I think Satele will have fewer pops for a little while. Star Forge seems a little bit more active right now. Satele is still fine at prime time, but it doesn't seem to go as late as it used to.

11/10 Also @Ramalina, ty for the kind words.

Is it better to camp one server, or go fly in different places? Remember, your argument is that this somehow kills queues if done on one server too long, or something. Mocking whiners is not the same thing as having "no respect for anybody". At this point I'm not even sure I know who you are talking about anymore. I thought you were complaining about the group that I run with, but at this point it could be a lot of groups. None of whom fit your characterizations either, of course. It's a team game, and people without teams are asking for teams to be deleted. We participate in group events and such. Here's Drako's latest request for some fun group on group combat: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=944406 Check out all those responses! Organized groups are not a problem. They've never been a problem. These players have always represented the most passionate group of GSF. Your "solution" is to delete GSF and replace it with a crappy game. Deleting teamwork and top end play completely is neither reasonable, nor a solution. The zero responses in Drako's thread imply that the actual result would be, no one would challenge our team, or very probably, any team at all. There's certainly not enough full teams grouping, and the thing we have seen that gets people grouping up is to form a team and fight. Some nights, groups show up to play against, other nights, they do not. But sitting silently in queue with no pops is what you'd actually subject teams to, and you absolutely know that. This is sig-quality material, just so you know. I don't know if I'll stick it there, but like, I really want to.

Have you done the math for the ion/heavy? I have not. Have you tried it out yet, and compared it to the piledriver yet?

Any mistake in aiming or range, or a target with a lot of evasion, is punished with a great deal of lost energy. The case where you are actually hitting your target is no less energy efficient than any other blaster, you are just emptying your tanks quite a bit faster, and it is noticeable because your regeneration is unchanged. I certainly end up with energy management issues when playing it, and I think that is pretty common? The unique weakness of the build is that the "projectile speed" of each blaster shot changes where the reticule is on a target with any lateral motion relative to your line of assault. This means that swapping your weapons will cause an abrupt jump in where the reticule is on the screen, and if you are attempting to get the double shot when that happens, it will fail because the second shot and the first shot, which happen almost simultaneously, need to be aimed at two different points, and you can't aim at two places at once. You just can't piledrive a target that is translating laterally relative to you, and it seems to me that it is generally a loss of energy and positioning to even try.

True, but getting the occasional set of two shots mostly simultaneously mostly seems like a nice bonus of the ship, and less like a purpose built technique. Your gain is also smaller when you are talking about the small per-shot damage of rapids or hull ions. It's more complex than that- for instance, you would probably prefer to land two ions and a heavy versus one ion and one heavy, regardless of their shield state, especially if the heavy will fire at the same time in both cases. Maybe someone will do that kind of analysis on the fly and have good results. One interesting thing is if you are using quads and ions, you can go into a pattern where you fire, swap, fire, and then repeat that the moment you see another shot go off. I didn't spend a lot of time on this setup, but the rotation is pretty simple because the quads and ions both have the same rate of fire. I think it is less damage though. The problem with ions is that you basically lose access to the rotation when you are on hull. Given the monster shield dps ions do, and the tiny hull dps, you are not going to gain as much by doing it. With Audson's technique, you have a good amount of shield damage from the heavies already, and your dps when you break through to hull is much more lethal. Still, it would probably be worth doing the per-target math, especially if you want to try it out.

