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Ramalina

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  1. My suspicion is that it's an artifact of the start of the GSF development process basically consisting of opening the Warzone code and going Ctrl-C, opening a new file, and hitting Ctrl-V. I'm pretty sure that at some point there was supposed to have been a housecleaning of legacy PvP code effects on GSF, but it's easy to miss stuff. Haven't tested recently, but in the past certain DoT damage effects on a character would transfer to your ship if you accepted the match before the DoT was cleansed or expired. I once died very quickly in a match because I was doing the Pub side Heroic on Balmorra where you collect droid intel in the toxic sludge, and the DoT from the sludge kept ticking on my ship when I spawned in. It's not much on a character, but on a ship hull it's pretty rapidly fatal due to the small health pools. Honestly, our characters should probably all get wireless controllers, don spacesuits, and get out in front of the ships to intercept incoming damage. After all, if you and your spacesuit can soak up a few hundred thousand points of damage, why aren't you protecting the ship with it's paltry 2.5 to 4 k combined health pool instead of hiding behind the ship's shields? Spec as a tank, grab ten medpacs, slap Guard on your ship, and get out in front of it with a jetpack, and there you have it: an invincible* GSF ship safely hiding behind its pilot. *Offer not valid if your ship gets within 0 to 35 meters of another pilot and is one-shot by their class basic attack.
  2. What engine ability and what upgrade level? Upgraded Power Dive for example should be free, and unless there's a lockout affecting you from Slicing or EMP should always work regardless of engine pool. Barrel Roll with no upgrades on the other hand is pretty power hungry, and it's easy even for an experienced player to get a bit low on engine pool try to Barrel Roll and then be unpleasantly surprised when it doesn't work. Though personally my favorite Barrel Roll error is forgetting that the Pike despite being shaped much like a Starguard does not have Retro Boosters and being very surprised when hitting the missile break catapults me forward into terrrain instead of catapulting me backward into terrain. Oh, BTW @Hefaiston, popping in here to ask questions and find out what's going on in a GSF match instead of automatically assuming it's hacks already puts you way ahead of a lot of GSF players. Keep learning and pretty quickly you should be a terror in the skies of SWTOR.
  3. You forgot: 4) Lockdown crew skill. Drains 40 engine power, range 5 km, base CD 45 sec but possibly affected by Alacrity equipment on character. Hangar UI implies it is, but hangar UI is not always entirely trustworthy. Alacrity probably shouldn't affect GSF, but it's always possible that it slipped through (obviously it did in the UI, but not sure about actual matches). Note, given the scale of max alacrity gains, not sure an absurd alacrity gear set for about a 5 sec cooldown on Lockdown would be really worth it in any case.
  4. There are multiple reasons people self destruct. There are multiple reasons that people chain self destruct many times in a single match. However, for the specific reason that you like to go on about at great length: people thinking that self destructing is a more time efficient way of getting non-GSF rewards from GSF than learning to play and winning, decreasing the peak respawn rate so that SDing is very obviously no longer time efficient literally removes the entire foundational premise of SDing to accelerate matches. I question the premise that switching to a medals based reward system would improve much. Not that I object to medals based rewards mind you, but these are already people not willing to put any effort into achieving victories in GSF. If you gate rewards behind effort in GSF more effectively, the likely outcome is that they decide that the Return On Investment is no longer worth the time spent, and they just shift to whatever the next best rewards/time activity is. Not sure anyone will be sad to see them go, but in terms of solutions for self destructors, vote kicks, respawn timers, and medal based rewards all ultimately use the same method of "solving" SDs. Driving those players just in it for low effort loot out of participating in GSF. If you wanted to change their minds about putting effort into GSF, you'd probably need: A high quality single player PvE series of tutorial missions for GSF. Otherwise the learning curve is just too brutal for most players. Hybrid maps that allow a mix of PvP and PvE goals so they can earn rewards beating up low challenge scripted objectives. Exhaust ports don't break your torpedo lock or shoot back after all. Vastly improved matchmaking that takes into account indicators of skill like: Average kills, Average damage, Average accuracy, K:D ratio, a grouping factor, and that actually double checks for horribly skewed teams before starting a match and rebalances the teams if they are. All of which would take considerable skill and effort, and are therefore unlikely to ever happen. If self destructs are taken on by the devs it's not so much a matter of whether they try to drive SDers out of GSF but how. The good solutions realistically aren't on the table, so it's a matter of picking which bad solution you want. Timer is relatively easy coding as far as the options go, and if the values are set correctly on the respawn delay a timer should be highly effective. So it's probably a "best" bad solution, or possibly second best after the, "do nothing," solution, from the dev perspective.
