Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'll flesh this out a bit more when I get home from work, but the gist of it is that there is a buttload of improvement that can be made to the market and manufacturing of mods and ships. Right now everyone is trying to sell the exact same thing, thousands of people all making the exact same ship, only trying to sell theirs for cheaper than the last guy.

Why can't there be some variation introduced, why can't Teams be reworked into something that can boost the qualities of a ship across a 4, 5, or 6-point scale, which introduces the need for corporate branding of a ship. This in turn gives corporations and alliances more incentive to behave as Corporations or alliances instead of political bodies.

I'll post more on this when I get home.

So the whole concept would be based around improving a ship based on certain predetermined categories, things like hull and armor, damage, speed, sig radius, maybe bonuses, stuff like that. These factors would be affected partly by the skill of the builder and partly by the specialization of the worker team, and could only be improved up to a certain point before severely impacting other attributes, as well, certain bonuses could be baked in in order to introduce variation on the different types of ships.

Such an undertaking would probably require a major overhaul of the market system, but it would bring us that much closer to a true capitalist economy. In addition, this change would help bolster the use of ship paint jobs and decals. Who wouldn't want to buy a Black Legion or Goonswarm-branded CNR, for example, maybe it'd have a slightly better bonus towards tanking or speed. It'd give us something to compete in the market over other than simply price and volume.

As well this concept adds to the meta-game by introducing actual marketing and opens up an opportunity for advertising.

This sounds very similar to Navy faction edition ships, like Vexor Navy Issues for example. Navy ships are most notable for having more hitpoints and often having a different slot layout and hull bonus. You're proposing that players could make ships with more hitpoints, among other things, at a greater cost.

Let me start with "that sounds nice". It does have some problems though. It will need to have a similar cost-benefit curve to Faction ships in order to keep Faction ships in their comfy place. That I'm sure you've already considered. The other problem is that there is presently no system for naming or selling "variations" of ships on the market. T3s are a good example, in that nobody knows what to call a certain subsystem setup, and can't sell the fitted T3 on the market. Contracts are a clunky way to do it, so you'll need to flesh out exactly how these ships will vary from one to another and how they will be findable on the market.

And my two cents, you should really tightly limit the things that can be bonused on a hull, ie only shield hp on a given Caldari ship, or only capacitor on a given Amarr. Simply because Nevyin is right - the more variations of something you introduce, the balancing work just becomes massive and impossible. See T3s.

It doesn't get a "no" right away. Keep working on it.

not to mention the load it would put on the data base

So, assuming the potential for minor changes to stats, (lets say 2.5% total in 0.5% increments,) for each of the 170+ ships in game, (plus so many modules I just can't be bothered to count them,) would mean that the ships alone would effectively create an additional 850 assets for the server per stat that can be altered.

Also, no one will want anything but the 'optimal' variants, so anything else would be pointless, or at best marginalised.

So, in short, the server would be so heavily bogged down it would kill the game.

But what about the benefits of this system:
A few privilaged individuals who can get access to a specific resource to alter their products create a monoply.

Yeah, no thanks. If everyone creates items that are equal, then the system ends up being equal. Once you start adding in these kinds of variations, especially through limited resouces, then you open the opportunity for monopolisation. Have you even heard of Goons? Oh, wait...