Great post overall. The only thing I don't agree with is the following: I went back and looked at screenshots I took during my first few months of play, and 30% hit rate as a starting goal seems MUCH too high. For my first month of play, my accuracy was usually around 15-20% (25% in my best games towards the end of the month), while my damage done was in the 20k-30k range. It wasn't until 6-7 weeks into the game that I started getting hit rates of 30%, with a damage done of 40-50k. I was playing GSF every night, on multiple toons, solo and in premades, and these were my best games, those I thought worthy of a screenshot. I don't have any screenshots of my first 5 days of play, but I remember having a hard time breaking 10% hit rate at first. For a brand new player, I think a goal of 10k damage with a 10% hit rate is a lot more realistic, then move on to 20k damage with a 15% hit rate, 30k damage with a 20% hit rate, and so on. It took me several hundred games to reach 30% accuracy. This is from the perspective of a player who only plays MMOs, which means that before GSF I had exactly zero experience at having to keep my cursor on a moving target in order to hit it. This was the hardest thing for me to get used to in GSF. Players with prior experience in flight combat games may be able to achieve higher accuracy a lot faster.

I don't think it would take that many changes to make Strike Fighters competitive. People seem to underestimate how changes to even one component can drastically alter the game. Before the barrel roll nerf, strikes were much more competitive. My favorite ship at the time was the Pike/Quell. I played it in all types of games, Dom and TDM, easy and challenging games, and tried various builds. I didn't beat damage or kill records with it, but I felt I had a "presence" in the game and made an impact even against good players. I liked to do hit-and-runs on gunship walls, and the short CD and cheap cost of barrel roll meant I could safely get away. I also liked to run into the middle of the enemy team, get their attention with a few shots and missile locks, then barrel back to my team with 4 enemy scouts in tow, which my teammates would shoot down while I got away unscathed. It was a lot of fun. The nerf to a single component, barrel roll, put an end to this. I learned to play gunships and now it is my ship of choice for TDM. I play either T2 scout or gunship in Dom, occasionally bombers. These days, I only play the Pike/Quell as a "fun ship" against newbies who haven't yet learned how to boost. IMO, restoring mobility to strike fighters would be the most important thing. Scouts should remain the most agile (highest turn rate) and fastest on short distances (highest engine speed), but strikes should have the most endurance and mobility over long distances. They would be the ship of choice on a map like Denon, the first to get to nodes at the start of the game, or to bring reinforcement from across the map. How could this be achieved? I think the cost of engine maneuvers should be lower for strikes than for all other ship types, as a class passive. It could be reduced by 50%, or even 100% (make all engine maneuvers free for strikes). This would solve the greatest vulnerability of strikes: their inability to get away when hit by ion railgun. They would still be able to use barrel roll or whichever engine ability they choose, even with no power. And it would not require any direct nerf to railguns (I would MUCH rather strikes be buffed without any nerfs to other ships). The cooldown of barrel roll should also be shorter for strikes, similar to what it was before the nerf. Barrel roll would remain as it is now for other ships. Additionally, I think that strikes should have either a larger engine power pool, or better boost efficiency (lower cost to initiate boost and lower power cost per second while boosting). This would give them more endurance than any other ship in the game, without altering their turn rate or max speed. These changes would give strikes a distinct role: they would be the first to get to satellites at the start of Domination games, and the best reinforcement to send when help is needed in a hurry at the opposite end of the map. Scouts and gunships would still be better "killers", bombers would still be better at area control, but strikes would have their own distinct role. In TDM, their ability to do hit-and-runs, and to lure enemies to their deaths while getting away unharmed would be restored. Another thing that would help strikes a lot would be to fix underperforming components. Two pet peeves of mine: 1) Why does Quick-Charge Shield (QCS) have a 30% strength penalty? Even Distorsion Field, the best shield in the game, only has a 20% penalty. I think QCS should have no strength penalty. This would help strikes in their role as "first on the scene", or "reinforcement specialists" by making them more sturdy, so that they can stay alive until additional members of their team show up to help them kill the opposition. It would also help them to get away safely when doing hit-and-runs/baiting in TDM. 2) EMP missile should have a much shorter lock-on time, no longer than cluster, and should do the same amount of damage to ships as it does to mines/drones, rather than half damage. I tried using this missile on my Pike/Quell when it was introduced in the game but it has 2 main problems: it is too specialized (too "niche") and it is not very effective at its one main use because it takes too long to lock on a target. Many times in Domination, I would approach a node guarded by one or more bombers and start locking an EMP missile, only to be pulverized by a scout or gunship before I could even finish the lock. Being forced to fly straight and slow for 3 seconds to acquire a lock just doesn't work against good opponents. Lock-on time should be around 1 second, maybe 1.5. Additionally, having this missile do more damage to enemy ships than it does now would make it viable as an AOE damage weapon in ship-to-ship combat, which would increase the versatility of any build using it. There are a lot of other components used by strikes that need buffing (RFLC, ion missile, etc...), but I don't have specific ideas about how to fix those. I do like the idea of giving RFLC a large accuracy buff to make it an anti-evasion weapon. TLDR: Buff the mobility and endurance of strikes by making engine maneuvers free (or at least cheaper) and increasing boost efficiency or engine power pool, and fix underperforming components.

