Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is an offshoot of an idea idea regarding Orca cargobay reconfiguration that was being tossed around by a few guys in a chat channel. Basically the idea was that based on how much of the ship skill for the Orca that you trained up, you could "shift" around the different cargoholds into each other.

On the current default config, you have:

Corporate Hanger Bay: 40k
Regular Cargo Bay: 30k.

What they had suggested was to have the ability to shift one around to the other, percentage based on the level of the Industrial Command Ships skill level.

Note: what follows is a totally radical idea and one that I'm firing off the top of my head, so forgive me if it has the flavor of such.


Why not go one farther?

What I propose is so radical, so game-changing that is has the potential to totally reshape how Eve is played in every single aspect. Allow players the ability to change our ships, much like how T3 is done, but without needing the subsystems to do it. This 'ship respec' would work in that by changing one attribute, you will lessen the other much like attribute respec'ing. We'll take a simple ship as an example: the Kestrel.

2 Low Slots
4 Medium Slots
4 High Slots

Shield:

EM: 0
Exp: 50
Kin: 40
Therm: 20

Say that you wanted to have another high slot for...whatever reason, another missile launcher. (These are example values, I would expect MUCH tweaking by CCP). So to have another high slot changed to 5, you need to give up one medium and one low slot. Changed layout is:

1 Low
3 Medium
5 High

Or how about a rebalance of the shield attributes?

EM: 20
Exp: 40
Kin: 40
Therm: 10

(Note that these values are not absolute, basically you have to subtract values from one pool to add to another, on a sliding scale)

These are just two examples of what can be done. Now imagine changing ANY ship attribute, by rebalancing different attributes. When you start thinking like that, you have endless variations on ships. Want more range on a sniping battleship? You got it, but your lock time is doubled. Up the capacitor recharge rate, but lose capacitor amount. Heck, this setup can even work on ship bonuses. Take the Kestrel (I'm Caldari, sorry) as an example:

Caldari Frigate skill bonus per level:
5% bonus to Light Missile and Rocket damage
10% bonus to Missile velocity

Increase the bonus to damage at the expensive of losing the velocity bonus, and vice versa.


Now, why would I think of this, and what possible benefit could this do to Eve? Simple: variety. Imagine a fleet of Drakes (easy example). Everyone in Eve knows the capabilities of Drakes, how they're fitted for damage, and most probably how they're fitted for tanks, with resists, range, etc. This idea would allow almost infinite variety for just a single shiptype, or even a single ship. No longer would fleet fights mean who has the most damage, or typical fleet loadouts, or even the most ships.

Now, naturally, how are you going to figure out what to do against ships to where each time you face the same enemy they can have a totally different setup? Simple: make ship scanners useful. Perhaps a buff to range, maybe a change to see the current changes on the ship with a % of chance that it's wrong, reduced by a new skill with a 100% chance of correct scanning at level V.

Now, this idea would mean that each fleet engagement will be unique. It would free people from the rigid doctrines of current fleet fighting, to say nothing of every single other aspect of the game dealing with ships. Transport, mining, PvP, PvE, logistics, fleet warfare......


I have no idea if this is even technically feasible in terms of coding on the backend, but I'm not a coding type person. I would imagine that since each individual ship is already stored in the DB to be able to have the server calculate for ship bonuses that this shouldn't be TOO hard to implement. All you'd be doing is allowing the client to change the stored values on the ship, and nothing more. Which, really, isn't anything different than what we already do; just on a more massive scale.

Thoughts?

maybe all this could be done by adding some new rigs to the game?
one rig gives you another spot for laser or missiles - another might adjust the cargo space to be 100% for Ore - or visa versa?