As far as frequency- kinda in theory but not really. The regular (non-piledriver) case for frequency capacitor over damage capacitor has always been that you need to be on target for quite awhile before you pull ahead for real. For heavy lasers dealing N, for instance, which shoot every half second, fcap opens up at .1N underneath dcap. Then, at 0.435 you suddenly pull ahead by .9N. Then 65 milliseconds later, at .5s, damage pulls ahead again by .2N. Then at .87s, frequency is again in the lead by .8N. Then 130 milliseconds after that damage is again ahead .3N. This cycle continues until around 3.5 constant seconds of firing, at which point fcap is ahead of dcap all of the time, though for some time after the amount of time fcap spends ahead of dcap by an entire shot is very small. Here's the dcap piledriver, with a rotation that seems to be possible much of the time: 0: Heavy1 0+small: swap, Quad1 (at this point you are waiting with your finger over 1) 0.37 Quad2, swap, begin spamming 1 0.5 Heavy2 0.67ish, the spammed swap happens 0.74, Quad3 .97ish, the spammed swap happens 1.00, Heavy3. This is the end of the normal piledriver burst window. But if we continue following: 1.11 - quad comes off cooldown, but you are stuck on heavies. 1.27, the spammed swap happens, firing Quad4 1.50 - heavy comes off cooldown, but you are stuck on quads 1.57, the spammed swap happens, firing Heavy4 In theory, with frequencies, you could pull this stunt: 0: Heavy1 0+small: swap, Quad1 (at this point you are waiting with your finger over 1) 0.32 Quad2, swap, start spamming 1 so you don't miss your window 0.43 Heavy2 0.62 the spammed swap happens, stop spamming 1 0.64 Quad3 0.87 heavy comes off cooldown, but don't swap yet 0.96 Quad4,swap when you see it 0.96+small Heavy 3 - in theory here you have woven an extra quad in, maybe In theory this does 4 Quads and 3 Heavies in about a second, whereas the dcap case does 3 Quads and 3 Heavies (which have a 1.1 boost). There's a lot of reasons to think that this won't really help. In the dcap case, you wait for the second quad shot and start spamming 1. There's reaction time there: if you miss it by more than 30 milliseconds (basically guaranteed) you are cutting into your Heavy3 time. But honestly, you won't miss it by that much, and you will still be landing Heavy 2 and Quad 3 at exactly the same times. If you try this trick with fcap, however, you have two failure points- you could induce a delay after quad 2, just as in the normal case, but also after quad 4. Your potential gain is .7Q - .3H, which is not much, and you pay more energy for it. You will go out of energy with this build. There's another issue: you could want to continue piledriving. In the dcap case above, you can see how the swaps don't line up quite as nicely, even though they still add dps at the cost of your totally hosed energy pool. In the fcap case it gets goofy, because you start with heavies selected and the following ideal situation if you somehow had no lag or reaction time to worry about: 1.26 swap comes off cooldown 1.28 quad comes off cooldown 1.39 heavy comes off cooldown So you need to wait for the 1.39 heavy, again visually, then spam swap which will fire the quad that was waiting, and then you are at 1.39 with 5 Quads and 4 Heavies. The dcap case gets you to 4 Quads and 4 Heavies by 1.5 seconds in, and you spent most of that time hammering 1. Your fcap case is ahead by a tenth of a second if a robot living in Reston, Virginia was doing it, but in practice you are probably at greater than 1.5 seconds when you get here, and have one extra quad to show for yourself, versus 8 other shots with a 10% bonus. Because half of those shots are heavies, which are more damaging than quads on a per-shot basis, I suspect you are actually either behind or basically tied on damage- but you had to land a bunch of timed button presses and paid more energy to be here. If frequency lowered quads to below the cooldown of the swap, it would make the rotation easier to run. Instead, you either run the same rotation, but with less damage in the same time, or you run a hard rotation that I don't think is practical, in exchange for a negligible amount more damage that you pay a lot for. Frequency capacitor doesn't seem to reduce the cooldown of swap, which we are pretty sure is 0.3 seconds. By all means experiment, but I'm pretty sure you'll get the best results by a lot with damage capacitor. This assumes an opponent sits around for a full second: many will simply not. In many cases, the value is in the first swap, or at most, the second, and being less reliant on precise server timings will serve you much better than hoping that they sit around until some breakpoint in time where you've done a fraction of one more laser in power's worth of damage

The game will accept unlimited key inputs at once: in my case, my "decelerate" button is one of my mouse buttons under my thumb. I'm not sure how Audson rolls on this topic. I will say that you are NOT doing this while you are in some tight turn fight. The speed of a heavy laser is different from that of a quad laser, which means that the reticule will leap in position quite dramatically when you swap between weapons, if you aren't lined up correctly. It is pretty much impossible to meaningfully piledrive under that kind of tight turning situation. During the portion where you are shooting, you definitely want to be in F1. When you line up for a run on this, you are playing like quads and pods for a bit, and you have to be pretty straight. I will offer this: the turning gain from F4 versus F1 or F2 is really hard to measure in a strike fighter, and I don't recommend it. We are still gathering data on this, but on one of Drako's recent streams he actually times this. The older data was for the battle scout, which at the time basically everyone had to play- we have a bunch of ships and builds to test out. After all, F4 never made any sense for this purpose- it seems like it is some effect of whatever the movement equations are or something. This build uses damage capacitor. Math (and a little bit of experimention) show that the frequency capacitor doesn't reduce the rates to below the quad laser swap point, and I think it will take a bit longer for a piledriver rotation to benefit from frequency capacitor versus damage capacitor.

piledriver ees bestdriver

The text channels are in almost constant use any time of day honestly. The Discord voice channels are available for anyone, and someone looking to pick up a group will be able to find a spot in there without any clashing. I do agree that it is odd that people don't use them more often for this.

