EVE Online: Protests continue over microtransaction row

JITA - There are unprecedented scenes in one of the busiest game areas of EVE Online today, as player protests against game owners CCP continue into a third day.

Players form a ring around the Jita Memorial

Players are angry with CCP following the most recent game expansion, dubbed "Incarna". One of the additions to the game was the "Noble Exchange", where real-life money can be exchanged (via a convoluted route of in-game items and currencies) for in-game items. Most notable amongst these is a monocle, offering no in-game benefit and costing the equivalent of a very real US $80.

But what concerns players most of all is the prospect that items that actually affect gameplay - such as ships, skills and standings with the in-game NPC factions - might be offered for sale. A CCP internal newsletter to that effect was leaked, and later confirmed to be genuine, further adding ammunition to the protester's weapons (not literally, though maybe in a later version of the Noble Exchange).

For some reason, CCP thought that this developer blog would help matters. Entirely predictably, it didn't, and angry threads on the EVE forums have nearly reached one million views and over 10,000 comments. CCP's internal attitude was revealed by another leak to EVE News 24, an internal E-mail from CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson seeming to revel in the anger sown amongst the playerbase.

The view from the hangar of the Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant station, the busiest trading hub in the game

The largest, most visible sign of the unhappiness of a large number of players has been an in-game attack on a monument in the busiest system, Jita. The monument itself bears the inscription "A memorial to the winner of the Ruevo Aram Riddle Competition, Hienky and Shin Ra of Burn Eden". The statue (which is invulnerable in the game) stands as a reminder of times when CCP were actively engaged in promoting the community of EVE Online, making the current protests all the more striking.

Hundreds of players, as well as abandoned ships, protest in Jita

 How this will play out in coming days remains to be seen. Nay-sayers will undoubtedly say nay, while some think the protesters should just leave and let them play the game in peace. Are there any precedents from other MMOs of in-game protests on this scale? The ironic thing is that it's exactly this sort of community spirit that reminds me just why I enjoyed playing EVE for so long anyway.

EVE Markets for 2011

This blog has quite a broad range of topics, including religion, technology, and internet spaceships. Today's post falls into the latter category; so if you have no interest in EVE Online you're excused!

EVE Markets has been online since May 2008, keeping track of price trends in the virtual market of EVE Online - a market complex enough that the game's developers, CCP, have a full-time economist performing analysis and producing quarterly reports with plenty of charts to keep traders informed. It was those charts that gave me the inspiration to start EVE Markets - what if we didn't have to wait for CCP EyjoG (the in-game name of Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson) to release the economic newsletter, but could have up-to-the-minute data displayed in real time, with customisable indices and lists?

So was EVE Markets born, and when I review the figures I'm always shocked at how popular the site is with users. At last count, the site has nearly 3,800 registered users; and over the course of the year the number of daily visitors has doubled, to about 400 a day. Unsurprisingly, the items most viewed are Tritanium and the 30-day PLEX; the most-viewed market group is the fullerenes.

For a site that I work on in my spare time and that started as a hobby, and which (thanks to NearlyFreeSpeech who host it) costs pennies to run, I don't think that's bad at all. During 2010, it even spawned a sister site, EVE Monitor, which tracks various public EVE APIs - sovereignty and outposts, for example - and as well as letting you view the history of a system, region or alliance, also tweets changes via @EVEMonitor. Prime focus of development remains the EVE Markets site though - in fact, some of the technology developed for Monitor is due to be ported back to EVE Markets in the coming year.

In 2010 most of the changes to EVE Markets were behind the scenes. Finally, there is database support for multiple data sources, though it's not currently live; and the underlying refactoring meant that the oldest areas of the codebase received some love and attention. The introduction into the game of Planetary RSI - sorry, Planetary Interaction - led to the addition of PI industry information alongside manufacturing and reprocessing data. The API was expanded to include a JSON-format option. And, of course, with each new expansion there were random breaking changes to the CCP data dump needing to be taken into account!

What lies ahead for EVE Markets in 2011, then?

Multiple data sources
It's been a long time coming! Sadly this will not include EVE Metrics data, since that site was closed last week. However, I'm keeping an eye on both Jitonomic and Eve-MarketData (though the former seems to be struggling at the moment). A side effect of multi-source support is that it will also be possible to track regional or even system prices - for example, comparing Jita local prices to global ones.

API improvements
It's been bugging me for a while that the API is pretty limited in what you can get from it. I'm hoping to stick to the principle that any of the data you see on the site will also be available over the API. I'd also like to be able to collect figures on API usage, since I don't have any idea how many people this affects!

UI improvements
Someone rightly pointed out that it's a pain to add a load of individual items to a list. It could be a lot easier to choose which of your lists are displayed on your summary screen, as well. These things, and other UI improvements, are on the cards for this year.

Oh - and just like so many other third-party developers, I don't actually play EVE all that much any more ;-)

Review: Advent Vega Android tablet, part two

So, "tomorrow" kind of disappeared into a fit of preparation for carol services... but here is part two of my review of the Advent Vega (part one here).

