it, you most likely increase the value of their service, and you have to pay for it.
and for god's sake, IF you buy any land, Linden Lab (maker of Second Life) won't stop at anything to fuck you over upside down sideways. There's people who's lost literally fortunes in Second Life by direct actions of Linden Lab, and no one is willing to do shit about it, and those who would be willing to do shit about it are already too damn broke to hire even the cheapest lawyer there is.
It's an excellent business plan to ass rape their customer's wallets indeed. Afterall, when they realize that the business Linden Lab condones is blatantly illegal (creating a market place, and then manipulating it freely to maximize their own profitability by utilizing a monopoly status which cannot be challenged), they won't have any money left to fight back!
Nevermind that Linden Lab has literally an money printing press, they even pay some of their salaries using the inworld currency L$, and when converted to USD other user's of SL will be the payors, and Linden Lab never ever buys a single L$ back, they only confiscate(steal) L$ and charges you L$ for some things. and naturally every L$USD exchange has a fee collected by Linden Lab (3.5% + 0.50$).
Yes, it seems to be insanely good business plan, where they can loose only by having mass exodus to a better service.
Re:Duh. (Score:1, Interesting)
I've long thought that MMOs should try to haul in players outside of the actual game engine. Example, WoW: why do I have to spend 30 minutes in game repairing armor, checking mail, checking auction house prices or guild messages? Why can't I do that through some web browser interface? The benefit is two-fold: I don't feel like I'm spending so much time grinding, and the developers have another way of hooking me into the game. Next website that I have input on, I'll make that suggestion to the developers.
I'm sure the developers of various MMOGs have a whole pile of reasons why they don't want to allow out-of-game access.
Maybe it would be too hard to hook the game data into a web page... Maybe they're worried about cheating... Maybe they just want to make sure people are actually logging in...
But developers are starting to hear that people want to be able to do more with their games. Look at the functionality that's slowly being integrated into the WoW Armory. [worldofwarcraft.com] You can now check a character's calendar from the Armory and accept/decline invitations to events.