I’ve read that every so often CCP sweeps through Eve and rebalances various features for the purpose of err balancing things.
Nature tends to balance things itself. For example the ‘arms race’ between carnivore and prey is a continuous process of refinement via natural selection. Some of this exists in Eve in that one can for example choose between a number of ship configurations each with it’s own trade-offs.
I’d personally like to see more inbuilt self balancing by enabling more varied scope for players to configure things.
I could imagine the ability to self select ship slots. For example rather than a ship having a fixed number of high, medium and low slots it simply has a number of slots that the player can choose to allocate high, medium or low. One could start a real arms race.
Need more slots of a certain type? In a certain configuration? Eve has a ship for that. They’re already far more modular than nearly any vehicles produced in the modern era.
Part of what makes Eve interesting is the tradeoffs and decisions you have to make due to the limitations of the hulls. Take that away, and you just end up with everyone flying whatever has the most slots.
That takes away the point of having different hulls. You could argue that traits are still a thing but if we get to the point of picking how many slots a ship can have then surely it would make sense to pick what traits we can have too.
Not going to happen
Think of the ships as “classes”, they got power in one area and a weakness on the other, nothing will be perfect and there is not a thing players can do about it asides using modules, implants and getting the right skills to help it get better.
If you REALLY want a customisation ship yet… there are T3 Cruisers just like Rosov already said.
Let me clarify. The slots per ship would still be fixed but fixed overall. The player Would choose however what mix of slots there would be. There would still have to be a mix of highs, mids and lows to enable the differing modules required to be fitted.
Again, not going to happen, I understood what you wanted from your OP
This would be nightmarish at best, imagine all the battleships flying around with repair bonuses…
“I heard you liek Hyperions, so we granted you the ability to get more low slots by sacrificing High and Med slots! You only fit 6 guns? Take away 1 high slot to low, now you got 8 low slots! Not a fan of dual modules in mids? Then you got yet another low to either buff up the insane tank you already have or grab some damage for the already strong dps by using blasters!”
Which is what you do by selecting a hull already, and not only that the various extant hulls have reasonable balancing penalties for the number of slots they have.
This would result in the exact opposite of balance. You’d end up with one of two outcomes here and neither would be “balanced”. First case, you end up with a lot of very very homogenous ships running around, as people narrow in on the best possible configuration of stats and slots for a given role. Second case, if you can’t change some stats on a ship, then people will narrow in on the best base hull and adjust its slots thus causing other hulls with worse base stats or bonuses to be ignored.
This was literally the issue with the T3Cs in a nutshell for so many years. Too many choices on top of really strong base stats that made them the obvious choice for a ton of things in Eve.
In short, this isn’t how balancing works. It wouldn’t get under-used hulls more use or make over-used hulls more balanced, it would just result in exacerbating problems that already exist and probably result in an even narrower set of ships seeing use.
So why is it that life exists in so many forms yet we cannot come up with an ‘evolution algorithm’ for Eve? You’re probably aware that some revolutionary designs have been achieved by using evolutionary algorithms. Perhaps an ‘evolve ship’ process combined with a ‘clone ship’ process.
In Peter F Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy, spaceships are alive and are grown and ‘wedded’ to their pilots. Starships known as voidhawks are based on a technology known as bitek - a biology based technology. They are highly evolved AI and are sentient.
Perhaps a simplified form of the above could be the basis for T4 ships.
Holy crap, we don’t even have T3 battleships and you’re already thinking T4? And what does a piece of flying metal have to do with “life” and “evolution algorithms”? We evolve sure, but do we really want another Sleeper catastrophe? This feels almost the same as watching a car commercial when they talk about the meaning of life and shove a Toyota at your face at the end.
Seriously man, you don’t need to think that just because it happens somewhere else that EvE should include it, not only would it be unoriginal because you just stated it already exists but would bring all sort of complications, mainly the balance issue and “where the hell we getting this new tech from since T3 originates from getting stuff out of Sleepers which is by far the most advanced thing we ever fought”
If we as a race that originated from the original humans did not come up with T3 then we as a race will be far from doing T4 alone.
I for one would feel awkward in piloting something “alive”, something that could just say “Hey master, you suck, get out”
First off, those things have nothing to do with each other.
Second, that’s not how an Evolutionary Algorithm works. The entire point of genetic/evolutionary algorithms is to produce an optimized result, not a fun result or one that’s balanced from a game design perspective.
You are literally spouting off buzzwords here and misapplying them hilariously. This is no better than someone saying that “amazing things have been done with material sciences, maybe we could apply that to Eve?” and equally as ridiculous.
What both this nonsense and the previous comment about evolution have in common is that neither has anything to do with game balance. Nature doesn’t have to worry about game balance and neither do authors. Quite the opposite in fact, since if an author writes themself into a corner by creating something that breaks part of their story they can then easily un-break it by writing in something else.
Just because something sounds cool does not mean it will make for fun or balanced gameplay. This is one of those things.
Also we really don’t need crazy evolving super-ships added to the game. Again, the point of an evolutionary algorithm is to literally be OP. These algorithms literally work by presenting generated cases against a challenge and basing future generations of test cases on the ones that perform the best against the challenges until you eventually end up with something that will easily beat all the challenges and the competition simply becomes one to do the absolute best at overwhelming everything else.
Given all of this does it make sense why what you’re suggesting just does not work?
“rebalance” means shifting the current meta where class or ship X is OP and used by 70%, but only 30% of playerbase has skills for ship Y… so, OP TF out of ship Y and nerf TF out of ship X.
Months and months of skilling required to get back to the top of the food chain of elite miner gankers and hi-sec mass-wardeccers = subscriptions = $$$ for CCP.
I have both of them, and I have quit using them because they are SLOW, and I hate slow. If it doesnt do 300+m/s I wont fly it. Which is why I spend so much time in a Breacher or a Probe. Because they are fast with drones… the Algos is a close second for me.
This is hilariously cynical and pretty wildly off base.
Just for a start, no where near every balance change that CCP makes results in anything like this. In fact the general trend has been for rebalances to leave things usable but less OP as CCP have gone through and fixed more and more trouble spots. Most of the old balance “migrations” of players were either to things that hadn’t been touched or to things that pretty quickly got fixed if they’d been tuned too high. Much complaining has been seen when CCP moves to quickly fix things they accidentally make OP, for example: Carriers.
Anyone who takes the above post anything like literally does so entirely at their own peril…
