An interesting thread over at Reddit about GSF......

One point I would like to mention....if they were to bolster GSF similar to the way they bolster PVP it would solve most of the entry problems IMO, but it would remove noob meat from the menu for regulars, and I am almost positive that Bioware designed the feature to provide new players as meat for geared ones.

It would stand against one of their design principals if that was the case, and I therefore find it, or improvements like it that level the playing field very unlikely based on my assumptions.

Naturally that is all they are.

I normally fair quite well in twitch flight simulators, but GSF went beyond that to areas of "trickery" that really have no place in a space twitch simulator.

The "one shot sniper" ship was pretty ridiculous and quickly became the FotM for anyone who wanted to win. Ditto Bombers when they came out. While I applaud the attempt at having different roles, GSF failed when it went away from twitch and towards RNG specials.

A successful free flight space game would have captured the flavor of the movies. Instead of a WoT style of ship improvement, the game should have been more like JtL with crafted components allowing players to determine their ships performance. This would have allowed anyone to compete without falling victim to a horrible match-making system.

What GSF could have been is what makes the GSF we got seem so horrible. And because we are stuck with it, people have stopped playing it. Sad that all of that development time was wasted on another failure.

All they had to do was make a tie fighter, rouge squadron style of game with a variate of ships including fleet ships and fighters/bombers add a random map generator that would add specific types of assaults where it be asteroids, interstellar, or mid air planet combat, with specific objectives like last man standing down enemy ship/base or a total domination..... Done... even the vastness was done back in 1994 with tie fighter obviously for some reason the simplicity was lost with well.... We must make something that is like a roller coaster?

Should have just copied Starlancer TBH.

3) Steep learning curve
The controls are complicated, .....really?!!!?
too many specials, too much equipment, you havent play a decent space sim to know that this is a baby version of a space sim
far too large of a gap between top level fully geared players and newcomers ...... it isnt man, its same as ground pvp

Really Really.

....and you have to play BF2.

The point was it should not have been the same as ground PVP. It should have had little if any similarity to ground PVP.

JTL was a fully fledged expansion. It introduced a whole crafting mechanic to an existing detailed crafting system. It was infinately more complicated and nothing in SWTOR comes close to requiring similar brain usage imho. The learning curve in JTL was much steeper (try explaining JTL's Reverse Engineering to the masses...good luck ). A mini game was all we should have expected and it's what we got. Granted, it pleases only a few, but I'm not sure why anything even vaguely JTL-esque is feasible in SWTOR.

GSF is a mini-game. Something for some to partake in while they wait/take a break from doing some other ingame activity. Glorified fishing if you will (Yes, I liked SWG's updated fishing mini-game also). It can still be improved but I very much doubt it will be (bar a serious balance pass or two).

My 2 parsecs.

EDIT: Seems I went off on a tangent. Apologies.

The controls are easy. Don't know why people have problems with them

GSF can be fun sometimes when teams are evenly matched, but for every one of those good games you have 2 or 3 games that you either steamroll the other team or get steamrolled.

Legacy hangar would help a lot. I don't bother with it unless I'm on all but one toon.

Bottom line is though no one asked for GSF. The people who wanted space content (including myself) wanted something a little more open with PvE content. I don't think the PvP crowd wanted space PvP at all. JTL was a lot of fun, I know different game and engine but I think that's what people really asked for. Doing PvE content is probably hard for them though because they would need to write an AI capable of handling a 3D environment.

In SWG PoB ships kind of sucked compared to a good fighter but they was a lot of fun, invite your friends aboard and walk around the inside of the ship and control the ship together in PvE and PvP.

No, I didn't wanted a JTL style gameplay. Sure, I would have also been fine with BioWare doing nothing at all for space, but the GSF I got is enjoyable enough. Sure, there are issues, and I would like to see the queues faster pop (the weeks with double rewards made that happen, now it is back to long waiting times).

In my opinion the gear makes to much a difference (it is no fun to start now, since the folks who are flying for month have not only the advantage that they know how to fly, but also the superior ships). A better tutorial could help, also maybe add a quest that gives tells one about the tutorial and gives a small reward for trying at least that (but of course with a better tutorial that would make even more sense).

Also, maybe more different kind of maps and especially objectives would be nice. Or, here is an idea, make a map called Corellia Obital Battle, and when you win a match you get a buff for playing on the ground on Corellia and the Black Hole. Or create other incentives so that players want to queue for GSF.