Ships & Modules

Before I go into the details of what I am thinking I want to make a few things clear:

1) There is a reason for what I am doing. I am not doing this just to annoy people who run killboards.
2) At this point no changes have been made, I am looking for some feedback.
3) Doing it right and setting the bar for all turrets.
4) Feedback please!

Before going into what I would like to change I want to talk quickly about what goes into the name of a weapon.

Let's look at small blasters for an example of things working well:

There are three basic types of small blasters:
Light Electron
Light Ion
Light Neutron

We then have (not looking at faction) 5 basic versions of those:
Blaster I
Anode Particle Cannon I
Limited Blaster I
Modal Particle Accelerator I
Regulated Phase Cannon I
Blaster II

Each of the five above versions takes the type name and slots it into the version name somewhere. For some it is at the beginning, for others it is after the first word. What you end up with though is basically this:

$versionPrefix $typeName $versionName

Knowing this we can easily and predictably create a list of small blasters:
Light Electron Blaster I
Anode Light Electron Particle Cannon I
Limited Light Electron Blaster I
Modal Light Electron Particle Accelerator I
Regulated Light Electron Phase Cannon I
Light Electron Blaster II

Now this is a case of the design working right. Just don't go looking many other places for it to actually work this well.

Continuing on the "what is in the name" but on a slightly different track I want to talk about sizes. This is referring to light, medium, heavy, mega, large, and whatever else we use to talk about size. The size of a weapon should match the market group it is in. Small for weapons in the small group, medium for... well you get the idea.

Next up is the meta level descriptor. Small Pulse Lasers use the following (in order):
Afocal (meta level 1)
Modal (meta level 2)
Anode (meta level 3)
Modulated (meta level 4)

Small Blasters use:
Regulated (meta level 1)
Limited (meta level 2)
Anode (meta level 3)
Modal (meta level 4)

So Modal is used across different weapon groups, but with different meanings. It hurts. Luckily though our kind writing department came up with a solution to this nonsense for all equipment. A standerdized meta level descriptor. A quick reminder of how that looks:
Upgraded (meta level 1)
Limited (meta level 2)
Experimental (meta level 3)
Prototype (meta level 4)

This common meta level was applied to lots of things such as shield hardeners, propulsion modules, and armor plating to name a few.

So that is what we think should go into a weapon's name. If you take it and apply that logic to just about any weapon group I am sure you will find it fails. We need to start somewhere though. If you ask around the EVE community most people will agree that lasers have the most confusing naming convention as it stands. So start there we shall.

So what is wrong with lasers right now and why fix them? Well hopefully you have read above and once I point out the what, the why will be obvious.

Here are the three main things wrong when looking at the small pulse laser group on the market:
We have three different weapon types in there all with different sizes. Light pulse, medium pulse, and just pulse.
There are lots of cases where the version of the weapon name destroys the actual name of the weapon instead of just merging with it.
The meta level names don't match the rest of the inventory.

So starting with pulse lasers, what could a revamped laser section look like? Before I show this I want to reiterate something I said at the beginning and just now: This is just a design right now, this is what it could look like. Could look like. OK, so on with pretty pictures.

http://i.imgur.com/wQ8MK.png

Random other notes:
* Faction/Storyline/Officer mods do not include the I on the end. Keep it like this? Or include it? I am leaning towards keeping it as is.
* Galting is renamed to Spiral in this case, this is not a sure thing. Lots of people wanted it changed last time this was talked about. So I was playing around testing.

And since my last graphic was more spreadsheet than anything, and Google failed to give me anything near what I wanted, here is my terrible designer art attempting to show how lasers hate life: http://i.imgur.com/hawIF.png

Spriral sounds weird, but other than that, more logic in naming conventions is great. I always thought that whoever came up with these names did it to confuse new players :/

What does spriral even mean? :D It doesn't sound bad, but yeah.

I'm guessing Spiral but I don't like it either way. Needs more work.

I think the other one on the list was Strobe...

I don't think anyone has any qualms about fixing everything to fit one naming scheme. When prop mods and shield hardeners changed, it was a slight annoyance for like 30 minutes then it was just as good as always. One thing to keep in mind is making stuff easy to search for on the market though. Like when I'm fitting up a Drake (for example) and I want 3 kinds of hardeners, its nice to be able to type "field ii" and they all pop up. making it (prefix) Electron Blaster II or whatever would be p cool just because that would make navigating the market in general easier.

In this case the nice thing is if you search for "pulse i" or "pulse ii" you will get all pulse lasers. They won't be filtered by size in this case, but yes.

Kinda makes me want to put "i" on the end of all the faction/officer/storyline weapons...

A consistent naming convention over weapon types would be fab. I've been playing a while and I still have to look up the meta level on weapons. Tbh I like the Upgraded, Limited etc.. thing, perhaps just use that for weapons too. Less to remember.

I'd like it so if I saw the word "prototype" in the name, I'd know it was meta level 4.

As someone actually writing a fitting tool (aka, I will get issues with this in pyfa):

I like it.

However, wouldn't it be better to do everything in one big swoop ? That'd mean we (=app developpers / KB maintainers / etc.) get to deal with **** once and then get it over with instead of having to do it every expansion again and again when another set of modules gets renamed.

It only appears so many times because the beauty of spreadsheets is changing one field and them all changing. Turns out it can also be a bad thing. Not sure how no one here, or from the CSM forum, noticed this. >< Whatever, no big deal. I have updated the sheet to refer to them as Gatling as people seem to prefer that, which is fine by me. :)