[Kipper]

By day (and night, and weekend) I'm a web (PHP) developer and I work for myself, so I like to take on these little hobby projects as places to test out some ideas that aren't on clients sites, then I can filter the best ideas down into the next paid-for projects.

I want to get into mobile too though because its a perfect companion for the sort of database driven web stuff that I mainly do (I code, I don't design).

While I agree with you that the actual data format will likely be JSON and/or XML, which is great - what's holding me back at the moment (other than time) is not knowing whether or not I should allow people to set up their own characters in the web database with faction selection etc, or whether or not that will all be done in game and it can just be accessed by submitting some sort of unique-to-the-player API key similar to how EVE online is (or was, last time I looked).

Unless they're going to allow people to make purchases or set up missions etc externally, then I can kind of see whey they might just put the stats behind a simple developer API key (just so they know who is doing what); after all - you can hardly grief someone just by being able to access their kill/death stats, and the map stuff will be the same to everyone anyway.