By the way, I'm all for the auto-adjusting of weapon parameters but I don't think I could convince the rest of Guild. I actually went so far as to make a little program that simulates bot combat (which conveniently eliminates the variability of pilot skill, but inconveniently assumes a rather low fixed skill) with a matrix of new, imaginary weapons/engines/batteries with various characteristics, and tweaked it so it created rock-paper-scissors cycles within the matrix. But for the results to work, they would require fixed ship configurations.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about weapons balance, or rather complaints about how unbalanced the weapons are and requests (demands in some cases) that the developers fix it. Rather than complain, I suggest a totally different approach: let the game balance the weapons automatically. Stay with me here! Imagine that the engine kept a record of which weapons were effective against others by comparing the attacking ship and defending ship's armor ratings at the time of death, or some other similar statistic. Periodically, it would check to see if the game was unbalanced, and then would create a new model of weapon to correct the imbalance. It would feel completely natural and seamless, because real products are constantly being tweaked and updated, but it would free up the developer's time and energy for more important matters.

It's a great idea with the potential to suck... :P
Basically, the changes should only be applied to outfits that haven't been bought yet. Imagine having the perfect loadout on your ship, and having spent all your money getting it, only to log on the next day and find out it completely sucks. If it only applied to ones that haven't been bought, on the other hand, it would work great. This would also allow for a "antiques" market, once item trading is implemented (which it will be, RIGHT? :P ). Weapon balancing should also be dependent on popularity of the item. More popular items will have more "intertia," as the manufacturers won't want people to stop buying them, but they won't want to spend more money improving them if they're already popular. However, they may want to use cheaper quality components, as they can rely on the weapon's existing popularity. Less popular weapons, on the other hand, will be improved greatly by the manufacturers, who want to gain some market share. Oh yeah, and crafting would be a great ability, too... ;)

Very nice ideas, but I would imagine the code would take as long to come up with as the dynamic economy, but it would free up the Devs to make new weapons and let the game balance them out, even after the game goes pay to play, and there are thousand of people on at once

The auto balance system uses many of the same concepts as the dynamic economy. Perhaps code could be recycled, or the two systems could be somehow integrated.

"The auto balance system uses many of the same concepts as the dynamic economy. Perhaps code could be recycled, or the two systems could be somehow integrated."

Dude that is genius. You have the cost/effectiveness of weapons linked and modified dynamicaly according to supply and demand.

1 possible serious problem is right here "Less popular weapons, on the other hand, will be improved greatly by the manufacturers, who want to gain some market share" (note that is a different person speaking)
If you did that then ppl buy the "best" weapon. When the unpopular weapon gets super powers, everyone buys it instead. Then the old powerfull weapon is unpopular and gets beefed up.

The bottom line is like in the modern arms race we will end up with Global Thermonuclear Warfare (who knows where that is from) Which I personaly think, would suck.

"Hello world" KABOOM!, "Uhhh hello, again?" BAMB BAMB BAMB BOOOM!

Some reason I don't think it would work very well. I'm not sure the computer can quite take into accout all the factors that go into the ships/weapons to make them even and balenced. Now, maybe a demand/supply dynamic economy something can help to ajust the prices. i.e everyone buys gauss cannons, gauss price goes up. Nobody buys tachyons, tacyhon price goes down. Now i know thats not the way it goes in real life, but oh well.

a problem exists:

if a n00b is killed by a vet using flare rockets then the flares will be changed so that the n00b will be able to win. same in any case with any weapon... the gun you have or had would be changed each time you bought it, making the weapon virtually unreliable....

i may have misunderstood what you mean so if i did please explain this to me... thanx

-io

Daon, you're forgetting about nation-imposed weapon sanctions. Except on government and black market weapons, that is... ;)
Also, I'd assume that there would be a general range of their power defined, along with a hard limit, to prevent uberweapons. Also, popular weapons would have their quality reduced, so the manufacturer could make more of a profit. This means that other weapons wouldn't have to become as powerful to gain market share, and overall power levels would remain somewhat constant.

nobody said...at least I don't think they did...that how often it would do these updates. If it was everyday, I would hate it, every month ok thats good enough.

The cost of the weapon should change all the time though. Maybe make a manufacturing type things so that in order to make weapon x so much of the cargo z and y must be delivered. This would keep trading up as well

Yeah, I've thought of this before. One major hurdle is the vast difference in pilot experience, which you can't check based on their score or anything. The fundamental problem is it's going to tend to completely stagnate all weapons; one optimally balanced solution is one where you can never hit anyone, and another is that any weapon kills in one hit.

Applying the dynamic economy to weapons would probably be a good way to set the price point of various kinds of weapons as a sort of "economic balance". Would be interesting to see how it shakes out.