  5. I figure that clusters of 3 to 4 deaths shouldn't be punished harshly, and that a good faith noob might easily die 6 to 8 times during a match. I didn't do any tuning on the math figuring a max of a 15 min match, but in that sort of tuning I'd probably look to not make getting nine plus deaths impossible, but to make it so that by death five or six you're spending some time twiddling your thumbs waiting for the respawn counter, if all five or six deaths are closely stacked on the timeline. One free death and then one additional un-penalized death every three minutes already puts you at up to 5 deaths with no consequences at all if you spread them evenly through the match. Depending on your rate of stacking the penalty, that means that 7, 8, or even 9 deaths may be fairly tolerable. Of course, you could also do non-linear penalty stacking along the lines of .25 min, .5 min, 1 min, 2 min, 4 min. You could also make the test condition be recent_deaths - 2, or recent deaths - 3, which gives the player more leeway on clusters of deaths before penalties start being implemented. So your counter is accumulating deaths, but it doesn't do anything about deaths until you've reached a threshold of deaths so quickly that the decrement hasn't had time to lower the counter. I mean, I feel like 6 or 7 deaths is something that an ace can carry to a win, provided it's just one or two people, it's the stacks of multiple double digit deaths from people who are faceplanting into the cap ship on spawn that really grate. So an equation that catches max rate deaths, but isn't that fussy about high average deaths seems like the best approach. Interaction with the non-participation timer is a valid concern, but really, spawn waits probably shouldn't count against that in any case, and as long as you're tweaking timers you might as well verify that spawn time isn't getting counted as non-participation while you're at it.
  6. A more aggressive kick isn't the only way to do it. A stacking respawn time increase would do it. You die, and it increments a died_recently flag by +1 from a default value of 0. Every three minutes died_recently is decremented by -1 until it reaches 0 again. For each respawn you look at died recently, and evaluate died_recently - 1, then multiply that by a time delay say one minute, that then gets added to your respawn timer. So two freebee deaths, and then a ramping respawn delay that abates if you stay alive for a few minutes. Set the delay value as you please to rate limit self destructs without being too harsh on new players dying through sheer inexperience. Given how hard it is get people to focus on vote kicking a bad actor during a match, an automated rate limit may be a more viable approach. I think that's what ultimately drove the decision to have auto-kick for non-participation be implemented.
  7. Those medals already exist and are properly awarded. The scoreboard doesn't show medals, and the legacy achievements don't do a great job of explaining medals, but the medals system works fine and registers almost all easily measurable aspects of good GSF play. I'll also point out that there is no factor that influences match outcomes more than skilled play. Throwing games just guarantees that you will likely have to play 1.5 to 2 times as many games to finish the daily and weekly, and SDs don't accelerate game outcomes enough to overcome that penalty in most cases, even in TDMs. From an optimization standpoint you're better off just finding a quiet asteroid to chill out near, and either dropping a healing beacon, or taking the occasional potshot at strays with a gunship. When the non-participation timer chimes in, charge into the fray and lob a torpedo, if it hits, run back to you spot, if not just plink at things until you hit or get shot down. Minimum effort, no real skill required, you don't piss other players off, and there's a reasonable chance that the rest of your team might be able to carry you to victory. It's win-win.
  8. Most of the builds are pretty good, but I'm going to argue against charged plating and deflection armor, especially for beginners. Armor piercing is practically everywhere in the current state of game balance. Charged plating is basically signing up to equip "extra vulnerability to AP builds." There are a handful of niche applications for it still, but they're uncommon and based on fairly high player skill. For a new player at present, equipping CP is basically just asking to die quicker and more often. The reason being, that if you make a list of the deadliest weapons in GSF right now, almost everything except Light Laser Cannons has armor piercing, which means that against them Charge Plating provides 0 benefit, and comes with some penalties retained from when the distribution of Armor Piercing was significantly different than it is now. For the T3 bomber, Directional Shields beats Charged Plating by a huge margin in terms of suitability for the build, it's not even close. If worried about getting shields facing the wrong direction in the heat of battle, just don't press the button. Directionals, just sittting there, are still better than active CP use. For the minelayer, there's not really a great substitute, but Shield Projector, Reinforced Armor and Large Reactor at least let you scrape by without seriously penalizing your survival chances. Yes, it sucks that Shield Projector more or less cancels out Large Reactor, but effectively giving up shield regen, or giving all enemies a free 23% shield piercing on you and coupling that with damage reduction that doesn't work against most of that piercing damage are both worse than a wasted reactor component. It's a ship that could use some love from the developers on defenses. There are other places I'd probably recommend different choices, but none that make enough of a difference to felt performance for a beginner to meaningfully notice. Practice and learning how game mechanics like range, accuracy, evasion, tracking penalty, line of sight, etc are more important than getting the last few percent of performance out of your component choices at that stage.
