Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 63rd edition! For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.
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Super Kerr Induced Nanocoating, new structures that can be fit like ships with modules, the promise of player built stargates… the ability to shape your space and change the look of your ships is finally coming to EVE. What other customization options of EVE would you like to have? What would you like to do to be able to shape space and environments? What would you like to change just for you in the client or in any 3rd party tools?

First thing that came to my mind was modding. Modding as in mods for the client. So you can basically make your own UI. Like some other games and MMOs have, for example world of warcraft. The biggest problem with this is that the best mods would become mandatory in PVP. As they might give someone an unfair advantage, or put yourself at a disadvantage if you don’t use them. For example in wow, everybody uses Deadly Boss Mods, you put yourself at a serious disadvantage if you don’t.

I don’t think we’ll see this happen in the foreseeable future. It would take a lot of development resources to adapt the client for mods and even more testing. Also it’s a bit of a support nightmare. Mods can screw things up, especially outdated ones. First thing in wow to do when something goes wrong is ‘disable all mods’ and see if it happens again.

Would it be cool ? Yes, especially because the things people will come up with is amazing. Things added to the client you might never have thought of. Some mods in wow became standard in the default ui, because everybody was using them and were a serious improvement over the default.

More participants over at ninveah.com.

Welcome to the continuing monthly EVE Blog Banters and our 59th edition!

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For more details about what the blog banters are visit the Blog Banter page.
This month’s version comes from commenter Zappity who asks:

Probably been done before… What about local force projection (as opposed to the longer distance force projection that is often talked about)? I think of ‘terrain’ in EVE to be how systems are mapped together by gates. Strong tactics which exploit terrain have historically been extremely important in deciding battle outcomes. How does this apply in EVE in the presence of cynos?

Related to this, you have the option to explore the topic of wormhole systems with effects (Black Holes, Cataclymismic variablestar, etc) and if similar environmental effects on certain grids/deadspace or system wide should be explored for known space?

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Terrain and space is a little hard to simulate. As Kirith mentions line of fire in his entry using structures and such, that would definitely be interesting, but usually, space is very empty. I don’t know the first thing about Cynos, so I won’t be going there.

Now regarding the effects, like wormholes have. Over at the Eve wiki you can check out the various effects. The pulsar and wolf effects would most noticeably change the environment for the battle. This will decide whether you are going in armor tanked or shield tanked. It will give the ‘home team’ a definite advantage I’d say. Other effects will affect ammo type and or weapon types.

Would this be suitable for known space ? Maybe in 0.0. In hisec if you would implement this in a system with agents, it would make mission running very trivial, or very hard. People would flock to the system with the generally known best effects, creating new over populating problems. You could of course rotate the effects, not sure if that would work. I am sure someone would come up with a website where you can check the best effect with lvl 4 agent and such.

All in all I think implementing something like this in K-space would spice things up, but in Hisec it would create new problems, and also make things more confusing for new players. Maybe try it out in a few systems first ? Or would people flock over there then ? Eve is so complicated sometimes .

More participants at http://www.ninveah.com/2014/09/blog-banter-59-terrain.html.