It seems that everyone is complaining about balance problems and making suggestions left right and centre about how to alter items and gameplay to keep things balanced. While they may be right, this is not an effective solution in the long run. Individual tuning of items such that they are balanced gets exponentially more difficult as the number of items increases. Nerfing items to prevent certain optimal and possibly unfair strategies from being used will eventually result in an uninteresting mass of similar items.

The main problems are that (a) it's too easy to get these optimal configurations, especially when you have millions of credits to spend and (b) the configuration-space is too small, so it is easy to locate optimal configurations.

So what do I suggest to fix this problem? How do we ever hope to balance the game once it's huge and there are hundreds of ships and weapons? Problem (b) will mostly take care of itself so long as there's enough variety. To solve problem (a) I recommend that an economy is put in place. This is a very decent and interesting feature to have for the final game regardless. Here is how it would work (in my conceptualisation):

There would exist mines and plants for producing raw materials, one, or possibly two types of material (maybe different grades) per mine/plant.

There would exist factories, which would consume raw materials and churn out either parts or usable items. Each factory would only produce at most 2 kinds of thing.

There would exist markets and stations which would gather and sell the items, so that people don't have to go around to every factory.

NPC traders (which I hear are going to be added) would help move the items around and keep the markets stocked.

Items would be priced based on how much demand there is for that kind of item. This is important, and it's why the whole thing works. The rest of the system is mostly to provide a reason to be for trading. You could do this right now with just the stations selling items as they are.

Basically, items beyond the very basic ones would be limited in supply, and would get more expensive as demand increased, and less if nobody was buying them.

This way, optimal configuration problems, like the current tri-sunflare Valkyrie would go away. Someone could obtain this configuration, but the more people that did it, the more expensive it would become.

This also does away with the current inflation problem (mostly caused by caps, but a good example nonetheless) - as people get rich and start buying the nicer things, the things start getting more expensive to compensate.

So with the full system in place, trading becomes important, even in the CTF test. If your nation doesn't have traders, you don't get a supply of good weapons.

I'd like to hear what the devs have to say about this, whether it was already a planned feature, whether they have other conceptualisations of how things should work, or generally what they think of this idea. For the sake of people playing the test, this could make things a lot more fun, and would also make trading much more intriguing and worthwhile overall, as trading has become almost pointless now that capturing the flag is so instantly lucrative.

- Mesostel Ze

PS - I'd be willing to do part-time volunteer work for you (free, or if you want to pay me that's fine :-) to help implement this and other features. I'm reasonably fluent with many imperative computer languages (most normal looking ones, anyway) and am starting to learn some functional languages. I'm currently a candidate for BMath in pure mathematics at UWaterloo, and I'm on my (much needed) summer break. I think Vendetta would be a fun project to put some work into. If you're interested, my e-mail address is cgibbard at student dot math dot uwaterloo dot ca.

- Cale Gibbard, or as an Itani, Mestostel Ze.

I'm not a dev but I can answer some of your questions simply because I've heard the devs answer these questions when they have come up previously.

1) "The economy should be dynamic!"

The devs think so too, but one thing at a time.

2) "I'm willing to help, can you pay me?"

No, they can't.

3) "Ok, I'm willing to help anyway."

Thanks. If they need additional help, they'll get in touch. (Also please note the PayPal Chinese take out donation fund in the lower right corner of the screen, not to mention that filling out thurough bug reports is help.)

My suspicion, based on what I know of coding projects is that bringing someone in would be more trouble than its worth, but who knows what the devs think. Quite a few of us have some coding background. I personally (me, not something I've heard from the devs) think that they could use some volunteer work with scripting NPC's, missions, and maybe even sector layout once those features reach a final state, but only when those features reach a final state. But I don't know exactly what thier plans are for any of those features, so it may not be necessary. And in any event it would be almost as much trouble as doing it themselves given that scripting bugs are still bugs and the need to review script content throughly to see if the privelege isn't being abused.

For a more complete answer, you will have to wait on a dev, but I suspect they are grilling burgers and blowing things up today like most of the rest of the USA.