Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I think you hit the nail on the head with "half-baked specialization". Ships should feel unique, strong at their role and counterable. Right now we have a sea of DPS + maybe some utility ships ranging from T1 frigates all the way up to T3Cs and pirate faction battleships. It's annoying and a lot of work for the devs who constantly have to balance ships when one winds up being the best version of DPS + maybe some utility.

On the other hand, there are some ships that are shining examples of specialization. When you need a fast ship with a lot of alpha, the Tornado is the only ship in the game for you. It's garbage at almost everything else, and easily countered by a halfways competent alpha clone in a T1 frigate, but its so strong at this one thing that it never feels weak or in need of a balance pass. Also, when the right ships are added, I don't think it hurts the game at all. Command destroyers are new, but their role is so unique and fun that it just enhances the game IMO.

That being said, I don't know what you do with the Rifters, Thoraxes, Harbingers etc. of the game. From where we are right now, it will take a lot of creativity, and maybe some painful choices to make these ships worth it.

"Something to look forward to" when you focus on seeding more and more ships in to a system that already has so many redundant ships isn't a lot to look forward to.

Case 1 (The T3 problem): You release a new ship that is better at a thing than an old ship. People are excited about the new thing, but the old thing becomes garbage. You have not actually added anything compelling to the game. People are simply changing ships to the new meta to do the same jobs, often being required to train new skills to do the same thing they were already doing.

Case 2 (The Sunesis problem): You release a new ship that isn't much better at anything than existing ships. People fly it for novelty a little bit then go back to what they were already running. At which point they complain nothing has changed.

In both of these cases you have not done anything at all to prevent the game from becoming stagnant. Flying one ship class versus another in EVE is an extremely similar experience. You could add ten new exploration frigates tomorrow, but if you don't add new sites that require something special about them its effectively pointless. You have added nothing of long term value to the game. If you add the sites JUST to force people to use the new frigates, you devalue the current ships in the process, and you're simply breaking even, killing one set of content to push people toward another set of content.

Upwell structures? That's a worthwhile, valid, and exciting change. It gives people more things to DO rather than more slightly different ships to do the same ****.

Defender missiles change? Again, a worthwhile change. It creates a new meta role by harnessing some ships that didn't have a clear role and weren't popular. Not by creating new ships, but by creating a role for ships that were redundant or undesirable.

As it stands now we have over 200 ships (not counting AT ships) and for the most part people have between 2 and 4 options for literally every ship role in EVE and we STILL have ships considered by most to be not worth using.

Adding more ships doesn't do all that much to combat stagnation or generate content. Adding new station mechanics and modules, new types of sites, new ship modules and mechanics for underused ships, and new fitting options to vary up the meta is overall simply a higher impact change for similar expenditure in art and design resources because they actually vary the experience for every player, and give people new things to fight over and new ways to fight over them.

EVE's most successful and impactful patches were exactly these types of changes. The changes to hacking added a subset of play that created new experiences and codified a profession that previously didn't exist (the noncombat explorer) The addition of Wspace itself drastically changed the game in a way that created space for existing ships that were unfavorable in other content. Ditto for faction warfare. Ditto for Citadels. Ditto for the most recent revamp of industrial command ships.

I'm not saying don't EVER add new ships. In some cases there's a need to add ships to fill a role. The SOE line and the porposie are good examples of when to add ships because it makes sense and aligns with mechanical changes in a holistic fashion.

On top of that we have a LOT of ships that virtually everyone agrees are simply not worth flying. Maybe in stead of creating new ships to fill new roles we look at old ships that doesn't have an effective role and see what we can do about them first. Battlecruisers are a great example here.

The news that they're adding a line of CONCORD ships and more pirate capitals? These seem like unnecessary bloat, like when they put new classes in an expansion for other MMOs just to have a bullet point of the box and drum up sales. They don't add anything meaningful to the game long term when they could in stead be increasing the utility of the player's existing tools by adding depth to both the tools and the tasks they are used to accomplish in stead of just giving them another equally shallow tool.