The EVE Online Ecosystem Outlook

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834

Sure. Fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years ago, a 500gb HD was huge. My smallest is 2TB now. A more critical issue is Lazy Programmer Syndrome. In 1986, Spy Hunter could be coded to run in under 64k of RAM. In 1998, most versions of the game required 8mb. Now, you’d probably end up with a 2gb minimum for a 35-year old sprite-based game.

No, it wouldn’t need to have things figure out beforehand. Let’s say you take ‘Tritanium’ as your starting point. Now you spend 6 months working on improvements to it. Everything’s tracked in a single research job until you say ‘ok, we’re done, we’ll work with this’. Until that happens, it’s just a research job, just tracking different improvements. If something happens, like the structure it’s in blows up, while it’s still in this state? Research is lost, toss that small table out, totally gone.

So, six months later, you pull out your results: A 0.02% reduction in mass, and a 0.003% improvement in thermal conductivity. The resulting material gets a name slapped onto it by the guy who develops it, but as far as the database is concerned, this is ‘Tritanium_Alloy_[DATE.TIME || LOCATIONID.INDUSTRYJOB#]’, which doesn’t store 0.02% and 0.003$, it stores what those work out to.

And yes, this means you’re going to see huge amounts of materials database tables. So what? They’re only looked up when you put industry/research jobs in and take things out1. The rest of the time, it functions just like Brain-in-a-Box, where once the numbers get worked out, it stores those final numbers and just uses those.

Where it really gets more complex is in the market, because now you wind up with a whole bunch of competing modules and hulls that are derivations of derivations, and each ‘item type’ becomes more of an ‘item category’, and people need to pay attention to what the hell they’re buying.

Which is also a good thing, and also helps avoid optimization. Any time you can build in the potential for more PBKAC, you’re preventing calcification.

Absolutely.

1. And if, down the road, someone else makes the same stuff, those tables simplify things, because once the final numbers are done, it doesn’t matter how they got there, the system says ‘hey, your final number match this other thing. Congratulations, you’ve figured out how to make Tritanium_Alloy_021422.0349 || 356473.4674545, good job.’

835

Can it work like that? Maybe. Is it realistic? Certainly not.

Ship customisation is a strong part of the game already and is deep enough by itself. No need to make it even more complex, which would - apart from the huge amount of work to introduce it - require a lot of additional monitoring and maintenance as well. Keeping an eye on some ship outliers is one thing, but when you need to for example balance ‘gank Catalysts’ based on the 200 variations that exist, in addition to all the variation of mpdules etc., things will take more and more time to maintain.

It’s a bit like walking in stations: I really like the idea, but it is useless and takes too much time that’s better spent elsewhere on the game.

836

It’s a lot more realistic than what we’ve got, where technology hasn’t meaningfully progressed in 17 years, but when there’s a change to ship stats, it’s passed off in-game as CONCORD altering the specs and somehow everyone’s crap magically changes to fit it.

Imagine being able to fly a 2006-era Typhoon, complete with the old model, alongside a 2012-vintage one… and the 2016 model.

No, it’s not. It’s the very heart of what gets optimized and becomes static. Everyone uses the same fits because we all know that they’ve been min-maxed out, and there’s really only one ‘correct’ fitting for a given hull.

It’s a whole lot of complexity that’s daunting for new players, but once you hit a certain point, you realize it’s all smoke and mirrors, a magician’s choice.

And this is where you’re still thinking in too limited a way. You don’t have to balance them. If innovation makes gank Catalysts too insane, innovators will focus on defenses for a while. And the people who don’t will get their butts kicked and have to figure out where they went wrong, like the IJN investing too heavily in surface combat vessels in WWII, or the USN investing (really) too much capability into vulnerable CVNs while advancements in cheap over-the-horizon anti-ship missiles keep being made.

You said it yourself: the underlying game needs to be changed. What CCP’s doing? Isn’t that. They’re changing ‘where do we get materials?’ and ‘how much of a pain in the butt is it to get materials?’ but once we have them? Nothing has changed.

This is just more ‘tweaking numbers’ and ‘twisting knobs’, and it’s not enough. They’re on the right track, saying they want resource generation to be done procedurally to keep it from becoming static… but game balance needs to be done the same way, and the only way to really make that open-ended without making it completely unplayable chaos that nobody can keep up with… is to do it through player-driven innovation.