It's not even half the rate. There was briefly a time that it was, but early on there was some factor added in. It's more like 2/3rds the rate or something now (you still get the base and the buff, not the base, the buff, and the subscriber), and you still gain full requisition from clickables. Every game shows you how much a subscriber versus a non-subscriber earns. GSF is probably the most accessible content in the game for free to play and preferred- you can do everything, as often as you want, and with no limits on your player power.

So you want them to delete GSF because you aren't winning enough, and replace it with a worse game that will let you win more. Splitting the queue is a terrible idea. Why not form a team?

> I'd say have solo queue, and group queue. Split it up, so you either queue for one or the other. Lol. It's a team game. If you can't find a team, you will be at a disadvantage compared to those who can. Doing what you talk about would destroy GSF, and make it into some solo queue nonsense. > the same problems exist in other games They aren't problems, they are good game design. > The very fact that it is not universally used, makes it a cheat. No, this is not what a cheat is. People in the same room is not cheating. People talking on ventrilo/mumble/discord is not cheating. Someone doing something you are not personally doing is not cheating.

> There are no sound effects for when your ship is being hit. There are sound effects for when your ship is being hit. > Your shields don't make a sound. But being hit does. > Your hull doesn't make a sound. My hull whispers "proton them all". But there's also a sound if I'm hit. >Damage by missile or being ripped to shreds by laser is oddly silent. Do you have sound effects enabled?

I mean, during the game, no, it doesn't matter at all. During the game you're just happy if tensor actually effects the game state by keeping someone alive, scoring a kill, holding a sat, etc. But at the spawn if the speed guy hits his first, his cooldown is wasted. "Doing nothing" is about as bad as it gets for an ability.

The type of spawn camping you are describing is not spawn camping at all. Notably, you cannot die on your spawn in domination except in very rare circumstances that you aren't describing there. You can certainly have all three nodes denied you, should your team be completely ineffective against the other team, but your capital ship turrets will meaningfully defend against almost all threats, should you fall back to around 5k behind any of them (the turrets will shoot powerful shots up to 10km out, and enemy railguns can be 15km out). If your team together can't push past that, then there's no hope for you, but you still aren't spawn camped. Spawn camping happens in TDM only, and it involves spawning directly into enemy munitions of some form- drones, mines, railguns, blasters, missile locks. All TDM maps offer three spawn points you can use to try to minimize this, but it can absolutely still happen. I also very much doubt you are seeing aimbots in any form on any server. It isn't impossible, but the theoretical gain of an aimbot in GSF is minimal compared to other games. The cleverest of shots will have a high deflection penalty, and the shots without that wouldn't really be helped by one. I'm sure it is possible, but I've never seen a confirmed case of one. If you do, well, report them.

