Jita Park Speakers Corner

As we all know, recently CCP has been rebalancing ships, especially those that in the past have been neglected and almost never used in combat. As they do this, they're asking themselves the question, "how can we make this ship class distinct and useful in combat?". Lately, the answers have been to give ships special role bonuses, like the new HAC sig radius bonus for MWD's, or to change the nature of the ship entirely, like the old laser Geddon to the new neut / drone platform.

In short, the approach has been to mess about with the bonuses of the ship. I'd like to offer a suggestion here - instead of focusing exclusively on that, why not offer special interfaces for advanced ships? "What the hell do you mean by that, Sak?" you ask - let me give you a few examples:

* If new Command Ship variants come out, they'd likely be based on the old Tier2 BC hulls (Hurricane, Myrmidon, Harbinger, Drake). Instead of just giving out ganglinks, have the ship give the pilot advanced information about the fleet they're commanding through a control window. Things like incoming / outgoing DPS figures on each ship in the fleet, how much repair power the fleet logistics is putting out, etc. In short, it could be a ship for an FC, allowing them to process a lot of data being generated from their fleet to help make intelligent decisions.

* Give EAF's & Recons the ability to see what other allied pilots are jamming, damping, etc., as well as to see if they're successful or not. Instead of a command interface as previously mentioned, a small graphic on the overview might be sufficient to show that the target is currently affected by a certain allied status effect.

* Give T2 Logistics ships the ability to see the cap status of the allied fleet.

And so on. In short, instead of having people pay millions more for a ship with slightly better abilities, give them a slightly better ship that's able to be much more coordinated with their allied ships.

Feedback please.

I fear the main issue with that is, that that will end up in a lot of information that has to be transfered to those relevant clients.
For 1-2 command ships that might be ok, but if you have a fleet of 100 EAFs you increase the information per tick drastically. From what I gathered, those things don't scale well, which is e.g. why the watch list is limited to 15 fleet members.

The general idea is pretty nice tho.. but would be more suitable to (limited) roles in a fleet, then only few clients that have to get the information.

Have to say I like the sound of this.

And Sephira you could limit the information to only squad commands, wing commanders, fleet commanders etc.

Could it not be somewhat similar to what we have for the Alliance Tourament?

ie,
Potential dps - actual dps
Potential Logi - actual logi
No. of jams - effective jams

etc etc