Player Features and Ideas Discussion

What it says on the tin. The ability to in station pay ISK and materials to modify various types of blueprints. The result is a custom item that cannot be sold on market.

And before you ask, "how would it be balanced?" I have three words. Internal System Space.

What's Internal System Space? In short, it is a sort of fitting resource for custom blueprints. The base blueprint has 0 spare internal system space. In order to get ISS to spend on other attributes, you must downgrade some sort of statistic about the resulting item. (Weaken sensors or less mid slots for example)

Every attribute increase costs exponentially more ISS to modify to. In other words, there's a penalty for selecting multiple stat increases of the same stat or attribute. For ship slots, this would be 140% (each additional slot after the first added would cost 40% more). For other attributes, it would be 130%.

Every attribute decrease yields exponentially less as well. Slots decrease by 40% after first removed slots, while others decrease by 30%.

Before you say, "No way, too complicated." or "Would unnecessarily complicate Industry." All of this would be in a clean UI - insert blueprint copy in slot, click 'Select Modification' button under it, and a pop-up appears akin to the info pop up when you click the I on a market item. From there, you can select the different tabs (aside from Industry) and modify stats to your leisure.

To cut you off again, yes, you will have a stat you can dump spare ISS into if you can't add anything else. This simply comes in the form of either
-Increasing CPU or power grid capacity on ships
or
-Decreasing CPU or power grid need on equipment

Lastly, to cap off this wall of text, which may be updated later,

Yes, modified ships will show their specs; however, this will require a skill called 'Modification Identification', similar to the new 'Modified Ships' skills and 'Modified Equipment' skills, which would permit use of modified items. They in addition would add bonuses to ISS gain and reductions in costs to Modification; however, modified items will require the minimum number of levels in these skills to use as they would to modify a standard BP copy to be of. (E.G. A Merlin is modified by a maxed character, but the character leaves ISS spare. As a result, since the stats can be replicated by a person a skill level lower in a blueprint, the ship would need 'Modified Ships IV') These would start at 0, be trainable only to 1 by Alphas (At least Identification)

And no, T3 BP's cannot be modified, as they are too complex.

And yes, this will be reorganized when I find time.

The idea for making totally unique and modifiable products is not a new one.

The core of the problem with this idea is this;

Some stats and slots are inherently more valuable than others.
Even if you try to balance it out, some industry people will min/max the stats in such a way to create the "perfect" ship for a specific doctrine or tactic.

This has the unfortunate tendency of actually **reducing** variety in ship fittings and tactics... because why would you create or use anything that isn't "perfect" for what you want to do?

Exactly why you make it complex and multi-step. People would either buy normal ships or more simply modified ones. Same things go for boosters. Why not boost/implant yourself to be perfect at what you do? Common reason is ISK...

And to Cade who said it couldn't be balanced, people would use different equipment; but what's keeping fitting balanced? Oh yeah, resource limits. The important part is that the modified copies would be like T2 ones, and thus would be a pain to make and manage.

I know I'd love to see charge-munching spray n' pray blasters that sacrificed even more range.

Actually, you can - rigs modify inherent qualities of the hull and become part of the ship.
In addition, T3 cruisers are highly customizable using subsystems, T3 destroyers can change the hull bonuses by switching modes.

If you customize the hull itself rather than using a skill, rig, implant, subsystem, etc... to modify an attribute, you need to create a database entry for that hull - which quickly becomes unwieldy.

The current system works quite well. CCP can see which ships are being used and which are not - the latter are scheduled for a bit of love on the next balance pass, the former may get nerfed to reduce power creep.

While few are happy to see the nerf-bat hit their favorite ship, power creep is not good for the game.

ccp has a hard enough time with balance

First off, Boosters are not particularly time or resource intensive to make, so your information there is just flatly incorrect. The main thing that makes Boosters difficult to manufacture is that it needs to be done in Low or Null Security space and components generally can't be sourced locally. Combine this with the relatively low demand for Boosters historically and you have a recipe for a fairly niche area of production, not an expensive one.



There are, in my experience, three ways this goes:

1. The penalties and costs are so acute that almost no one uses the system and it's basically wasted development time.
2. The penalties aren't steep enough and the whole thing turns into an out of control min-maxy mess.
3. People find a few things that don't really severely impact performance to trade off for a bonus to one of the stats that matters. For example fitting out a Vindicator with blasters that have no falloff or tracking but the ship now hits for 3k DPS.

None of these is desirable. This is the inherent problem with multiplayer games with point-buy min-max systems. They're inherently exploitable and players will gravitate to the inherently exploitable combinations. Any unique or interesting combinations are superseded by getting more of what works well.

The net effect of this actually makes the game less complex rather than more since it allows people to refine a few powerful strategies generally by working around mechanics instead of using them, making those mechanics not matter. We saw something similar early in Eve's development before the Speed Nerf and the changes that gave Missiles 'tracking' so they didn't just deal full damage to everything.



A Tristan is a Gallente T1 frigate, it costs under 400k ISK on the market. I have no idea what ship you were thinking of here but it certainly wasn't the Tristan and it almost certainly wasn't a Frigate either.

Then that's a trade-off that you have to live with. The whole point of the different racial ships is the variations they have. Caldari ships tend to have small to non-existent drone bays, for example, but better shield resistances in many cases. They're also generally more missile focused with rails as a secondary branch.



Thankfully the Vindicator has a web bonus, and a dual web Vindicator can web a target down to basically zero velocity and hit it just fine with absolutely terrible base tracking.

Your example is exactly why this is a bad idea.



Boosters are, at best, middle of the road when it comes to supply chain complexity. Also making something have a high initial setup cost is just a good way to hand the older players a monopoly on it, and is generally a poor idea except in the case of things that are equally expensive to produce like Keepstars.

Generally speaking, assume that anything you post on here will be picked apart and even a good idea has a low chance of getting into CCP's backlog of ideas.

Eh, not really in practice, it's just that there are a *lot* of poorly thought out ideas that get posted, and a lot of people willing to hang around and poke holes in them.



They are stacking penalized, the Vindicator gets a 50% bonus to web effectiveness, which means each of its 60% webs slows the target by 90% instead. Even with stacking penalties this means that two Vindi webs slows a target more than 4 regular webs can manage. The result of two Vindi webs is something like a 97.5% speed reduction after stacking penalties.

Also FYI if you web someone without stopping them from warping they'll warp almost instantly under most circumstances, especially if they were moving to begin with.

Just so long as we're clear that webs do have stacking penalties, even Serpentis webs. 90% webs are just silly silly things and stupidly powerful.

The number of these still in the game is actually quite small. Quite a few have been removed via bans, biomassing, players quitting the game, and other methods. Also the current method of T2 invention actually beats out a lot of BPOs for high end production at any volume due to the copy time required on the T2 BPOs.

Generally speaking a new player doing invention won't have any serious issues competing using invention in the T2 production market.

Also yes, when ships are nerfed they aren't grandfathered forward, but when a ship is removed for whatever reason it is. This has resulted in quite a few rare and quite powerful ships floating around in the game.