  9. SF is my home server, and the premades there don't worry me. There are 3 specific players that sometime play in groups (usually pairs or threes), that worry me, but it's entirely down to their personal skill, not to their grouped/not-grouped status. They also solo queue quite a lot. There are also some players that predominantly solo queue that worry me about as much. For the premades in general, you've got a decent shot at victory with two good players on your team and nobody at the bottom actively trying to sabotage the team. I should probably visit SS and DM at some point and see how they're doing GSF-wise these days. My understanding is that the queues are smaller, so a premade might tilt things a bit more on them.
  10. This does not require a full premade. It just requires everyone on your team to be bad at GSF. I can think of at least 10 people who are active these days in GSF, who by themselves, are capable of pulling off this sort of thing against a really weak team. It's sort of diagnostic of crappy matchmaking where for reasons known only to devs that probably moved on from SWTOR years ago, the matchmaker decides that putting all the weakest players on the same team is the thing to do. It happens. Back when GSF and SWTOR had populations much bigger than now and a GSF Scoreboard Records thread was maintained, the record entries were mostly that sort of game, where one or two skilled people rampage over a team that contains zero players that know how to effectively counter them. I 100% guarantee that grouping is not needed to do this, because I've done it solo myself. I'm at the bottom of the ace level skill spectrum, so I need an especially weak team to fly against in order to pull it off, but this is doable by a solo player, and fairly easy for a pair at the right skill level. I'm curious though, what server and what times does this premade run? Cause I'd actually like to fly against a premade skilled enough to tilt the win/loss odds as much as you say they do. Small pool of players, players tend to play at routine times that fit their personal schedules, matchmaker uses the same algorithm for every match. It's not really surprising for teams to be more or less the same multiple matches in a row. You sir, are a true scholar of GSF history, as shown by this very accurate assesment.
  11. I've had plenty of fun games solo queued against premades. I've had plenty of fun games where a purely solo queued team beat a premade. Pressing the Group Battle dialog button does not make players more skilled. I would be nice if it did, but it doesn't. Throw a bunch of noobs in a premade, and they're just as doomed as they were in the solo queue. There are 2 or 3 exceptional premades, none of which fly regularly anymore as far as I'm aware, where if you're not one of the other exceptional premades, then yeah, your team is probably doomed. For the more average guild or casual GSFer premades, the premade really isn't determinative of match outcome. There might be one or two people on the team to really worry about, but what matchmaker does in terms of filling the non-grouped slots on both teams is typically more important than the mere presence of a premade. Having the 3 or 4 people who are AFKing, or busy whining in Ops chat instead actually make a cursory effort to play well, is about as good having the average casual premade on your side. There's a world of difference between an ineffective player who dies 8 times vs 4 times, or who get 150 objective points vs 25. People who kinda suck but put in at least minimal effort can be carried against a premade. People fully dedicated to doing the "moping potato" style of play usually can't. Premades also aren't as common as some people think they are. Match maker is fairly consistently stupid. Given the same small pool of people in the GSF pool, it will tend to group them similarly from match to match. It doesn't learn from making horribly imbalanced matches, so it's happy to repeat the same team composition mistakes multiple times in a row. Seeing the same people in a team 4 matches in a row really doesn't tell you anything about whether there's a premade queuing or if it's just matchmaker being matchmaker. You have to actually message one of the players and ask in order to find out. The core complaint against premades really boils down to: "I want to win more games." To which the answer is legitimately: learn to play better. Get to the point where 80000 damage, 20 kills, and 50% accuracy (70% or better if in gunship), are fairly routine for you, and premades become not that much of an issue. You'll have a sporting chance of beating them on your own, and your team will have a sporting chance of winning by taking advantage of the premade focusing too much on you. I'm not quite there myself, but I'm close enough that aside from the 2 or 3 specific premades I mentioned, if matchmaker can throw me one other fairly decent player, and avoid lumbering me with people who are arguably flying more for the other team than for the one they're on, I'm not bothered by premades because two decent players + a remainder that aren't actively sabotaging have a reasonable chance of winning. The hard part is getting good at a game mode where there's not good in-game learning experience, you have to go out and pretty much literally do your own homework. Once you are good though, the barrier to beating a mediocre premade is not really that high. The crapshoot of matchmaker is still the crapshoot of matchmaker regardless. Besides, how would people explain away their losses if there weren't premades to blame? It could cause a mental health crisis for people who are convinced that their incredible loss rate doesn't have anything to do with their lack of comprehension of even the most basic GSF game mechanics.