You can tell it's a T3 bomber: when it realized the gunship was targeting it, it used power dive.

Another bug from 3.0 that hasn't been fixed yet is that the alacrity stat from the ground game still has an effect on GSF tooltips. It is particularly obvious if you have a bounty hunter or commando: the cooldowns displayed on the GSF components tab change when you switch stances (high-velocity gas cylinder/armor-piercing cell increases alacrity by 3% and reduces displayed cooldowns accordingly). Alacrity from gear has a similar effect. This appears to be just a display bug but it is confusing.

Rotational thruster is buggy for all T1 gunships, not just the cartel market ones. I don't own a single cartel market gunship on any toon because I get the T1 gunship for free on all of my toons as a long-time subscriber. Right after 3.0, when we lost the Disto lock break, I tried a different build on my gunships, with fortress shield and rotational thruster. This build was somewhat popular on Harbinger even before 3.0 but it took the loss of the lock break to give me the incentive to try it. Everything seemed normal at the start of each game, but once I used rotational thruster in any given game, my engine would make no sound while boosting for the rest of that game. The first time this happened, I was really confused and I thought that somehow my ship was not boosting. But I looked at my power and throttle indicators, and I did have engine power, and it was getting consumed, and my throttle was at full power. I mentioned it to a friend, who said it was a "known bug" with rotational thruster, so I didn't bother reporting it in-game or mentioning it on the forums at the time. I don't remember whether my engine trail was visible or not, but I may not have noticed if it wasn't visible: I am the kind of person who reacts a lot more strongly to sound cues than visual cues. I immediately notice and react to any change in sounds, while it takes me much longer to notice and react to visual cues. (A few weeks ago, my headset died, and I was unable to lock missiles or break missile locks until I got a new headset, even though there are enough visual cues in the game that I should have been able to do so).

Additional bug: Alacrity affects GSF tooltips (see this thread on the GSF forum for more information). From the limited testing I did, this appears to be a display bug with no effect on gameplay: only the tooltips are affected, not the actual cooldowns while playing GSF. However, it creates confusion, as players with identical builds but different amounts of alacrity will have different cooldowns displayed for their ships' abilities.

