I. Do. Use. My. Blasters. Still see that stupid message. Luckily I haven't run into the kick trolls lately. Wonder why the enemy team that runs away from my tick spots after I destroy some of their ships don't get kicked if we're all treated equally. My kill counts are going up. Wonder what the function that controls all of this looks like. Probably like pvp flag in WoW: you get flagged and assigned a time stamp. If you don't engage in any more pvp activity for the specified period, the flag goes away. But in this case you start out with a count down timer that gets reset every time you "participate". One thing I've seen is I see that stupid message and I'm moving toward the fight and I get one shotted by a gun ship or a fighter and then I see "You are contributing again." So, I guess "using. my. blasters." is not the only way to participate. And finally, telling someone to send a video to prove what they're saying about a piece of software is a tactic used by low level help desk people to try to get the complainer to go away. Strangely, I've seen this type of thing in Bioware's official response to problems such as a corrupted launcher.settings file. That's not a good sign. Wonder at the mind set of the guy that sits at the spawn point waiting for someone to be flagged so he can get them kicked for "not participating". The lack of self awareness is strong with this one.

Maybe the definition of "actively participating" doesn't work when it comes to some ships. Take the bomber, for example. It's obviously designed for defending a position. Most of its weapons fire out of the rear of the ship and remain there. It's slow and no amount of pressing the f3 key will make it faster. And while people can sometimes tell the difference between "new and trying" and "not trying", computer software is really bad at nuance. I know, writing computer software is my job. So, someone saying that you "never" can be kicked if you are "actively participating" runs the risk of not being able to support that absolute statement. In the two times I was kicked, I was moving toward the enemy, trying to set up my mines. That's what bombers do. But if your definition of actively participating is to just madly fly into a group of enemies and be destroyed, then no I wasn't dong that. If I was going to play that way, I'd just fly into a wall and be done with it. At any rate, vote kick is fundamentally harassment. And since I'm a paying customer, it's much more than that. Selling someone a product and then preventing them from being able to consume that product might be called fraud in some courts. I'm amazed no one has thought to challenge it with a class action lawsuit. Maybe that will change.

I'm not directing this at anyone, so please don't take it personally. We're talking about a sub part of an online game. A game that's played by all ages and skill levels. And levels of interest in getting better or not. And commitment of finances and time. We can all name parts of the game that we'd like to see improved on. And the play of other players. My personal gripe in dom is the guys that fight like crazy to take a sat and then fly away and leave it unguarded. But I wouldn't vote kick someone for doing that even though it clearly costs matches. As for not being able to be kicked if you're contributing: I've noticed the message "not contributing" while there were enemies all around me shooting at me and me shooting at them. I've noticed the message "contributing again" after fighting 4 or 5 enemies in a row. I never saw the warning, tho, even when I scrolled back looking for it. As for travel, I know about and use the F3 key. On some maps at some spawn points it can take me two complete tanks of energy to get where I'm going. I've noticed it varies from match to match on the same maps, so that's weird. But all that's beside the point and again just my opinion. It's also my opinion that vote kick is abused in every game and should be removed. If you want the game to grow and improve why kick people who are trying to learn the game? That's counter productive, whether you understand it or not. As for the self destruct, I bet if you're honest even the aces that are commenting here have done it. You know, your shields are red and someone you hate has a lock on you, so you fly into a wall to deny them a kill. Come on, admit it. I won't judge you.

Okay, a few points: I mainly fly bomber. The bomber isn't a dog fighter. I excel at domination, because I can burrow into the station and kill scouts by the ones and twos. That brings me to another point. I average about 1 or two kills per match. On some of my best dom matches I've scored as high as 10 kills. I think one reason for that and it goes for both dom and death matches, when the other team gets a couple people killed at a certain location, they avoid it. Now, the bomber is not a dog fighter and I have to move from cover to cover and that takes time. Maybe EA's software marks me as afk when I'm just trying to get to another relatively safe place. So, maybe EA should not apply the same contribution metrics to bombers? Today was better. Only ran into one troll and he went after someone else. I put him on ignore after we lost that match. You'd think someone would point out all this time people spend worrying about what other are doing is time they're not contributing as well. Just my opinion.

Okay, this has been discussed a thousand times and nothing has been done about it but... Here's a new wrinkle for me at least. Now that I've started playing GSF, I'm running into the vote-kick trolls. Only happened a couple of times in the last week, so not a major issue. But I like to fly the bomber and that really gets to some people. And both instances of me getting vote kicked were right after a match where I killed some people and then in the next match I got grouped with them. Then they started mouthing off about how they hated bombers and next thing I know I'm kicked. I know EA/Bioware will never do the brave thing and do away with vote-kick no matter how much it's abused, but how about giving us a list of the people that vote-kicked us so we can ignore them. Right now I have to scroll back through the chat log and that's kind of hit or miss. I may be ignoring people who didn't vote to kick. So, just an idea. Any tool to help deal with the toxic players would really be great. Thanks