At the end of Part One, I said that installing a custom ROM (such as the one from MoDaCo that I used) was the only sensible approach to the Vega. Without the standard wave of Google functionality the Vega is essentially crippled. With Market, Gmail, and the other Mountain View offerings in place, the Vega suddenly becomes a very powerful tablet indeed.

Having Market access naturally explodes the functionality of the Vega. Of the apps I've tried so far, nearly all have had no problems working on the 10.1" screen, though one or two insisted on rendering on a phone-sized portion of the screen, making them awkward to use. The rest seemed to make good use of the extra real estate, with the games Angry Birds and Air Control being great at that size; and the onscreen keyboard is big enough for me to type at a reasonable fraction of my usual speed, albeit with slightly lower accuracy without the tactile click of physical keys.

On the subject of keyboards - there's no need to stick with the Android default. I tried a couple of options, including Smart Keyboard and SwiftKey trials, before finally opting to pay a couple of quid for the full version of the latter. I still wouldn't choose to write an essay on it if I had a laptop with me, but for reasonably quick text entry it works well.

At least, it works well when the thing isn't plugged in. When it's charging, something seems to happen to the touchscreen; it seems to register phantom touches, and it can make typing impossible (when eevverrrry kkkeyy gggeettss mmuulltttipplee prreesseeesss). I've only noticed this when the tablet is plugged in, though (and mine isn't the only one to behave like this).

That leads me nicely on to talking about the Vega's battery life. I've not got any firm figures, just anecdotes from using it for a couple of weeks, and I can say that the battery will easily last an entire day of use - I think my colleagues and I managed to get it down from 100% at 9am to about 25% by the time I tore myself away from it to sleep that evening. Recharging to full normally takes a couple of hours, though make sure you have something small and opaque to place over the charging light if you charge it overnight as I do, or the purple blinking will drive you mad.

There are a couple of other limitations the Vega has over, say, the Samsung Galaxy Tab (on paper; not having the latter I can't really perform a true comparison. Donations welcome...!). There's no 3G, so if you're not in a wifi hotspot there's no data for you. There's no vibration (ahem) so Android's haptic feedback settings are redundant - though I don't like it much on my phone anyway. And there are no hardware "Home" or "Menu" buttons - though the latter is simulated with a long press on the physical Back button, and all three have buttons on the Vega's always-present notification bar, which mercifully has been made smaller in the MoDaCo ROM (if you pay for access to the custom "ROM Kitchen" - well worth it IMO).

Further - though it has a full size USB-A socket, which might imply that you could connect USB drives and such, the device is configured as a USB guest and not a host so you can't. Someone on the Internet has found a Korean rebadged version of the same hardware with USB host support, so it's only a matter of time before this feature arrives in a custom ROM for the Vega. This also means you can't yet get clever and plug in a 3G dongle for a data connection; and you'll have varying degrees of luck if you try configuring your phone as a wireless access point, since many phones can only manage ad-hoc and not infrastructure modes, and Android so far refuses to connect to the former.

There's been a lot of discussion about the display. People have complained about limited viewing angles, especially in portrait. Personally, while you can't by any means still read the screen through a 180-degree arc, the viewing angle simply hasn't been a problem or even that noticeable in normal use. The only time it's been an issue has been when it's sat on the desk in front of me - it needs to be propped up a little to make it readable - but my desk is cluttered enough that a jury-rig solution has always been to hand!

Use Cases

The question lots of people pose about tablets - be they the Cupertino fondleslab or any of the other variants around - is what are they actually for? So here are some situations where I either have found a place for the Vega or can see it would be useful, if those situations existed in my life...

• Checking details on (eg) Bugzilla during our morning stand-up meeting at work
• Checking details on (eg) Facebook during our morning stand-up meeting at work
• On the bus/train as an RSS feed reader (with offline sync with apps like NewsRob)
• "Hey, Mum, read this news article, you'll find it interesting" before passing her the device
• As an e-book reader; the screen's no e-ink but it's more than adequate. (I also have the YouVersion bible application installed, though I haven't tested this in anger yet.)
• Using VNC to interact with another computer - this is how I controlled the lighting for the church carol services last week. I could equally have controlled the sound desk
• Sitting on the sofa watching telly with housemates, while flicking through Facebook or Twitter or chatting to someone over messenger

I'm sure I could think of more - I haven't even covered the possibilities for media (iPlayer works great), which a lot of people would see as a major role - and, certainly, there's overlap there with what netbooks, notebooks, desktops and phones could achieve. But I'm convinced that there's a definite gap in the market for this form of device - and if you can have it for half the price of the Apple offering, and without the draconian limits that Steve Jobs puts on his device, then why not?

To sum up: the Vega isn't the perfect tablet, but for the price I'm very happy indeed with the purchase. As Android gets developed more for the larger form factor, and as the online community continues to play around unlocking more of the device's functionality, then it can only become even better.