Posts: 3,575
Threads: 107
Joined: May 2012
Staff roles: Balance Dev
The balance team, or at least me personally, already use plenty of objective data and "maths" for balancing. It's not just some #yolo thing where I go like "Five people complained the Eagle is overpowered, so I'm going to give it twenty less nanobots". As Tachyon noted, however, it's extremely hard to mathematically express certain aspects of the game. Shapes and sizes of ships, arguably the most important aspect of snub balance, for example, are very hard to express mathematically. I have used surface area from different perspectives (top, side, front) as well as volume in the past. While it certainly helps with balancing to have a numerical representation of a ship's hitbox, having a program decide stats based on that will not get better results than we have right now.
On the note of maths-based balancing: the class 7 and 8 gun rework that happened relatively recently was done entirely by a program, so it does happen. That's generally because guns are more straight-forward (Higher speed = better, higher damage = better, lower energy use = better. Give those aspects a certain 'weight' and you can fairly easily generate roughly balanced stats). Oh, and VHF shield bubbles have been (mostly) balanced according to volume (woo numbers) very recently.