One of the changes that came with 3.0 is that alacrity now decreases ability cooldowns in the ground game. GSF tooltips are also affected by this. For instance, my gunnery commando gets 3% alacrity passively from armor-piercing cell. With no alacrity on her gear, the tooltips for distorsion field and barrel roll show a CD of 29 seconds. As before the patch, tooltips do not reflect cooldown reductions from talent trees. I was curious whether this was just a display issue or whether it actually affected cooldowns during GSF games. In order to test this, I bought 7 alacrity enhancements from the Rishi commendation vendor and I crafted some green lvl 56 implants and an earpiece with alacrity. All together, this gave me an alacrity of 12% at lvl 60 (9% from gear and 3% from armor-piercing cell). Originally, I wanted to test whether this affected BO, barrel roll, and distorsion field CDs on my Flashfire, but the matchmaking kept giving me really challenging games, and using a stopwatch while flying evasively in a scout against experienced opponents wasn't practical. Eventually, I was able to do some testing in a dronecarrier, measuring the cooldown of interdiction sentry drone (with the T1 talent reducing this CD from 90 sec to 60 sec). On fleet, the displayed cooldown for interdiction sentry drone was 90 sec with 0 alacrity and 80 sec with 12% alacrity. In-game, with 12% alacrity, the measured cooldown was exactly 1:00 minute (60 seconds). This appears to indicate that alacrity has no effect during a GSF game, and that the cooldown reduction from the T1 talent is working as it should. Ideally, I should have done more testing to measure the CD with and without alacrity, and with and without T1 upgrade, but I didn't have the patience to test all these combination (I'm pretty sure my team lost that game because I was flying a barely-upgraded dronecarrier instead of one of my "good ships".) TLDR: From the limited testing I have done, this appears to be a display bug with no effect on gameplay. It does, however, make tooltips confusing (or maybe I should say "even more confusing"). Two players with identical builds but different amounts of alacrity will have different cooldowns shown in their tooltips. It really makes me question whether these tooltips have any consistent relationship with reality.

The problem with cap ship turrets is that they force ship choice. The only ships with weapons that can outrange turrets are gunships. If cap ship turrets were put back into TDM, they would force everybody to play gunships in order to contribute and avoid being flagged as inactive (for lack of opponents to hit) when the opposing team retreats to the safety of their cap ships and refuses to come out. Back when capital ship turrets were operating in TDM, it had pretty much become the meta on the Harbinger server: one team would just all choose gunships and spend the entire game sniping from the safety of their capital ship. Players on the opposing team had 4 choices: 1) play a gunship, 2) play a non-gunship and be marked inactive for not being able to hit anybody on the opposing team, and get no requisition for the game, 3) play a non-gunship and make a suicide run on the cap ship every 2 minutes to reset the inactivity timer, and hope to at least hit someone to get an assist before dying to the turrets, or 4) leave the game. It wasn't newbies who were doing this, it was experienced players. When I played with a premade, this tactic was used against us almost every time. When I solo-queued, there would often be someone on my team who would say at the start of the game: "let's all get in gunships and wait for them here at the cap ship, let them come to us." It was the most predominant tactic in TDM and made for excruciatingly boring and frustrating games. TDM was a broken game mode. Even if turrets were only reactivated when one team has a 10-point lead (or whatever number was chosen), it would force players to mostly play gunships in TDM, especially against weaker teams, since that would be the only way to get kills once the turrets become active and the weaker team starts huddling at their cap ships. Imagine the following situation (using a 10-pt lead as trigger for turret activation): At the start of the game, both teams leave their cap ship and meet approximately in the middle of the map. Team A is much stronger and wipes team B, while only getting 1 death. The score is 8-1 as team B respawns. Team A, looking for people to fight, drifts closer to team B's cap ships. Once again both sides engage and team B gets wiped again. This time they get 2 kills for 8 deaths. The score is 16-3. At some point during that time, the turrets reactivated. Now that they are protected by turrets, all of team B decides to respawn in gunships and stay within the protection of the turrets. On the other hand, team A players are still flying whatever ships they picked at the beginning, and any of those players who is not flying a gunship is reduced to the role of spectator. They have no way to get within weapon's range of any of the enemy ships without getting instanty killed by turrets. After 2 minutes elapse, they are marked inactive and start losing requisitions. The only way for them to get rid of the inactivity flag is to commit suicide and give a free point to the enemy. With both sides in a standoff, neither side will be getting many kills and the score will pretty much stay frozen until the timer runs out (assuming pilots from team A don't commit suicide out of boredom). We'll be right back to the broken game mode that existed before the turrets were removed from TDM. One consequence would be that most people would just pick gunships right from the start of the game, to be prepared in case the turrets get turned on at some point during the game, since gunships are the only ships that can still get kills once the turrets are on. As a result, instead of getting on a partially upgraded strike fighter when my team is facing a bunch of 2-ship newbies, I would make sure to always use a gunship because I would know that at some point, the turrets would probably be turned on and I would end up inactive if I was on a strike. Basically, I would feel forced to play a gunship 100% of the time in TDM.

