Noisrevbus
388
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Posted - 2013.02.22 00:11:00 -
[1] - Quote
It is no larger secret that i almost always agree with you on the overarching theorem of this game. The abstract.
I would like to learn of your opinion on something very concrete though:
You, like me and many other voices in the spatial chatter right now, are a champion of "bottom up economy" (Farms and fields etc.).
However, what is your perspective on the "warchest economy" or the financial balance of the ship classes in the game?
I've argued, more and more recently, that the most severe issue in EVE is ramping up to be the malbalance of economy, as CCP set out to re-balance more and more ship classes without attention to economy at all.
If i am a moderately high SP player today, in a moderately sized alliance, i can fly a larger Tech I hull even with Tech I fitting and meet the demands of most things in EVE at the moment. I can take my BC or BS and meet most PvE challenges or slip it into a 100-man fleet and be incredibly effective on the PvP-side at large, while effectively erasing the ISK factor. This makes number of pilots and size of ships scale arbitrarily, which is what drives the profileration of upscaling to Coalitions and Capitals, that later deadlock.
Obviously, going completely bottomed-out is not what most players in the game do... but that's where the "powerbase" lie that allow subsiding resources at a whim and still remain cost-effective. The powerbase lie in the bottom, where bottomed-out Subcapitals free up resources for accumulation of Supercapitals, or where bottomed-out PvE-ships free up resources for accumulation of PvP-ships, and so forth.
How do you see these reservations in light of the "bottom up perspective"?
Do a Tech I subcapital ship with Tech I fitting present the meaningful small-gang target we want it to be?
Do you see the implications of this when compared to taking risks at undermanned engagement?
Do you see the further implications of how this feed the up-scaling that ultimately lead us to the Supercapital deadlock?
Ultimately i would argue that this is a scaling-issue and a form "handed-" or "placating" non-interactive perspective that both you and i are champions against. It's rooted in the inability to see that eg., Tech II Cruisers should not just be balanced to Cruisers, but also to larger ship classes. It interacts not only with Cruisers, but also with other classes that have a different financial scale. This is a perspective CCP have still not aknowledged despite allocating a fair amount resources to the current very ambitious re-balance initiative. It is also non-interactive in the sense that it stifles interaction between groups of different scales, when economy no longer provides a balanced resource-factor to volume.
I am all for moving content from infrastructure to ships in space, but the importance of those ships is also an important question that is often overlooked in the "bottom up economy" discourse. Many ships are not important at all, in the same way that alot of infrastructure is not important, at all.
A bottom-up economy with imbalanced creation-to-destruction would presumtively render a similar situation to that of Tech today, where the structures holding the moons are tedious but relatively cost-free and thus risk-free in themselves.
What is your perspective on this?
... and how would you prioritize it next to more resource-heavy and time-consuming issues commonly brought up (such as POS-rework, SOV-infra rework and Ring Mining) or artificial, non-interactive or punitive restrictions to the scaling issue (such as Wormholes, Capital spool-up, mass-limiters, local removal and Super nerfs)? |