Huh, good point. How would rail guns be affected if they too had to aim for a lead indicator instead of the ship itself? It'll probably only make it a little harder to hit.

Since the new strategy will be focusing more on the single player aspects of the game, I was wondering if BW devs have ever thought about some changes to subtler game play elements. Specifically, adding questing areas where there are not path, and quest markers. Last night as I was playing a second toon through Rishi, I noticed that i had just turned on the minimap to get myself to the next quest point. Considering I had upgraded to a gaming PC from a 3 year old laptop in the meantime, It was a damn shame I didn't take the time to really explore and get a feel for the environment. Then I remembered this : To summarize: It's a comparison of Thief from 1999 to it's 2014 reincarnation, and pointed out a part of what made the older game fun was the lack of minimaps and quest markers. It forced the player to really explore the environment, appreciate it, and then master it. I'd like some of that out of SWTOR If Bio-ware is in the process of adding new areas, I hope they consider aspects of this philosophy and add areas designed not to use Minimaps and/or quest markers. Tell us general direction and distances where quest objectives are and we'll figure it out ourselves. Once again we'd feel a little like exploring instead of following a predetermined path. In addition, this will make seeker droid and micro-binocular quests that much more satisfying.

So that's a new ability at 61, 62, 64 and 65? And here I thought they were trying to fix ability bloat

Pretty much this too. I don't know if rail guns are insta-hit weapons now or just very fast projectile speed, but if evasion stat is dumped, then I suppose rail guns bolts will need a travel time now. But, that is an entirely different topic

Some kind of turnbased minigame based on random collectibles from dropped loot or cartel market. Either Sabacc or Dejarik

Are save points and MMO's mutually exclusive? This is an interesting point that I've been thinking about for a while. Actually, I have an exceedingly vague memory of something about character slots mentioned in a cantina tour sometime back. The statement was about expanding character slots, but the BW rep ( i forget who) also mentioned something about expanding something else in regards to how they saved player information. This memory of a memory is driving me nuts because I can't figure out if it's something I legitimately heard or just dreamed up somewhere along the way. Anyway.... my point is, there are probably only so many meaningful character choices along the length of a season's worth of story. So let's argue that at the end of the season a player can make 4 meaning choices along the way with 2 options each. So, along the way, the player's possible world state multiplies, go from 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 - > 16. So in the end of a particular chapter there are 16 possible combinations of states the player could be in. A lot, but not exactly mind boggling. Now let's say that for each character slot, BW has expanded the character save architecture to allow the character to revert back to a previous chapter. Character will maintain all it's gear and stats, the only thing that will be reverted are that character's instanced world states, which will probably only involve switching off and on different instanced areas that were in game anyway. I'm the furthest thing you can get from a game dev and software engineer, but I believe something like this would give a player the illusion of save points without blowing up servers with useless extra data like the inventory and gear for multiple copies of the same character.

I think this highlights one of the limitations of a game like GSF in the current engine. I always assumed that the RNG hit system was put in place to compensate for the engines inability to do any sort of reasonable hit detection. I can only guess that the dev's solution was to make all the ship's hit boxes similar in size and program different defense values to simulate the evasion capabilities of a small fast scout, vs the slow- easy to hit bomber. Pretty clever actually, but when the devs also decided on the speed and boost capabilities of each ship, they didn't realize how much that would compound to make the scout that much more effective than the strike fighter. That is to say ship surviveability scales a lot better with speed x Boost capacity x evasion, than Armor x shield capacity. Frankly, I'd really like to see how a game plays out when you simply turn off the evasion stat.

A lock on indicator is not a bad idea, but might add even more information overload for a new player. Not to mention making GS's even MORE of a pain to sneak up on (in strike fighters) Maybe leave it as a equipment slot for strike with some added benefit of extra defense or shielding?

I like your idea Kaiser, I had a similar one a while ago. But instead of the strike having one of these drones the "Bomber" gets this offensive turret probe that auto targets nearest threats and instead of having mines these "bombers" are given the slow targeting, but verly powerful AoE missiles that are used for clearing out mine fields and cap point defenses.

My biggest complaint about bombers is actually a complaint about how the cap points are designed. Their LoS antics around the base of the satellites keep them alive much longer than they should. I believe that many of these complaints against bombers evaporate if the cap point were an open structure like a large open box, but then I suppose GS antics would become much more prominent. le sigh.

Just started up GSF again lately just to get a feel for it again. Strike fighters have always been my main goto since GSF came out. In my opinion, the frentic speed of the game is what really hurts the strike fighters the most in it's current state. Any weapon that requires any sort of sustained DPS is severely handicapped by the rapid closing speeds. 1000m can pass by in a literal blink of an eye and thus bursty damage weapons like burst cannons and rail guns are going to win out over quad lasers and rapid fires. This is compounded by the strikes inability to keep pace with most anything that's trying to get away with it, save the bomber, which will simply drop a mine or LoS indefinitely. Hyper-unrealistically (and a bit selfishly), My suggestion to fix the strike fighter would be to slow gameplay by entirely dumping the boost system and slowing turn rates. Rework both the strike and the scout into one role that is fast and excels at hit and run tactics, and the other slower but maneuverable. I say selfishly, because this would boil the game down to something a little more that I would prefer, something that gives me a little more time to consider the board state, such as, the vector and speed that targets are traveling, and how to maneuver accordingly. Granted that all is sorta there as the game is now, but happens a little too fast for my shriveled brain to take in fast enough. More realistically. My suggestion would be much like anyone else's. Buff the strike fighter's damage and surviveability.

As someone that's started playing around with EMP missiles, I like suggestion 3 a lot. They're nice to have when a node is mined up and absolutely useless any other time.

There was a time i would disagree with adding joystick control. But as of late I've come to appreciate the need for more control options. One stepping stone to implementing joystick controls would be to put in a reticule sensitivity or range limiter. That is, a slider setting that controls the max distance from which the cross hairs can be move away from the center line. At 100% range the controls will behave as they do already and at 0% the cross hairs will essentially be locked in place. Anything in between sorta adjusts how "stiff" or "loose" the responsiveness would feel. Next step would be to map X, Y input to joystick controls which would conceivably translate better at lower settings. Yes, lower setting would not allow one to track targets, but I think it's a worthy trade off to have a tighter control over where your reticule is at all times and might be off-set by the forced decrease in tracking penalties.

I'd also chime in and say that simply giving players tools to communicate may not be enough. Putting in an in-game system that rewards cooperative behavior would be the way to go with this. Difficult? Sure. But I wholeheartedly believe that it would be the way to go with this game, adding a new layer of depth that would go beyond simply adding more maps and ship variants.

Absolutely agree with this thread. GSF needs more ingame options for PUG communication. I also agree with quick-key commands as being the way to go with this and drafted my own ideas on how such a system could ultimately be integrated into the game. Granted, much of it is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. But I think at the very least, having a "help" key, which highlights enemies currently targeting you to your squad members would be a HUGE step in the right direction. Maybe have it on cool down to prevent spamming or something.... anyway, here is a link to my original thread: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=736819