The 12th EVE Blog Banter: EVE on the MOVE!

blog-banter

Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s banter comes to us fromCrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!

It’s an interesting topic isn’t it?  I’ve been considering writing about how we might play EVE on-the-move post Dominion for a while now, and what better way to do that than with my first Blog Banter!  After all, the whole point of having a soapbox to shout from is that you get to loudly disagree with the idiot on the soapbox next to you!  Otherwise, there’s very little fun involved…

To discuss a topic like this, it’s important to define what we consider as playing EVE.  Do we only play EVE when we’ve got the client up and running? Do we play it when we sit and chat with our corp mates on ventrilo?  Do we play it while we’re sitting at the office, posting on our alliance forums?  What about AFK mining?

As far as I’m concerned, the client has become only a facet of the incredibly vast EVE experience, and probably one of the lesser ones at that! The true power of EVE as a game, and the reason why it’s been around so long, is precisely because it’s become so much more than just another icon on your desktop.  Consider what you do, outside of the EVE client, that relates to the way you play EVE, and I think you’ll find we’re all far closer to the EVE universe than a first inspection would seem to indicate.  I, for one, was thinking of my new Vexor fit in the shower this morning.   As soon as I was out, I did a quick search for something similar on BattleClinic, before going through my daily plodding of the EVE forums.  Before lunch, I flicked through the old issue of EON magazine that’s still lying around in my toilet.  And I’ve just swapped tab from writing this meaningless drivel to check my sell orders on EVE Commander.   Oh, and I’m currently writing an article on EVE.  I have no doubt a lot of older, more community involved EVE players “play” EVE a lot more!  Think about the lottery organisers parsing their data through excel, or the bankers at E-Bank frantically trying to recuperate lost cash, or the industrialists trawling through their market data on Google Docs or EVE Metrics.  Hell, I suspect Chribba is in fact an AI constantly plugged into all information relating to EVE ever, and is always playing EVE!

Eye opening, isn’t it?  The EVE experience extends far further than we assume it does, and thus, at least by my definition, we play far more EVE than we think we do!  More relevantly, a fair few of us now play EVE on the go, on the move, on iPhones, Blackberries, tablets, laptops, netbooks, bizarre futuristic cybernetic nano implants, and any number of other programs capable of browsing the web. We use these tools to access Capsuleer, EVE Metrics, and maybe even this very blog!  Okay, fine, probably not this blog (maybe that’s just me…), but you see where I’m going: once you have access to the web on the move, your access to the EVE universe can become nearly omnipresent.

Post Dominion however, I’m clinging to the hope that we’re going to see a radical reshape of how mobile users interact with the world of EVE, through the introduction of EVE’s brand new “social networking” site, COSMOS (aka. Spacebook.  See what I did there?)

Already, through the wonder of the EVE api, most of the information on your EVE character is available on the internet.  I briefly mentioned EVE Commander earlier in this post, and I highly recommend people check it out: as long as you trust it with your full API key, it will allow you to access your assets, ships, market orders, and transactions from anywhere, any time.  You can also plan alliance ops from the forums, plan your route using DOTLAN Maps, and consider the market using EVE Metrics.

There is very little however, that you can actually do from outside of the game.  You can look at your contracts and player skill queue, but there is, for now, no way to change skills from out of client, update market orders, or even send an EVE mail.  If CCP is to believed however, they aim to change all that, through the wonderful magic of COSMOS!

As you can see in that interview, as soon as COSMOS hits in Dominion, you’ll be able to send, receive and read EVE mails out of game.  It seems you’ll also be able to manage corporation and alliance recruitment, as well as god knows what else! If this dev blog by CCP Rhayge is to be believed, there is very little COSMOS cannot do theoretically.  Just like the rest of EVE, I have no doubt that COSMOS will continue to evolve as expansion after expansion is released by those crazy people up at CCP.  In the near future, COSMOS will be the main link you’ll be seeing between EVE in game, and EVE in your browser.  Don’t be too disappointed however, as I suspect this feature will become far more important if CCP succeeds in moving more people into 0.0, alliance politics, and sovereignty with the Dominion expansion, as is their stated goal.

One thing is for certain in Dominion: holding sovereignty will be a far more interesting and active job than it is currently.  CCP Abathur gave us some hints as to how this might work, and these changes are apparently going to appear in Singularity in the near future.  If these changes are anything like what I’ve imagined in my head, you’re suddenly going to have a lot more information available on your “sovereignty dashboard” than we do currently: the status of the upgrades in your system, how full of fuel and ammunition they are, and maybe even who is currently in system. I’m clinging to the hope all this information, and hopefully a lot more, will be visible, and maybe even modifiable, on the move, via COSMOS.

After that, the possibilities are all but endless.  Through COSMOS, we’ll hopefully one day be able to manage nearly all the facets of our EVE life!  Recruit corp members, modify industrial orders, manage system upgrades, set standings…EVE is often referred to spreadsheets in space after all.  Short of PvP, there is very little in EVE that we actually need the EVE  client for.  If EVE is spreadsheet in space, COSMOS could be our google documents: access it anywhere, modify it anywhere, and then share it with anyone.

So, in the relatively close future, I’m hoping for the ability to do everything we do in stations from your browser in COSMOS.  Chatting, organising, selling, buying, researching…do we really need a client?  Of course not!  So let’s hope we see them in COSMOS.  Maybe we’ll even get little animated gifs to let us spin our ships through a browser :P

Beyond that? Who knows.  The possibilities, in the long run, are endless for the world of EVE, and are only limited by CCP’s ability to code and our imagination.  Already, the iPhone and other smartphones are displaying graphics capabilities which can rival the most powerful portable gaming platforms.  What’s stopping us booting up EVE and joining fleet ops in the bus or on the train to work?  Not much at all.

Just as I finished writing this post, a new dev blog detailing exactly how COSMOS will work was published, and thankfully for me, it looks like CCP and I are following relatively similar trains of thought.  COSMOS will indeed, in the words of CCP, be “EVE away from EVE”.  The future is looking brilliant!

That’s all from me.  I’d like to thank CrazyKinux for organising such an awesome blogging spree from the community.  I hope you’ve enjoyed my first blog banter, and I’ll see you in New Eden!

Check out these links to other posts in this month’s Blog Banter:

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Published:
09.29.09 / 1pm
Category:
EVE Talk
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