EVE Blog Banter #8

Welcome to the eighth 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 otherEVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
This month's topic comes to us from me, Ga'len at The Wandering Druid of Tranquility. He asks: "What new game mechanic or mechanics would you like to see created and brought into the EVE Online universe and how would this be incorporated into the current game universe? Be specific and give details, this is not meant to be a 'nerf this, boost my game play' post like we see on the EVE forums."

Even though this isn't an EVE blog I'm a long time player and fan of it so I thought I'd jump into the blog banter and offer up my view. My first thought was that I'd like to see something like a dueling system where two players or groups of players could agree to a fight without being Concordokkend. But then I remembered an older thought that I've seen put up elsewhere:

"Claimable Low-Sec"

Now the quotes are important. I don't want to see 0.0 style Sovereignty in lowsec. That's what 0.0 is for. What I'm thinking of is something a bit more casual in a sense. And giving pirates and other lowsec corps something fun about lowsec.

The way I see that it could work is by giving corps or alliances the ability to 'register' claims with the Empire that claims a lowsec region. In exchange for a small payment of some sort (ISK, towers around moons, etc.) the Empire give the corporation free reign to destroy ships of corporations with Headquarters or Offices in enemy Empire affiliated stations.

Now to balance it out and to stop the pira... I mean corporations and alliances from having life to easy anyone is allowed to engage the ships of claiming corporations without sentry gun aggro.

Also multiple corporations and alliances can claim a Region of lowsec so they would also be able to shoot each other just to make life more interesting.

Now this would need more work but I think it could make life in lowsec more interesting by reducing the amount of GCC and the consequent sentry aggro.

Capsuleer 2.0 Review

My short review. Great app, works smoothly and it's free. Throw the devs some ISK if you like it though.

Now for the longer one. Capsuleer is an EvE Online related iPhone and iPod Touch app. At its most basic it allows you to track your skills and what you're training within EvE. The user interface is a bit spartan at the moment with only three icons working with space free for many more. The developers have said that more functions are going to be added in the future.

Adding a new toon is easy to do as you just eail yourself a specifically formatted link and your API details get added. After getting the latest info from the EvE servers your current skill queue is then within a couple of clicks with easy access from there to more information about any skill in the queue. The ability to also check the Attributes and Implants of your clone is a nice touch.

Capsuleer also contains a skill browser that displays all the skills you've trained and highlights the current skills on a char's skill queue. The skill inforation page is nice as it clearly shows the description, attribuites, prereqs and training times for the skill in question. There is also a default char with all skills to level 5 that you can use to see all the skills but as all skills are at level 5 no training times are shown. This is the biggest downside I have in day to day use with the app but it isn't a very big one.

Another nice feature of Capsuleer is the built in ability to subscribe to the blogs in the Eve blogroll and the tracking of the CCP Announcements, devBlog and Patch Notes. The best bit of this I've found owning an iPod Touch is that the entries are downloaded to local storage so that it is possible to read the entries without a network connection. One small downside is the lack of support for images on the blog so if you want to see them you have to use Safari to read them.

The final neat side feature is the Server Status. Capsuleer checks the status of TQ and Singularity and the MOTD.

On the whole I'm impressed by the quality of the app and the smooth user experiance that makes using it quite enjoyable. If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch and play Eve then Capsuleer is a must have.

Capsuleer Home Page -- http://capsuleer.evesuite.com/