Status Report Type Post!

Some days I feel like the two office monkeys in the picture too busy checking progress to make any actual progress. All the training plans and ISK making plans and plans for how to fly through dangerous space and plans on what to buy/sell for trading. I swear some days the status of each plan and making sure that the project is on track is why EVE has corporations as groups of players. It’s seriously more work than my real life job tracking each and every project. Spreadsheets in Space might be a mocking term used to describe EVE but well with all the moving parts to track. A lot of the time I feel the need to create spreadsheets to track aspects of my EVE time. As such I have many spreadsheets on one of my gaming rigs at home.

To make matters worse this week my RL job has me in Atlanta Georgia whipping a remote data center into shape. I am away from my comfortable gaming sanctuary with all its raw power and vast screen resolutions playing on a laptop. While I have at night more free time to play EVE this laptop can just render the pilot portraits. That’s on the highest performance settings, plugged into an over sized power brick, with a gun held to its CPU. So let’s just say PvP is not happening, in fact the letters P v P lag out when I type them in MS Word on this pocket calculator. Anyhow I have all this time on my hands and about the only things I can do with it are trade, mine, or finish moving my P.I. colonies.

OK so I am not at home where I have all my spreadsheets that I use to calculate this, that, or the other. So as I redesign my P.I. colonies and hunt about for things to trade I find that I am missing the little table I have at home that I update from market feeds from Jita etc. I am missing the exact daily inputs for my production colony. THEN zombienutz announces that he has room in his training queue via capsuleer on my iPhone. I don’t have EVEMON installed and begin to hyperventilate trying to remember what skill is next in the plan. Traveling and playing EVE without your army of external EVE resources is a right royal pain in the balls.

What if EVE had some capacity to build training plans and store them much like EVEMON? What if also P.I. had some sense of flow charts (there is a nice picture on the schematic) that could be used to track colony input and output ratios then tie them to profits. Why must I maintain a spreadsheet of all the markets I choose to trade in (yeah I know there are community web sites) in an environment where conscience can be captured and dumped into another body. To me EVE and the concept of corporations scream better corporate like tracking tools. Not going to talk about the horrid corporation management tools because really there are NONE to talk about.

Anyhow! I have all the time in the world for the next few nights to play EVE. Sadly PvP is out on this 1990’s cell phone of a laptop. So it’s ISK making activities for me. I just wish there was more integrated tools to manage it all.

Cheers

EVE SOB