EVE General Discussion

So seeing sites like dotlan and major killboards evekill/zkillboard be almost essential to eves play and vistied many times by almost every single eve player daily why doesnt CCP hire the creators and or take the site under thier wing to make sure better running.

I know iv used dotlan hundreds of times daily since starting to play and the recent lovers quarell between evekill and zkillboard has left eve with some rather iffy functioning public killboards, i know everyone used to use battleclinic back in the day and then it went to evekill then within the past few months evekill hasnt been pulling half the kills and have been migrating to zkillboard but its had alot of downtime following the problem between the 2 site runners of both so it leads again to my question why does a third party and non dev have to provide tools that im pretty sure even ccp uses, same applys to any sort of out of game ship fitting program. Why are there no official ones from CCP?

I don't see Chribba relinquishing control from some of his sites soon (maybe over his cold, dead veldspar laced body) :P

LOLOLOL good one!

Evekill missing half of the kills in eve and zkillboard being constantly down and battleclinic not being updated in the past 10 years doesnt seem very powerfull. Even thirdparty killboards are having problems since they cant pull from either of the main killboards. Jesus could you imagine if dotlan would go down? I know eve lived back then but most jump related anythings would crawl to a standstill. I would much rather have ccp at least give backup support so these important third party sites dont go down leave the community in the dark. even sites such as eveskunk are falling behind.

this

Don't get me wrong, I feel just as worried as you losing dotlan, evemon, zkb or any of the other amazing sites out there. So CCP taking over sites sounds good, in theory, one of the main advantages (imo) that them being 3rd party is that they are (most of the time anyway) driven and developed by dedicated fans that have a closer relation to their fellow users, and as such the sites and tools become more "what we want".

I'm not saying CCP doesn't listen or try to accommodate what the players want, because they do, but they also have a business vision and a business plan to fit into this. I feel that it's here where the power is lost, because they will constantly need to evaluate if their investments is in line with the business plan, and if spending money on it lives up to its ROI (this goes for most things not all obviously).

There's plenty of things that have been lost or almost lost in the past due to the fact that CCP is after all a company with a business plan. Just look at the old screenshot section (the one I mirrored over at http://timeline.eve-files.com/ ) or the old character portraits (the portrait server).

For me, I don't have to worry about if the things I create will make a high ROI because I get to do them purely because I want to (and of course I have the ability to do so), I don't have to think about a business plan and because of that I have an easier time spending time on a feature that is useless - but it's there because you wanted it to be there.

That's what I mean by them being more powerful in our hands. With that said, like I said before, I do share your fear or losing some of the best tools out there, but I would much rather see another dedicated and passionate player developer take over such projects (if at all possible) than having to fear CCP suddenly dropping a project because it is suddenly not worth the time.

/c

LOL.. Doc needed a good laugh this morning.

CCP can't even Forum, and OP wants them to take over 3rd party sites that are actually useful.

Careful what you wish for.

Because then I'd need to make "Dotlan Enhancer" and "Killboard Enhancer" alts, and that's too much effort.

Developer time is not cheap. I code and maintain a dinky browser extension to make the Eve forums more livable, and if I were to have billed for all the work I've done on it, it would be somewhere around $10k. Something like Dotlan, evekill, or zKB is far, far more extensive, and requires the work of multiple people. They are given free to the community by people who code as a hobby, saw a problem, and said "yeah, I'll fix that; looks fun".

If CCP were to take over, it would have two effects. First, development would slow down as it would now be driven by money, and developer time shared with other projects. It would also likely cease to be open-source, and the development process would get integrated into the same feature/bug tracking system that is used for everything else.

Second, development of other 3rd party tools would also slow. The presence of an "official" tool has that effect on 3rd party development.

So, it boils down to "if 3rd party devs are going to improve our game more than we would be able to, and for free, let them!"

Well, with the inclusion of market data in the CREST API, maybe they can pull in live prices once a day to keep the kill mails more current.

There are no financial incentives for CCP to take over thirdparty sites.

They'd need to create a department that runs and supports those sites. Which is much more expensive than giving someone a free account and a fanfest ticket. A free account and a fanfest tickets is not even enough to cover the salary of ONE staff member.