Watching my Skill Queue and the Decay of the EVE Online Ecosystem

I was a little worried on Saturday.  EVE University was doing an update to their wiki and my gut response to that was a deeply felt “please don’t break anything.”  It is one of the EVE Online community resources I lean on regularly and its departure would be missed.

A core of the New Eden community

Also, it would leave a ton of dead links on my site, which is what happened when CCP shut down the game wiki they were running.

Fortunately, not too long later, there was a message saying that the update was a success.  The wiki carries on.

Op success!

I should go donate some money at their Patreon.  I probably won’t, but in the words of Todd Rosenberg, the fact that I seriously considered doing so will make me feel better about myself. (I bring him up because I found an Odd Todd sweatshirt in a drawer and I had to sit and think about which economic downturn and layoffs that was from.

Shout out if you have any memories of this…

It was the Dot Com crash of 2001, which was like four Wall Street induced economic crises ago by my count.  Welcome to capitalism!)

As usual, I am off on a tangent, so back to the main thread here.

The Equinox expansion brought a host of new things, including new skills to learn, which meant that I was at least momentarily interested keeping an eye on my training queue.  I remember a time when that was almost an obsession.  In the days before the training queue you had to keep an eye on EVEMon to make sure you knew when to log in and start another skill because time subscribed without a skill training was time UTTERLY WASTED!

Old hands will remember being admonished to start training a long skill the day before an expansion as we never know how long the downtime would be or if CCP would do something wrong, like delete your boot.ini file.  (And no, I am never letting go of that bit of ancient history.)

Things are better now, but I do still feel a bit of the old obsession to stare at some utility while not logged into the game to see exactly where current skill training stands.

This is especially dumb because my currently training skill is Jump Portal Generation V, which I am a good 68 days from learning as of when this post goes live.

The top of my skill queue currently

I want that skill because I need it to do the carrier conduit jump and I want to have that capability.  I have a carrier, a twelve year old Archon that I bought back when we lived up in Delve and have never once used in combat to my recollection.  That is largely because nobody wants a carrier in the fleet when every capital pilot has a super carrier and because I can never remember how to use fighters.

Seriously, I’ve been through three Imperium capital training ops on how to use fighters and I know how to used them when the class is done, then I don’t use fighters at all and six months later when I think about it I have totally forgotten how to use them.

Odds are I’ll never use it, or if I am in a situation where a fleet needs somebody to do this, there will be two dozen others ready to go who also know how to use fighters.  But maybe, some day, Asher will need somebody in some set of circumstances and I’ll be the only one at hand who can manage it.  Be prepared.

So I want to be able to bring up my training queue and stare at it, all the better to make the training go faster.

But what can I stare at?

I mean, we used to have an official app from CCP, the EVE Portal Companion App, which showed up back in 2019.

EVE Portal App

I was not a fan, the app’s primary purposes seeming to be allowing PLEX trading.  But I had to admit that it did have some utility, including the ability to manage your training queue offline.

And I still have the app on my phone… the way I still have Harry Potter: Wizards Unite… because I am that kind of person.  But tapping on it gets me nothing because CCP gave up on the app last November.

So no joy there.

But the EVE Online community provides!  There must be some app out there I can use.

Except, there really aren’t that many other options.

There is the Neocom II app on iOS, the author of which lives in Belarus and went silent after the  anti-Lukashenko protests after the last election there, so I was told.

This version is made with moon goo

As such, the Neocom II app, while a fine app and well worth the money I spent on it, has been slowly decaying as EVE gets updated.  As such, no new skills show up in the skill queue in the app now and any sales transaction for a new item causes an error in the app.

But at least Jump Portal Generation is an old skill, so it appears in the app allowing me to stare at its progress on the couch, in bed, at the kitchen table, or any number of other household locations.  Except, it is wrong.  Look at what it tells me.

Things are thirteen days faster on the Neocom II app!

For whatever reason… CCP no doubt made some change with Equinox… the training progress in the app is somewhat more optimistic than what the in-game queue, pictured up the page, is telling me by nearly 13 days.  Also, you can see the Upwell skills simply don’t show up the way they do in game.

Anyway, that seems to leave Neocom II out.  I’ll still watch it to keep an eye on my PI and a few other things, but another aspect of it is now broken.

So my next stop is EVEMon.  Good old reliable EVEMon, which has been around since just after I started playing EVE Online.

I mean, it is past its prime.  It hasn’t been the same since Battle Clinic, which used to host its development page, went away back in 2016.  But it gets updates now and then, though where it lives can be a chore to find.  I think the link in the about page of the app is wrong, but the links in the EVEMon thread on the forums still seems good.

So how is that doing?  Well, on the bright side, it at least puts in placeholders for the skills it doesn’t know about.

My skill queue in EVEMon

On the down side, it seems to have the same problem with the training time for Jump Portal Generation V… though the first of the Unknown Skills seems to have the correct training time for the skill listed.  That seems odd, but at least I can see it somewhere I suppose.

Like I said, EVEMon does get updates now and then… and they even alert you and allow you to download and install them directly from the app… but there isn’t a lot of news going on that front.  The last update I see was in 2021, which doesn’t give one much hope.

It could get an update I suppose… or it might never get one.  So it goes.

I fished around a bit more and found EVE Skillplan.net, which is better in that it does get the time for the one skill correct, but then doesn’t acknowledge any of the new skills and it is about 6 million skill points shy of being accurate for my total skill points… which, now that I mention it, so is EVEMon… pegging me at 258 million SP when I am close to 265 million. It also doesn’t look like the site has been updated for a while, and his ISK tip jar has received zero ISK this month.

So I am feeling that gap in the EVE Online community that supports the game with the news and utilities and information that CCP has been consistently unable to supply on its own for the last 21 years.

This is the pain of depending on your customers to essentially do things for free.  When they are done with your game anything they built tends to fall apart.

And that’s when I start worrying about things like the EVE Uni Wiki and DOTLAN EVE Maps and zKillboard, all of which support the community for a few donations now and then but mostly out of the goodness of their collective hearts and their passion for the game.