Topic: Proposed new industrial system
After reading the post regarding some of the pending new changes I foresee several issues.
I understand it may be premature, but this is what a beta is for I believe.
First, I think it is a mistake to believe any critical or powerful new equipment will find its place in the market anytime soon. Making it difficult if not impossible for smaller/newer corporations to compete. This is bad for player retention and gaining new players.
Let's use a hot new piece of EW equipment being released as an example. It is NOT in the interest of the corp that finds it to release it to the general public - as a matter of fact I would go so far as to say it would be criminally stupid to make such an item public. Which gives the corp or corps owning it a distinctive advantage. Now let them use that in a series of attacks to weaken or drive off another corporation. You have now generated a large number of angry players over a perceived imbalance.
Secondly lets imagine at some point an unbalancing piece or combination of equipment is released. I see the potential to create an impression of of bias on the part of the development team. Again this is a very bad thing. Min/maxers will generally find some way to take advantage of such a situation faster than the dev team. This is not intended as a slight of the dev team, but based on my experiences in 20 or so other mmos.
Thirdly, to me it comes down to the growth of the playerbase and retention. At some point many if not most of the corporations will become selective in their recruitment, this will become stronger in the older/more powerful corporations. Again this is based on my experiences in pvp centric games. This limits the options for newer players to start. Now you are further limiting the likely options for newer/smaller corporations as I would predict powerful additions will not be made generally available. Giving away tactical and strategic advantages isn't the fastest route to victory. Eventually some of it will make it into the mainstream, but they will always be behind the curve on many levels. This will not only limit the number of players attracted, but will quickly turn a number of them away.
This type of development heavily favors very large corps but actively discriminates against smaller/newer corporations. My question would be how does the dev team envision the game say two years from now?