I've been running a type 3 scout (Spearpoint / Bloodmark) some of the time in domination, and I am convinced it has some legit role in the metagame at this point, in at least some team compositions. I'm not totally sold, but I'm sold enough to offer some tips about tensor and maybe get some discussion about what everyone thinks of tensor, and this ship. Here's my top tips: [sOLO Q] Before the initial domination launch, mention what type of tensor you have and where you will be tensoring. If your tensor is unmastered, or "regen" (T5 right), and someone else is doing a "speed" tensor (T5 left), make sure yours goes off first or try to hold it for the node fight. Likewise, if you are doing a "speed" tensor, try to hold it for a moment to fish out any lesser tensors, as everyone wants to take your tensor buff off the spawn (they also want the T5 regen buff from a regen tensor, but that won't go away when you cast yours). During the main core of the battle, try to catch allies that will be helped by the tensor when you can (especially bombers), and if you cannot, make sure that you get utility out of the tensor. Tensor on one ship isn't great though, but sometimes that's what you need to do. Choose your tensor talents based on what you personally value. Note that tensoring a node with allies on it will usually help (sometimes a great deal) a good player, but may cause a poor player or a newer player to crash into the satellite. [GROUP Q] If you have one tensor, "double right" (evasion + regen) is probably preferred, and if you are running two tensor scouts, one should be "double right" and the other should be "double left" (turning and speed) or, at minimum, one should be "regen" and one should be "speed" (and the T4 ignored). In our group we mostly determine who is who based on the preference of whomever plans to run it most, but anything will work. Tensor seems to be to be difficult to coordinate vocally (and with little payoff compared to heals), so I mostly do not. In my play, I will try to hold tensor for ships that are about to use engine or just have, and will put a priority on tensoring a node defender of any ship type, as boost is life. I will usually try to vocally call a tensor on the node right before doing it to prevent comedy crashes. With the tips out of the way, I'll move on to discussion: While tensor field (like all major full tree components) comes in up to ten versions, only eight are materially different when cast, only four are mastered versions, and only two don't have some odd overwrite interactions. When you press tensor, you apply the tensor field buff and up to two secondary buffs to all targets within 4500m or 5000m, depending on if you have the tier 2 talent, which most ships do. I believe the buffs in question will overwrite other tensor buffs as long as the duration will be longer: I haven't tested that. Regardless, if you have tier 3 tensor, you will be overwriting all the nearby tensor buffs with yours when you cast it. The tier 4 left talent modifes the tensor field buff that you apply, by adding extra turning to it (total 22% turning). The tier 4 right talent doesn't modify the tensor field buff that you apply, but it does make you apply another buff: evasion +6%. The tier 5 left talent modifies the tensor field buff that you apply, by adding extra speed to it (total +30% speed) The tier 5 right talent doesn't modify the tensor field buff that you apply, but it does make you apply another buff: engine regeneration 2/sec. Tensor is composed of up to three elements. The first element is the tensor buff itself, which by default grants 15% speed, 15% turning, and 1 engine per second. This buff exists in up to four versions: the version as stated (unmastered or double right), a version with 30% speed instead of 15% speed ("speed tensor, T5 left), a version with 22% turning (T4 left), and a version with both 30% speed and 22% turning ("double left"). The second and third elements are the T4 right (evasion boost) and T5 right (2/sec engine regeneration). These exist as separate buffs. While no one really cares much about the T4 elements (evasion or turning), and these are mostly chosen by personal or team preference, it should be noted that, should the opportunity arise, the T4 left tensor should be applied after the T4 right tensor, so as to benefit from both the extra turning and evasion. The T5 elements are a bit more important, as extra speed makes a notable difference in flight times, and the extra regeneration can make a difference in available positions and actions for your team. During an initial launch, the "regen" tensor should be cast prior to the "speed" tensor. It is also worth considering during the main game, should you actually have two tensor scouts in the same place. Any tensor can greatly shrink the vulnerable window of a bomber moving from node to node. Tensor on node helps defending allies more than attacking allies. I almost exclusively run double right tensor. I kind of prefer T4 left (extra turning) over T4 right (evasion), but it is a small thing. I really enjoy being able to apply the extra energy, as almost every ship seems to get good use out of it throughout the match. I'm not really sure which of the T4 choices is generally better, and I'm really not sure which of the T5 choices is better overall- I just find it is easier to apply a meaningful buff in combat. I will say that the regen buff seems to get turned off or mitigated by enemy debuffs much more often than the extra speed buff is, an argument for the T5 left. Overall I am really pleased that I don't feel compelled to SD this scout at the start of every game any more. As a support ship it doesn't add up to the might of the battle scout in domination, but you can at least make a case for its unique ship-specific system buff beyond the opening of the match.

Heh, there is some salt in that twitter thread. The best is probably the guy that mistakes a guide for an announcement of content, and then mistakes GSF for a pve minigame. I guess if you think GSF is a pve minigame, you are probably pretty disappointed with the lack of features, given that, you know, there's no pve in it at all.

Yea that sucked. But there's other concerns than pvp in the ground game, like making galactic dollhouses and stuff. This game doesn't have those distractions. If pvp was what everyone did in the ground game, they would likely be a lot stricter on that note too. Also note the ground game has class icons, and nothing in the ground game covers ground like ships can here. Or just not. I think it was lame that they made all those changes. I don't want to see them duplicate that mistake in GSF, especially lacking a compelling reason like they do in the ground game (quality of life for RPers, less inventory burden, ability of players to tell stories, etc- these are unpresent or irrelevant in GSF). Yea so lets not mess the game up. Absolutely.