Are there any plans to adjust the "non-contributor" system? There are issues with the current system in both game modes. a) In TDM, players who intentionally and repeatedly self-destruct on their own capital ship can sabotage the game for their team but there is no way to vote them out because they are still considered "contributing." On the other hand, a player who is flying defensively while being chased by multiple enemies will eventually be marked inactive. Similarly, a player who is chasing a very evasive scout (for instance trying to tie up an enemy ace) will eventually be marked inactive if he doesn't manage to actually hit the enemy ship. The trigger for being flagged as inactive should not depend on factors outside a player's control such as RNG or the enemy ship's build (evasion, distorsion field) or the enemy player's skill at not being hit. b) In Domination, a player who actually goes afk for the entire game at a satellite held by his team is considered contributing, but a player preventing multiple enemies from capturing a neutral satellite will eventually be marked as non-contributing unless he manages to hit one of his opponents while trying to fly defensively and stay alive. Being penalized for preventing the enemy from capturing a satellite makes absolutely no sense. Here is an actual example to illustrate this issue (in case the devs read this post): I was recently in a very disputed game on the Denon map. At one point, about half-way through the game, the enemy team had the lead. My team held A, the opposing team held C, and I was keeping B neutral on my own against 4 enemies (after a failed capping attempt), while the other 7 members of my team were trying to take C from the remaining 4 enemies. Eventually I was marked inactive, at which point I left B and barrel-rolled/boosted to A to reset my inactivity timer, letting the enemy take B. As soon as they took B, two of them went to C and got there just in time to prevent my team from finally taking the node. Somehow we still won that game by a few points but me having to leave B to the enemy in order to reset my timer at a friendly satellite almost cost us the game. By holding the satellite neutral for over 2 minutes, I was accomplishing two things for my team: I was preventing the enemy team from getting an even bigger lead (if they had held 2 satellites instead of 1 during that time, they would have won) and I was tying up 4 people who otherwise would have been either defending C or possibly attacking A. I should not have to choose between losing a large amount of requisition due to the inactivity timer or letting the enemy potentially win the game.

I like this idea a lot. Not just because it would speed up queue times and allow for better matchmaking, but also because games with fewer total participants allow each individual player to have more impact on the outcome of the game. Currently, the worst imbalanced games are usually 12 v 12. When a decent player gets stuck with 11 inexperienced and/or mediocre players against better opponents, there is not much he can do all by himself. In Domination, it is easy for 12 good players to 3-cap and hold a 3-cap for the entire duration of the game, while blockading the enemy cap ship at the same time. It is harder to hold a 3-cap in an 8 v 8 game, as long as the opposing team has at least one or two good players, and it would be even more difficult in a 6 v 6 or 4 v 4 game. When I get stuck with 7 2-ship newbies in an 8 v 8 domination game and we get 3-capped, I will go attack A (or C, whichever has fewer people defending it), kill the turrets, maybe kill whoever was there and start capping. If I'm lucky, I can even finish the cap before reinforcements come and I get overwhelmed, at which point I head for the opposite end of the map (C if I was at A) while the enemy are re-capping the sat I was at previously. Again, I kill the turrets and attempt the cap until people show up and kill me. Rinse and repeat. Occasionally, the newbies on my side will get the right idea and come to the sat I just capped and we will actually hold it. I can't win all by myself but I can actually accomplish something and earn a decent amount of reqs for the game. When I try this in a 12 v 12, there are so many enemies available to counter me (either "floating", blockading our cap ship, or split up with 4 defending each sat), that I usually get killed before I can even kill a single turret. I've had 12 v 12 games where I ended up with 0 objective points and less than 300 reqs, because I couldn't leave the cap ship without getting 5 or 6 enemies on my tail. Most of the newbies just gave up and sat at the cap ship (or didn't hit the respawn button) and waited for the game to end. This would be impossible in a 6 v 6 or 4 v 4 game. In a 4 v 4 domination game, it would only take 2 good players to win the game for their team. They wouldn't even need to be in a premade together or anything. Individual skill would matter more.