837

Do you really believe that players will be able to keep combat balanced by themselves, without CCP interference that way? :open_mouth:

I expect to see players claiming - for example - that the defence innovation growth factor of freighters is not enough to fight the multiple catalyst damage innovation growth factors and that CCP needs to balance those factors (in addition to the current base ship balancing actions). And they would be right, because only CCP determines how fast those increases are innovated, even if the players do the innovation.

Even more work for CCP and definitely not a balance mechanism.

Player-driven innovation would only be possible within boundaries that CCP sets, and CCP will be the one that then needs to balance all the different possible paths of innovation in order to keep the gameplay diverse and fun and the meta changing.

Player-driven innovation sounds fun, but it is not the solution you are looking for.

838

I believe that if players are driving innovation, then yes, they will, because you’ll see large groups putting lots of time and effort into it, and those benefits, again, will disseminate through the ecosystem. The entire story of EVE (like literally all of gaming) is that a small group of developers cannot keep up with large groups of players. Players just have more man-hours to devote to it, because 100 guys have 2400 man-hours in a day.

And they’d get told ‘then put more work into it’, because no, CCP wouldn’t be determining how fast those increases are innovated, the sheer amount of work players put into it, modified by RNG, would.

Again: only if you half-ass it. Let it off the chain, and no, CCP doesn’t have to keep doing work to balance it, because that balance is already built into the code that makes it possible.

EDIT: You know, I just realized that there’s a disconnect in how we’re communicating here. You’re saying ‘balancing freighter defenses’, but that’s not how it would work. Instead, you’d have a better material, tougher, so the same amount is more HP, and lighter, so you can use more of it, that would go into any ship schematic. So the defenses you’re looking at would be the same stuff the null blocs are pushing to maximize the EHP of titans, and then you just apply that to constructing freighters.

That way, this isn’t ‘oh, you need to balance freighter defenses’, it’s ‘use better materials’. And that goes both ways, because you’re looking at gank catalysts. Gank cats are used for 2 reasons: they do a lot of damage, and they’re cheap. So they’re never going to be built using bleeding-edge, as-advanced-as-can-be tech, because that tech is expensive to manufacture. ‘Expensive’ and ‘disposable’ do not mix, especially not at scale.

839

And now new people turn up with the original T1 stuff, and look at your T9999 stuff, and quit.
Well done on killing the game.
That sort of upgrading constantly meta only works in periodicals or themeparks.

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840

That’s no longer up to CCP. They’re a studio now.

841

Indeed

842

Except, once again, tech disseminates. Let’s face it, the people wanting to make money have a vested interest in making sure higher-gen materials and infrastructure are out there. Most large groups still import more than they build. If they want to be able to do that with their not-quite-cutting-edge stuff, they need to put the means to make that out on the market, and from there, it will spread.

So again, the ‘baseline’ levels of industry rise, just like you don’t have to go and buy a Model A Ford first if you want to get an F-150.

That’s also not true, as PA has not intervened in CCP’s internal operations. CCP is not ‘just a studio’, they’re a subsidiary, with their own C-suite executives.

843

Uhuh, I’m sure this works fine and dandy in RL (Except it doesn’t even then), but it’s not going to work fine and dandy in a computer game. You’ve gone on about how the ubber tech is going to cost more, so there is no way they can afford that, so they are stuck with the starting stuff.
Your idea simply doesn’t work outside of ‘gear reset’ themepark expansions and periodicals.

844

The most cutting-edge stuff would cost more, but as production broadens, those costs come down. Of course, because that takes time, the bleeding edge keeps advancing, so the top-end stuff stays expensive.

Over time, the old ‘starting stuff’ winds up hitting a point of complete obsolescence, while the most commonly-available things are more advanced than the old ‘starting stuff’ was. And yeah, this does work fine and dandy IRL (when you go to the hardware store, how many of the hand-drills there are wood-handled, hand-cranked drills, and how many of them are cordless power drills?), and would work reasonably well in-game, too.

845

Your entire idea is just titan cold war writ large on every class of ship. And we know how well that works.

846

No, it’s really not. It’s Dong Feng-21s, with titans playing the role of the Nimitz-class.

