I sit here a hopeful Merc....

I was present during one of Eve University's regular Q&A last night.

I was pleased and gratified at the number of questions we had about Dust and Dust University itself. I tried to answer as best as I could while dancing on the edges of the NDA. What was being asked genuinely encouraged me that Dust has the interest of many players of Eve and the increasing member numbers of Dust University delights me no end. I feel that I'm a part of the beginning of something special.

But......

There is a group of folks that no amount of numbers or happy talk is going to convince them of the merits of Dust and what it can bring to New Eden. They are entrenched in a dogma that will not let them see beyond their gaming mouse and keyboard.

That dogma is PC gamer elitism.

The refusal to believe that gaming on any format other than PC has any form of merit and is to sneered at. In a word, snobs.

I'd like to believe that it's just sour grapes that CCP decided to go down the populist route and make Dust 514 for consoles and not for their precious PC's. But it's deeper than that. The fact that it makes perfect financial sense for CCP to go for an untapped source of income and introduce a new audience to the wonders of New Eden makes no dent in the mindset of such players.

The increasing of the population of the world they like to play in and the opportunities that will bring them in the long term doesn't seem to interest them. They think Dust is something that isn't going to effect them. It's new form of PI.

And for the moment they may be correct. But not for long.

It was very telling that in the first section of the freshly released minutes of the recent CSM winter summit that CCP Unifix, Jon Lander, pointed at an iPad and wondered out loud why PI wasn't being done on that rather than being tied to using an Eve client.

Increasingly in the mind of CCP, New Eden is a destination for players to make a trip to do things they couldn't do anywhere else. And CCP want to enable them to get there as quickly as possible and more importantly however they want to get there. The mode of transport is increasingly irrelevant to CCP. It's what Crest and the new generation of api is all about, enabling access to New Eden via browsers, smartphones, tablets and other mobile platforms.

Oh, the quintessential way to play Eve is always going to be on a desktop, don't get me wrong on that. But the influence of those players that stubbornly refuse to embrace the new ways is going to diminish over time. What's the point of cornering the market in a secluded section of the galaxy, sticking to the model thats served you well in the first 10 years of Eve when someone can hire PS3 Merc's to destabilise the sovereignty of your trade routes or play the stock market to your disadvantage from the comfort of an app on their iPhone. That's what's the second ten years of Eve is going to be about.

Ditch your snobbish prejudices now. They're going to get you creamed in New Eden soon.