I think only BLC and slug should have their armor piercing reduced to 50%. HLC, proton torpedoes and thermite torpedoes should keep 100% armor piercing. This would solidify the role of strike fighters as the best anti-bomber crafts. Torpedoes are hard enough to get a lock with and to successfully land, and they do not need weakening. Nerfing armor piercing on HLC would be too detrimental to strikes and dronecarriers. I already feel that dronecarriers need a buff (mostly a reduction in the CD of their drones). A 50% loss of armor piercing on HLC would put dronecarriers at too big a disadvantage when fighting minelayers at nodes. Unlike minelayers, dronecarriers do not have access to charged plating, so nerfing armor piercing on HLC would result in a net buff of minelayers over dronecarriers. I disagree. I think the TRAVEL SPEED of missiles/torpedoes should be normalized, NOT their reload time. It is absurd that torpedoes, which have the longest range and thus usually the furthest distance to travel once a lock is obtained also move so slowly that oftentimes a ship will be able to keep from being hit simply by boosting to stay ahead of the torpedo until their missile lock break comes off CD. On the other hand, the travel speed of sabotage probe is too fast and it causes really annoying glitches. Most of the time, when someone fires a sabotage probe at me and I use a lock break as soon as it is in the air, the lock break will go off but the probe will still hit and take effect. Even when I barrel roll away, the probe will catch up with me after barrel roll and hinder me. This is not due to the fact that the probe is released from short range: I do not have any issues breaking lock on cluster missiles. This issue is specific to sabotage probe and I suspect it is related to the travel time being so fast. I also wish that the glitches causing locks to break without the use of a missile lock break would get fixed. Currently, any ship, even a bomber, can break lock simply by accelerating or turning, even if it never actually goes out of range or outside the arc. I have repeatedly lost proton torpedo locks on bombers because the game somehow decided that the lock got broken when the bomber accelerated or turned, even though they never got anywhere near the edge of the range or firing arc. This type of glitch gets compounded by the slow lock-on time of torpedoes and the slow travel time. If I decide to hold the lock while boosting towards my target, to try and realease the torpedo at shorter range, the vast majority of the time the lock will just randomly break due to this glitch (I am playing on a west coast server from the east coast and I suspect latency may play a part in it). EMP missile definitely needs a buff but I think this might be a bit excessive. The main issue with EMP missile is that the lock-on time is too long. It often needs to be used in circumstances where LOS is iffy, and/or where having to maintain a straight course (or come to a full stop) for several seconds is suicide. The lock-on time should be similar to cluster. Also, the damage from the missile to ships within the blast radius should be the full damage, rather than half damage. Even so, fully upgraded EMP missiles would only hit for 360 or so. The current 180 damage to ships is ridiculously low. I don't understand why Bioware is buffing EMP field and not EMP missile in 2.8, when EMP field performs a lot better on live than EMP missile does. I don't agree with your proposed BLC nerf, I think it would reduce the variety of builds used by T2 scouts. This also ties in with point #2 where you want to nerf cluster missiles by increasing their reload time. There are currently 2 viable T2 scout builds, that are about equally powerful, although they excel in different circumstances: BLC + clusters, and Quads + pods. Both builds allow incredible burst when combined with offensive CDs like BO, TT, and offensive crew abilities. You propose to nerf both cluster missiles and BLC but leave quads and pods untouched, which would mean that the optimal build for T2 scouts would become just quads and pods. I really don't think either BLC or cluster need to be adjusted. What needs to be adjusted are the offensive CDs that allow too much burst (most particularly TT and BO). I am torn on this. Bombers already have such a limited role in the game (they are a 1-trick pony and everybody keeps clamoring for their one trick to be nerfed) and I would hate to see them weakened too much. On the other hand, it is frustrating to be clearing mines with ion AOE in a gunship and accidentally blow up a scout on my team who happened to be whithin the radius of the blast. If this change is put in, I think the radius at which explosion is triggered should be slightly increased to compensate, or it would become almost trivial for scouts to kill bombers.