And an edit to clarify this: Smaller, cheaper crap will always be able to retool and rip through upgrade cycles faster than the big expensive things, because they don’t take as long to build, so they’re easier to replace. Which means you’ll have what amounts to cutting-edge little throwaway weapons used in the big wars, targeting big-ass mountains of floating ISK that haven’t been refitted in a dog’s age.

And yes, I said ‘used in the big wars’, because that’s where the money will decide those cutting-edge small ships are cost-effective. Ganking freighters won’t be. That’ll be 3-4 generations back.

847

Here are your targets, here are your directives, this is your timeline, these are the resource allocations. Also, please remember to set aside XYZ because we’re tasking project ABC to start up in parallel and you are required to assist.

Look, I get the whole “I want to believe” thing. But welcome to the real world where even a hint of a financial directive is a marching order. And PA is perfectly willing to learn, but it builds farms. Of assets. It’s a quite well known model, worth exploring. On top of simple and straightforward realities of the industry.

This is fine. But CCP executes. CCP connects for them. That’s it. PA owns everything.

848

Except there haven’t been any directives, according to both CCP and PA executives. Jesus, check out the PA quarterly investor release meetings. CCP’s basically printing money for PA right now, so PA’s not ■■■■■■■ with them at all.

849

Players have one goal: break the game in their favour. They aren’t going to do the balancing work for the developers.

It’s not going to save the developers time when they need to balance an always changing game with many variables, rather than the current static game. It’s going to cost a lot more time to undo whatever the players inevitably manage to break, because it does not work to let players decide game balance in a competitive game: there are too many conflicting interests and playstyles.

850

No, players have the goal of finding the best way to pursue their goals. And the developers can put that to work.

851

I’m out. Good luck pursuing your idea, I think it’s a nice fantasy, but unrealistic in how it’s going to work and unrealistic in saving CCP time, even ignoring the massive initial time investment.

1 Like
852

The cloaking issue, or, to me, non issue.
I spend a lot of time in nullsec, I’m small and fairly new, this makes me easy to kill so I have sealed and use speed, agility and cloaking. I have encountered exactly one group who, if they set their minds to it, have the skill (and I don’t mean skill points) to catch me and kill me at will in Nullsec.
On the other hand, in lowsec and wormhole space there’s a hell of a lot of people who can hunt me down anytime they want, this can become a waiting game on my part.
Case in point: I wanted to see what a war, like a big one looks like first hand so I flew into Goonspace and found systems with shocking numbers of feathered ships floating in front of shocking numbers of the stations. Once there I made a bunch of safe points so I could get everything I wanted to see on grid, I was hunted but it was honestly effortless.
If I had done this in Rancer (a lowsec system near Jita, I would have been caught, killed and podded. Cloak, fast align and all that are of no use against someone who knows what they are doing, and with the exception of, as I said, one group in nullsec, I have yet to see that skill anywhere other than lowsec and wormhole space.
That’s on you, not me, if you can’t catch me and stop me from spying on you because you lack the skill that’s not my problem, or a problem related to my ability to cloak, align fast, or out clever you. I suck at PvP, I’m flat out terrible at it and yet I see all these people freaking out because their hunters are less than amazing, their gate camps are lazy and rely on numbers rather than ability and in general just want to have everything their way or something.
If you can’t catch ME of all people with your gate camps, hunters and massive swarms of insanely expensive crap, that’s on you. I know people who can hunt and kill me in any space in a Corvette.
Hell, I even respond (politely when I can) to the abuse I get in local.
If goonswarm had any sense or skill I would dead hundreds of times over, I go where I want, when I want anywhere in their space I want, make bookmarks 20km from their titans and do so in a ship without covert ops cloaking.
In Rancer I would be dead, if it were V0LTA, Wingspan or any number of other wormhole groups I would be dead.
One group I have yet to encounter is Bombers Bar, I intend to go find them in the near future to see what I can learn from them to increase my skill at being an evasive and sneaky little bitch, and I intend to use that skill to go look at places like Goonspace and others because I’m curious, but now, after all this sniveling about cloking campers (WONT ANYONE PLEASE THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!?) I think I will start doing it more and even do things like logout there just to watch the blood pressure go up.
Actually it seems to me that my ability to go anywhere I please might be useful to someone… Hmmmmm
This might be a fun job. Hell, all I was trying to do was get some pictures.

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853

You have no idea how this works. Come back when you too have forty years of experience in VC and enterprise transition management in this and other industries.