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Comment by kjs3 | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone wants to play a game where Excel is a requirement.

I guess it's also true that not everyone wants to play a game where an Excel add-in is not available.

Please note, Excel is not a requirement to play EVE Online, it is only useful to have an add-in for some roles.

Further, for most popular games, Excel doesn't even make sense. Parent's request for more games to be more accessible to external tools like Excel is not a request to make Excel access your CoD game state, don't be dense.

> not a request to make Excel access your CoD game state, don't be dense.

Hey one could imagine cool things to crunch that data lmao

Microsoft Excel for Xbox ?

Excbox

Xboxcel

Dense? Who's the one who missed the joke, and then doubled down on missing the point?

The parent is excited because the game they like to play is so baroque and complicated, that full participation requires external data processing (yes I know you don't have to use Excel or anything else, but amongst the dozen or so regular EVE Online players I know, including one former EO QA tester, every single one uses Excel to some extent to track their game, so YMMV). The point is not every game needs visibility at the API level, so why should the game developers waste time providing it. My grandma's casino sim games don't need an API; wins and losses are tracked quite easily in the app. If you need an API and an external tool to play Farmville or some such, I think you're missing the point just a touch. Does my city building sim need an API? I guess I can think of a few things that an API could provide. Would I use it? Why, it's just a game.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the game you like needs an API, everything need an API. Same mentality.

My brother in christ, you are are a casual, and there's nothing wrong with that, but leave the serious gaming for the hardcore players.

No problem, sport, it's all yours. Just keep your APIs, Excel spreadsheets, game-as-job and the rest of the hardcoreness down in your mom's basement where it belongs.

Crusader Kings II/III w/ Excel?

Also, have to love that Microsoft is actually involved here. Makes me wish that Activision buy out goes through.

EVE Online has the nickname "Spreadsheets in Space" for a reason, though. There are many aspects of the game where you don't need a spreadsheet, so you're not forced to play this part of the game. However, if you want to do anything serious within research, production or sales, then spreadsheets quickly become your friends. And API calls and scripting.

that moniker came from the visual appearance of the old UI circa 2010.

The "old UI circa 2010" is like the second refresh, and the game already had the reputation back in 2007 when I started playing. It refers to the big business players, who actually play the game like they're real life companies.

I was guessing at the date, because I started shortly after launch when I was a wee lad. The way I remember it is the joke was because of the way every window had rows and boxes, with data inside. I don't actually recall people using actual excel spreadsheets for much other than enjoying the meme because a lot of the things we use excel for in industry now did not exist yet at the time. (Maybe comparing ship stats before the compare tool got better?)

I'm not so much arguing with you as presenting how I remember it. We could both be right, or one or the other, it's not important... I'm just an old scordite miner getting ready to retire, so out of the generosity in my heart, anybody who sends me some ISK today, I'll go ahead and double it - no strings attached. It's time to get out of the game anyway.

Very true.

I just wanted to add how much farther that the "Spreadsheets" analogy goes with a few examples:

There are actually custom ERP and management resources that have been developed by the eve community like the Alliance Auth project and a large group has even a issued a cryptocurrency to automatically manage in-game payouts for certain types of ship losses. There are the requisite and copious discord, irc, and xmpp integrations, but there are also automated mapping projects, and large scale data analysis projects. There are projects which seek to analyze ship losses for intelligence and counter intelligence purposes. There are background checks, escrow services, automatic billing service for eg logistics (trucking services) and in fact there have been several functional _casinos_.

The excel plugin looks to add a lot of additional capability to the spreadsheets, since now you can integrate all of this information into whatever analytics you would like to create with excel, which is of course quite powerful.

The funny thing is, that you can extend excel with c# to do basically anything. So just by having the Plugin in excel allows for c# interop

99% of players don't use spreadsheets

but just like real life, the 1% own the majority of stuff and need to use spreadsheets or software to plan stuff out

very apt metaphor

Don't really see how that enters the equation.

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