You're in a lobby pre-match. One of your teammates admits he sucks at GSF, or perhaps that this is his first foray into the game. You've got sixty seconds until the match begins. What - if any - quick tips can you give noobs to hopefully limit their frustration?

I realize there's a lot you can't possibly get across in this scenario, and there's no good substitute for good old experience - but is there any useful info you can possibly impart?

Just one "follow me and be my wingman".

They can learn from watching and doing. Just remember to not boost around too much cus u have someone trying to follow! LOL And let them clean up the kills so they can get some confidence too.

I usually tell them to not worry about being bad or losing the match. Just have fun.

I usually throw that in if I can, but it probably isn't a lot of fun being completely disoriented/cannon fodder/space dust.

Just one "follow me and be my wingman".

 

They can learn from watching and doing. Just remember to not boost around too much cus u have someone trying to follow! LOL And let them clean up the kills so they can get some confidence too.

I like this, I'll try it.

Space bar makes you go faster. Follow the group and support them try to focus fire. Don't shot till your target goes red or you are just wasting energy,

If you sit by the cap ship through the entire fight your a traitorous b@stard and nobody will fly with you. And that's for good reason. Also if come the end you have 0 kills 0 Assists 0 Damage but lots of deaths its clear what you were doing. Just don't.

How about, "The wonderful people of Bio ware made a Tutorial. If you haven't completed it and feel uncomfortable playing this match, you may want to complete it first. It will teach you the basics of navigation and satellite capping."

That said, I am at about 1000 matches completed and just did the tutorial for the first time ever two days ago. LOL. Someone told me I would get requisition for it. Fat lies.

Space bar makes you go faster. Follow the group and support them try to focus fire. Don't shot till your target goes red or you are just wasting energy,

 

If you sit by the cap ship through the entire fight your a traitorous b@stard and nobody will fly with you. And that's for good reason. Also if come the end you have 0 kills 0 Assists 0 Damage but lots of deaths its clear what you were doing. Just don't.

See, these are all excellent points and valuable nuggets of gsf wisdom...I just have no idea how you'd get all of this across during that brief period you're in the lobby together. I've whispered virtual essays to people post-match, including some of these very comments. But I guess here I'm looking more for just one or two very quick points that might help make a noob pilot's experience a little better, and possibly lessen the inevitable frustration just a bit. Maybe that's unrealistic, I get that...like I said earlier, there's no substitute for experience. But there have been a couple of good ideas in this thread.

"practise flying, learn about power management & explore the maps a little bit. don't worry about your score for the first 50 or so matches"

That's more along the lines of what I'm shooting for.

And @oscar - suggesting the tutorial is a good idea, I know for a fact that lots of folks don't have a clue it's even there. BW probably should have forced new pilots to at least run through it once before throwing them into the fire.

How about, "The wonderful people of Bio ware made a Tutorial. If you haven't completed it and feel uncomfortable playing this match, you may want to complete it first. It will teach you the basics of navigation and satellite capping."

 

That said, I am at about 1000 matches completed and just did the tutorial for the first time ever two days ago. LOL. Someone told me I would get requisition for it. Fat lies.

Sometimes, when I see many new players fly, I wonder wheter or not they've used the tutorial... I learned quite a bit from it when I did it in the first few days of GSF.

Aside from that, though, practice practice practice is where it's at.

Sometimes, when I see many new players fly, I wonder wheter or not they've used the tutorial... I learned quite a bit from it when I did it in the first few days of GSF.

 

Aside from that, though, practice practice practice is where it's at.

absolutely no arguments there. Problem is, a lot of yutzes get into a queue and are like, "Which button does my missiles?" and they haven't gotten the hang of how to not face plant into asteroids by avoiding them at 10k clicks instead of trying to strafe out of the way (which, for the record doesn't work. Literally, the key binds don't do anything)

of course, ideally, the crash course would have to be more than 60 seconds because it would include the following in my opinion:

- Do the Tutorial. Several times if you can't complete it in under 3 or 4 minutes.

- Go look at your key binds and get familiar with the key strokes you might want to know. Review this once every week, you might re-discover something you suddenly want thanks to your new-found experience doing GSF.

- Don't fly in straight lines, they get you killed by gunships and even a noob can track you that way/

- Experiment with your loadouts for the ships you have. Use your requisition wisely, but don't be afraid to try something new, you might find it does exactly what you want.

- Be judicious about your crew. The difference between using one copilot vs another can mean killing in 5 seconds or 10. Or dying or living in a lot of cases.

- Play several queues a day if you can. You only get better through experience.

- Expect to die a lot at first. Even a lot of experienced pilots have lower kills/higher deaths without upgraded ships.

We have a GSF channel setup to chat about starfighter and to help new pilots. I often times use this time to send a message advertising the channel. I keep the text in a text file so I can copy it and paste it into the chat box instead of typing it out every time. After that I try to model behavior that helps, such as calling out what satalite I am heading to and with what ship. Calling out if I plan to stay and guard, if I am supporting with a hyperspace point or hull repairs, etc.

Getting them to the channel means we have more time as a community to help them with questions and tips.

We have a GSF channel setup to chat about starfighter and to help new pilots. I often times use this time to send a message advertising the channel. I keep the text in a text file so I can copy it and paste it into the chat box instead of typing it out every time. After that I try to model behavior that helps, such as calling out what satalite I am heading to and with what ship. Calling out if I plan to stay and guard, if I am supporting with a hyperspace point or hull repairs, etc.

 

Getting them to the channel means we have more time as a community to help them with questions and tips.

I like this too...the channel, of course, but also simply the idea of having something ready to paste into chat. Seems obvious, not sure why it never occurred to me. I'm not the world's fastest typist, so it can be a bit of a hassle to input anything substantive into the chat box given the limited window of opportunity.

My tips to self admitted newbies before takeoff:

- EVERYONE sucks for the first few dozen matches. Don't get discouraged.

-Stick with other players, and try to shoot what they do or shoot people shooting them

-Above all, relax!

The relax line is more to see who gets the reference than any really useful advice.

/feel old sometimes

"Great, I'm about to be killed a million miles from nowhere, and Gung-Ho Iguana is telling me to relax."

I always say:

"Space bar is boost!"

and "F3 to re-route power to engines!"

And of course, "Good luck, have fun! For the Empire!"