Slashdot Mirror
CCP Considering Mobile Apps For EVE Online
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."
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.