Shadow of Cerberus
Public => EVE World News => Thema gestartet von: Aura am März 08, 2013, 09:04:18 Vormittag
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Data is data
There isn't much point to this post... just a little afternoon geek philosophy for you.
One of the things that's always bugged me about EVE in a low-level way is how the communications technology in their century is worse than the communications technology in ours. Isn't this supposed to be the future?
On planet Earth if I want to buy something in New York City or put in a bid on an auction in London, I ultimately have to use really advanced science called a "transmitter" to make that happen. But it can happen: I need not be physically present to buy something. I can get on-line and see the price of a variety of company stocks or products all over the world. I can even have them shipped right to my door. In EVE, though, I can't place a bid on a contract in another region and I can't even see the market in Jita unless I'm physically in The Forge. The latter drives a lot of the cache scraping mechanics that EVE market websites have to go through to show us the latest EVE market prices.
CCP could put a stop to about half of this immediately if we could look at prices and place orders remotely. How many of you have asked on your alliance's comms, "anybody got a Jita alt?" or just logged in your own Jita alt to check prices or to buy a few things you had no intention of immediately picking up? A lot, I'm guessing. Granted, it'd cause a bit more server load, lots of people being able to check the Jita market or place a bid on an auction in Jita from wherever they are. But ultimately that server load comes from somewhere anyway because of people logging in Jita alts and cache scraping.
Hey Red Frog? New business for you: I put a shopping list into a website somewhere, one line at a time. It kicks me out a ticket number. I paste that ticket number into an EVE mail, send an account some ISK. You do the shopping for me and then deliver the stuff to me where I specify. eve.amazon.com. Go!
The contract one just makes no sense to me at all. Why has it ever been the case that you can only bid on contracts in your own region? What does CCP get out of this?
In a similar way, in the real world if I taste a cookie that I like and I ask for the recipe, I can get it. And that recipe can be stored on an e-mail server in New York City, but that doesn't prevent me from baking the cookie in California. But in EVE, I need to physically be near to the presence of a BPO or BPC in order to build the item that blueprint describes. I kind of, sort of get this for BPCs: they're license keys, not the actual product. But for BPOs? Other than the fact that I'm putting them at risk by putting them into space, why must I have copies of BPOs at every station I work or why must I carry them around? Is the risk part of the equation sufficient reason for all that lifting, hauling, and carrying?
Granted, there is a risk involved in moving BPOs around and I'm of course all for that. Likewise, I guess I like the mechanic of having to buy multiple BPOs for things since they're a ISK sink. But how does a programmer in Iceland even think of that mechanic, and how did he sell it to his boss? "There's these blueprints, see, and you need them to build things. Only it's not tied to the character... anyone that physically takes ownership of them can use them. But you can only build them once per blueprint. And if you're a region away from the blueprint, you can't build those things at all. And if your blueprint gets blown up you have to buy a brand new one and you forget everything your character learned about that last blueprint." Huh? At some point, someone had to think all that up. Who was this guy?
Data is data, except in EVE where not only can your cookie recipe get blown up, but you permanently forget how to bake cookies if that happens. ;-) But yet I can restart my PI extractors from half-way across the galaxy? How did that happen?
And before you ask, no, I didn't get any blueprints blown up. I'm just geeking out about this. It happens sometimes: I think of these things that are weird about EVE and I get to actually thinking about them. Discuss.
Source: Data is data (http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2013/03/data-is-data.html)