I feel you are missing some "or" in there, and instead used "and". You can, for instance, give up extra arc on pubside. Alternatively, you can take the decent firing efficiency and the awful extra blaster power instead of the peerless engine efficiency and the good extra engine and get it that way. I go for the first option. Why is this a problem? Is it because the factions aren't mirrored? Or is it because the double weapons engineering guy is terrible passive combination, and these passives should be different? Does every example favor imps? I don't think so. If you are looking for weapon efficiency and hydrospanner, that's a hard combo to find on impside, and I can think of a couple builds that want that. If you could mix and match passives and copilots separately, I think you'd make builds that neither imp nor pub actually end up with in most cases, and then instead of having two cool builds, you'd have just one build that was boringly better than the others. I'd prefer to keep balance and content separate. New crewmen could bring new copilot abilities and passive abilities, and balancing could address some of the power deltas between some of the passives (in particular). I don't feel we are looking at a problem that needs a solution- I think it is nice that Republic and Empire have slightly different strengths. It's ok if your favorite build is slightly better on one side. It's less ok if that happens a lot and is always the same side, but I don't think hydrospanner alone is making that happen.

Ironman Team Deathmatch

There's ways to balance games besides exactly mirroring stuff. The fact that the maps are not mirrors should already prove that GSF is kinda serious about having some real but minor factional differences. Warhammer was a solid game that had actually serious differences between factions, and it was overall balanced enough- GSF doesn't nearly bite off that big of a bite to chew on. Even WoW offers real factional differences in pvp. It's not unprecedented to have a fun game where things aren't the exact same on each side. Mirroring stuff and totally obliterating nuance does technically create balance, but it gets there the most annoying way possible. As long as whatever differences don't imbalance the game enough that you would be hoping for one faction in a controlled 8v8, I think we're just fine. Honestly, the occasional complaints I hear about faction imbalance are more a result of some of the copilot abilities and crew passives needing some nudging. I don't think GSF needs careful mirroring, and I really don't want it. The most successful game in this genre doesn't have mirrored factions. There's realm versus realm games in the future and past that avoid this flavorless hammer in design choices as well. There's plenty of ways around this, and there's plenty of balanced games without mirroring.

I always post in these threads to remind everyone that I disagree with them completely. I very badly want Empire and Republic to be different. Currently, this is only true in GSF, and only when it comes to the choice of certain active/passive combinations. These minor differences make the experience of playing on both factions unique, even if only a little bit. Changing this isn't "fixing" this, it is actively homogenizing the minor differences away in a quest to be sure that the game is narrower than today. It will ultimately remove interesting choices that players make today. It would be bad if crew members were homogenized across factions, it would be much worse if you just picked a pile of passives and actives and then applied your favorite voice over. There is nothing I like about any of these suggestions: all make GSF narrower. I also hate the idea of allowing players to customize their engine, blaster, or missile components separate from the actual effects of this. Not only does this homogenize stuff further, it also prevents you from knowing the components of the enemy by looking at their ship- right now, targeting an enemy provides information about what they will be shooting you with, or how they will be evading you, if you are accustomed to the looks of these things. There could be other ways to offer this information, but the current one rewards you for learning about the game. Changing any of these would, IMO, make the game worse.

This is a GSF forum, not a promote-potential-competitors forum. That being said, I know our team has tried it out in some fashion. It's fun, but it isn't anything like GSF. The capital ships in that game don't have a roll feature, and they don't properly pitch either. You have a functional yaw, and you can ascend, descend, and accelerate. You really feel the weight of the ships in question, and it does a great job of capturing that capital-spaceship feeling- the game feels the way that it looks. But it isn't anything like GSF with its full axis controls and flight logic. It's still a game I like, but it doesn't stand in for GSF at all.

I don't think anyone has an issue with the current setup for Dom. In Dom, it is reasonable to create a safe zone for spawning, because all of the interactions with the game objectives are far from the safe spawn points (some are close to unguarded spawn points, of course). If a team is badly outmatched in Dom, they can flit back and forth between the cap ship and the enemy wall, doing damage as they can and continuing to make attempts to push out and grab a satellite: meanwhile, the game will end quickly enough, and with a brutal score befitting a three-cap. My understanding is that this discussion about TDM, where the ships themselves are the objectives, and talking about whether a case where one team is mostly unable to escape their spawn points, even if individual players can.