Zero Kelvin

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 from CrazyKinux 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!

I love mobilility and use my cell for catching up on news, reading my favourite blogs online while on the bus or train.

I would like several functions to be mobile or more accessible. Imagine being able to adjust your skill queue from the bus?

Realising that I might never actually fly in space there are still alot of things that can be done “offline”, be it from a phone och from a browser.

• Trading - Adjust buy and sell orders to keep those ISK at work
• Contracts - Check, issue and accept contracts
• Science and industry - keep those slots filled, check invention progress, manufacturing etc. POS fuel monitor.

All these things would be really neat, you know?

Those points aside, one of the most important thing to me in the game is the networking, or the social part of the game. A way to logon the game and chat with your corpmates would be awesome, access to eve-mails and a forum to ravage when bored on the commute.

Maybe play those minigames against corpmates, betting ISK on the outcome?

In the upcoming DUST 514 release, we could interact, maybe place invasion contracts, chat to DUST Merc Captains negotiating for deals?

CrazyKinux’s blogroll banter discuss a monthly topic and I thought I’d give my feedback on the same topic, even though I’m not in the blogroll.

This month’s question is posed by Mynxee of Life in Low Sec and it is:

Alts and Metagaming: Is playing two accounts who are logged in at the same time and work together (hauler/miner, explorer/combat associate, trade alts in trade hubs) a form of metagaming that is “ruining the game”?“

My short answer is Yes.

Why you ask, well I’ll tell you. EVE is an MMO, a game which lives on interaction between players.

Each action that is performed by an alt, be it hauling, missionrunning, invention, PVP or any other aspect of the game, is removed from the list that has to be performed by fellow players.

For example, a LVL4 mission is quite hard for a half year old player but quite easy for a year old player. Which would be more MMO, adding an alt to add DPS or another player from you corp or maybe even local?

Alt-phenomenons like Cynoing and Trading would require you actually travelling by ship to a “mid cyno” going out into deep 0.0 and lighting a cyno or jumpclone to Jita to adjust your orders.

Would this hurt the game? I don’t think so.