Player Features and Ideas Discussion

So this is an idea I've had around for a while.

But basically, the balancing the players are seeing right now can be aptly described as 'slow' and certainly labeled with all kinds of colorful names if one is more inspired to. I certainly don't expect the devs to just go up and change everyone's ships up and make everyone mad, and I had not a single doubt in my mind that the changes would be slow and gradual. Moving quickly ruins familiarity and causes discomfort, that's just a psychological fact.

But a thought occurred to me. You can look externally to a lot of games that support mods (and some that don't) and you will see the community balances, bug-fixes, and improvements generally add a lot of life to the game (a few really good examples come into mind, such as Stalker, Diablo II, Supreme Commander, and Sins of a Solar Empire). This is because, a dev team, however well meaning and sized, does not compare in any way to the sheer number of player inputs and their own speculation, self-balancing system.

What if it was made an option that the community could simply balance all of the ships personally? Instead of, for example, battle clinic (or some other service) had ratings of entire community ship balances, instead of fittings? The obviously trolltastic ones would get voted down (or get a few upvotes for the sake up humor, like... mining dram) and the ones that everyone feels is more just and balanced gets up voted. It might take a while for everyone to get used to the idea. Think that a particular ship is OP or underpowered? Post an alternate to the community and see what happens!

I am also aware that community members are not devs and have not been developing this game for however many years. However, there is a lot of people who have been with this game for many a year, and I think it's silly to assume they would know nothing about balance after all of that time. And the ships wouldn't even have to represent an immediate in-game thing, I would certainly be for a system where a popular ship is taken into dev consideration where they, themselves, approve or make changes to it before putting it into testing (read: not live).

At least people would have something to do instead of simply raving "this ship is unbalanced" or "CCP needs to rebalance this or that" ... they'd actually have to win over the community first with their idea. You know. Do work, try and be productive to solve the issue instead of just moan at an effective (but rightfully so) wall. I think it's much better then posting one or two ship fixes to this particular forum, as well.

It could be expanded to allow you to try out the ship's stats in-game somehow (local test area or something, hell if I know) or use that test server to test out really popular ship balances. Hell, even all of the hypothetical ships people are suggesting (like T3 battleships) could be entirely worked out in advance and balances simply discussed much like certain fits are. I don't think anyone would argue that all of the fits on battle clinic represents a great sum of time in which people simply... thought about how ships can be fitted, their functions, limitations. One could even imagine modules being brought into the picture... I mean, we already have all of the ship data pretty much sitting right there. Why ignore it?

So, what does everyone else think? Would this have any chance at work, or would everyone just endlessly bicker? Or what?