  12. I've got a fair number of GSF memories. Facing Tommm and SammyGS (the original, and only true Aimbot), on Jung Ma. Having RamaStock characters on I think 10 or so different servers for community stock ship nights. Losing both TDMs and Doms horribly to collections of noobs, because the entire team of 2 or 3 premades was chasing Drakolich on the other team during his birthday events. Being one of the prime contractors on "The Great Wall of GSF text" back when this thread https://forums.swtor.com/topic/734258-lets-talk-about-strike-fighters/ was all the rage. Being part of the closed PTS testing running up to the GSF balance pass of 5.5. Doing community events: strike nights (back when they sorta sucked), stock ship nights, super serious nights, etc. Being kinda pissed that my very first GSF records thread entry was for a match with a dronecarrier bomber. Why did it have to be one of my least favorite ships? Seriously. Those rare games where I'm just in the GSF flow or get mad for some reason and start flying like a real GSF ace. Transcribing game stats into a spreadsheet and doing math modelling to back up balance changes I was arguing for, and sometime being surprised by the results. I think overall, GSF has been the most memorable part of SWTOR for me.
  13. It's been at least six years since I've seen that, and that was on a community organized theme night. But yes, wild exaggeration aside, it can be really rough to fly against 4 or 5 decent gunships, or even just one truly top notch gunship, if you don't know what you're doing. So learn what to do, by reading guides, asking questions, checking out Despon's GSF School youtube channel, and then of course . . . practicing.
  14. Logging in is taking around 3 minutes, compared to about 10 seconds or less normally. Once logged in FPS are normal, but going by chat, most group finder activities are buggy/crashing out, or just being really wierd. Also had one log in where instead of displaying normally, a single pixel of color filled the entire screen. IDK, maybe the pixel at the center of the screen or something? It changed with mouse movement of the camera, and sound was fine, maybe infinite zoom in? Anyhow, tell the server admins to disable -lickedpsychedelicstamps in the console, eh? Cause the server is tripping pretty hard right now.
  15. @Caleb_Nokama If you're really truly at your wits end with regard to contributing, there are a few ways to cheese your way around that mechanic. On a scout, equip EMP Field. It does a trivial amount of damage, but the only requirement is that you be within 4.5, or upgraded 5 km of a valid target. Get close, press button, boom, you have now contributed, technically. The down side is that unless your team is facing a bomber heavy situation and you really know what you're doing with EMP Field it's probably an overall handicap, because it's a specialist team support anti-bomber build that is strongly skill dependent to really be worth passing up other ships that are more useful most of the time. It will cure your non-contribute fairly easily though. Ion railgun on a gunship, once upgraded 4 tiers has AOE damage options. You can target turrets at satellites, or bomber deployed mines or drones that have no evasion and don't move, making hitting easy, and the splash AOE can hit any nearby enemies. This also works with locking EMP missiles on the same types of targets. Finally the Lingering Effect crew skill will debuff a target, and if anyone hits it, it will apply a 200 damage DoT, which should probably lift the non-contribute timer, though I'm not sure on that because: a) I only ever get non-contributes if I'm actively working on getting them, and b) Lingering Effect is so weak compared to other crew skill that I've never equipped it, so I don't have any experience with whether it works or not, but in theory it should. More generally in terms of hitting things in GSF: Make sure "detailed tool tips" are turned on in your hangar UI so you can see the full stats of each component Know the range of the weapons equipped on your ship. Shooting at things too far away works 0% of the time. Know the accuracy falloff with range, at to hit roll of 120% at 500 m may turn into a hit roll of 80% at 4000 m, some weapons are not good at their max ranges. Understand tracking penalty. If the lead indicator of the target ship is not near the center of your firing arc circle, your chances of missing are high. Understand accuracy and evasion. It's basically like accuracy and dodge/parry in the ground game. Stack accuracy, and wait out evasion buffs on scouts and gunships before shooting at them. Choose arc increase and accuracy increase crew passives. On strikes choose efficient targeting as the magazine option to speed up missile locks.
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