Sorry, I did not know that. This is good news. For some reason, my target window does not show buffs/debuffs on enemy ships, even when I apply the debuff myself. When I hit a bunch of ships with ion railgun AOE, a blue glow appears on each ship for a few seconds and I thought the glow represented the debuff. I guess it's just showing me which ships I hit (but I already know that from the numbers appearing on top of them). Anyway, my first point still stands: this is likely to encourage ion spamming because the duration of the slow is not affected by charge. Thus, there is not much incentive to use full charge when specced for the slow, as opposed to the regen debuff. A single gunship will be able to CC multiple targets in fairly quick succession for very little energy cost by targetting them one at a time with a 25%-charge ion shot and letting the other ships on their team finish them off.

Yes, sorry, I meant fleet coms. I edited my original post to reflect this. The vendor is located in the same quadrant of fleet as the GTN (NE on Pub Fleet, SW on Imp Fleet).

Nem, could you maybe go on PTS and buy a bunch of boxes and see if you get any of the really valuable mats? None of my toons has any fleet coms, so I can't do it myself. I never had much interest in the PVE space stuff. I stopped doing the missions around lvl 35 because they became overly difficult and never bothered to try the heroic ones since I couldn't even complete the non-heroic ones successfully.

My main concern is that this will bring back ion spamming. Currently, most gunship pilots spec into the regen debuff, which synergizes with the energy drain, and the drain scales with charge. This creates an incentive to use fully charged ion railshots. If you hit someone with a minimum charge shot (25%), the energy drain is small and the additional regen debuff is not nearly as crippling as on a ship that takes a full ion shot. Secondary targets that get hit by the AOE get even less power drained and the 6 sec of no regen is not too much of a concern for them because they usually have plenty of power left, which lets them survive until they can regen again. The 12-sec slow on the other hand is just as deadly on a ship with full power as on a ship with low power, so there will be very little incentive to use full-charge ion shots. Just the opposite in fact. A gunship can usually get off 2 full-charge shots back to back before running low on weapon's power. But the same gunship could get off 8 or more 25% charge shots on a full power bar (probably closer to 10). This means that a single gunship could potentially snare every single ship on the opposing team before running out of power. Realistically, not every shot will hit its mark, but some shots will hit multiple ships. Now, imagine a team with 4 gunships, each of which can fire a partial-charge AOE ion railshot every 1.75 seconds... There is another issue with the slow: it is just as crippling to the secondary targets caught in the AOE as it is to the primary target, unlike the regen debuff, which is most deadly to the primary target that got a significant portion of its energy drained by the shot. Also, secondary targets get hit just from being within the radius of the AOE, regardless of any defenses they may have (such as passive evasion) or any defensive CDs they might be using (such as Distorsion Field). So, if I want to slow a scout, I don't have to worry about evasion, I can just hit the strike flying nearby and the scout will be slowed by the AOE. In fact, if the strike is 14.9k away and the scout is 16k away, I will still slow the scout if he is within the radius of the AOE, even though he is out of range of my railgun and probably thinks he's safe. This is currently the case with ion debuffs on live, but it is not as much of an issue because, as I mentioned, the debuffs are not as deadly to secondary targets as a 12-sec 55% slow would be. For these reasons, I think that a 12-second 55% AOE slow is too powerful, unless the duration of the slow scales with charge, which is not currently the case. Also, secondary targets should only get half the duration of the slow.