Just a thought... It has been a while since I saw self-destructors in a game. Could it be that this autokick function also monitors self destructs? Anyone who is willing to test?

Well, thanks Ramalina for investigating this and bringing clarity. I would also like to thank Bioware, because I actually think autokick is a good idea. It is of course open for discussion how long you can be afk before autokick. Three minutes is a long time to be non-contributing (I do not remember I saw much of the non-contribution warning when I started playing---but on the other hand at that time everyone was new to gsf...)

Ok, if it has been test then I withdraw my theory. I might have been confusing correlation and causality here. (Which is slightly embarrasing as that is something I warn students not to do...)

It certainly was like this before, but I think that Bioware must have lowered the number of votes that are needed to kick someone. Before 7.2 it was very rare that someone got kicked---usually it took repeated messages in the ops chat before enough players hade voted. Nowadays, I mark someone who has been non-contributing for a while and they get kicked within a minute or so without any need for convincing the rest of the team to take action.

You are missing the point. Gunships (and thus sniping) has been part of starfighter since the very beginning and it has been included in Bioware's description of the game all the time. You are greatly over interpreting the word "dogfigthing". Again, you are misunderstanding what I wrote. I did not say gunships are weak. A good gunship pilot is hard to kill (in the same way as it is hard to kill skilled strikes, scouts and bombers). What I did say is that when a strike or scout "...start an attack run on a gunship, that gunship only has few seconds to live if it does not make a quick retreat or is assisted by team mates." The keyword being if it does not make a quick retreat. Only a new gunship pilot makes that mistake---even a moderately skilled gunship pilot will run for cover when their shield and hull starts to disappear rapidly. Your suggestion would deprive them of that possibility, which would make even the most skilled gunship pilots easy targets. That is what would make gunships unplayable. Is it not your experience that gunships immobile gunships are killed quickly? There are plenty of ships and builds that can deal a great deal of burst damage. Try them out. Hunting gunships is a fun sport.

Well, considering that gunships have been a part of the game since start, it could rather be that it contradicts your perception of what the game should be. Anyway, several others have already pointed out that your suggestion would not be an improvement and explained why. Let me just add that if I am in a strike or scout and start an attack run on a gunship, that gunship only has few seconds to live if it does not make a quick retreat or is assisted by team mates. Any time delay to switch from railguns longer than one second would be a death sentence for gunships that are up against veteran strikes and scouts, making gunships essentially useless in the game. Which would be a loss for us all. What makes gsf so fun is that even though we only have six maps (and cannot hope for much more) there is such a large variety of play styles and tactics that it is still entertaining after 10000 games. Reducing the variety to fit the specific play style of a certain group of players is not a good idea.

The same web page which has headings such as "MASTER A VARIETY OF SHIP ROLES" and where gunships are described as "the heavy firepower of a starfighter squadron, gunships dispatch enemy vessels at extreme range before they can retaliate"?

Who says that? Personally I would refer to this game mode as open space pvp. It is definitively not a sim and concerning dogfighting... gunships have been part of the game since launch (moreover, bombers were intended to be part of the game already in beta and were added just a few months after launch).

Actually, I have tried rebinding the keys so that I have "Toggle World Map Pane" on M and "Toggle Map Overlay" on Alt-M instead. It works when I am in the ground game, but back in starfighter I still have to use Alt-M to bring up the map. That would be appreciated!

And I see in the battle log that we still get medals---it's just that we don't get to see them in the scoreboard... (Isn't that the kind of bug that should be caught during testing?)

Thanks, that did the trick. Agreed, pressing two keys (on opposite sides of the keyboard) is not something you want to do in the middle of a fight. I also tried to rebind it without success.

Is it just me who no longer can open the map in a match? And do you see any medals in the scoreboard after the match?

Maybe this is something new that I have not seen before, but until I see a video or experience it myself, I will be sceptical. Sometimes you may see players moving around in a random fashion, making them very hard to hit with lasers or to lock a missile on. This is usually due to extreme lag. However, the lagging player has an equally hard time hitting targets and are not very efficient. The reason why some players have a huge kill count is... skill.

There are so many ways you can do that without cheating. Here is just one example for a T2 strike: I am attacking a sat and see an opponent executing their engine manoeuvre and lock a protorb. While the protorb is flying, I turn to the sat, lock an EMP on a stationary target (turret, drone, mine or a tick bomber), the aoe damage takes out three mines and severaly damaged opponent. There you have two kills and three mines in a few seconds.

This issue has been discussed many times before, so let's take the short answers: In domination, there are already capital ships protecting spawn points. In deathmatch, protection from capital ships allows for a tactic that is much more destructive than spawn camping: score a few early kills to get a small lead and then retreat back to your spawn point and wait for the win. It should also be noted that in deatchmatch there are always three spawn points---if one is swarmed by enemies then go to one of the others. Moreover, the main reasons that there are plenty of enemies at a spawn point is that one team is that much stronger than the other, not a deliberate tactic.

An appropriate level of 10-year anniversary gift to the gsf community would be to introduce a new game mode. But to be realistic, I would be really happy if they at least could fix the most annoying bugs (component deselection, disappearing cursor and the sound bug).

And just now I got my 100th savior medal (took me almost a year to earn those last 37 medals...) Now I got all my starfighter achievements and could retire with a clear conscience.

This is a nice idea, but that means that any time a player is in trouble in a TDM game, they could self-destruct and come back with full health without the other team receiving any score.

Did you even read the entire post?

There has not been many self-destructors around since the end of Galactic Season 1, but now I am afraid that this problem is returning. I just played a game on Darth Malgus where two players did nothing but self-destruct the entire game (except for taking time to mocking those of us who called out on their behaviour). They actually managed to die 34 and 33 times respectively, which is the worst result I have seen so far. (Fortunately for the rest of my team, it was a domination game and the rest of us were good enough to win the game anyway, although it was a close call.) This kind of game sabotaging is really annoying and it is time that the devs do something about it. Of course, when you are new, it is easy to selfdestruct a few times (and this is not something they should be punished for) before you learn how much space you need for engine maneuvers, but I do not think that I have ever seen a newbie die more than 5-10 times in single game. There are plenty of simple options that would discourage self-destructors. The most straightforward would be that a self-destruct should not count as contributing to the game---if you do not do anything but self-destruct you should be eligible for vote-kick. There could also be an upper cap for the number of self-destructs and if you exceed that limit you do not get any rewards from that game. I am sure that other players have more suggestions.

Tonight I finally managed to get the Crack Shot Master achievement (65% accuracy for 100 matches). Considering that I have played since early access - probably at least 10000 matches - I guess it says that aiming is not my greatest strength... Now, I just got the Savior medal achievement (still missing 37 medals) until I get that 100% starfighter achievement record. Is there anybody else who have a few achievements that just does not suit your prefered playstyle?

Finally a proper definition of what constitutes a proper GSF ace! I have a questions though: The only time I've been accussed of cheating was when someone thought I used a hack to "stop in mid-air" (i.e., hitting "X" when I was trying to make get rid of a pilot who was on my tail). Does that count? The idea of taking accusations as a compliment and sending gifts as thank you is brilliant. I will do that too if I ever get accused again.

Agreed

I have never liked to use the F-keys for power management, because I need to move my hand to use them. I always remap them to keys closer to the space bar (C, V, B, N), where they can be conveniently reached at the same time as managing the speed booster.

More likely that the other team had a T3 scout using Tensor. The combination of tensor and engines built for speed is considerably faster at reaching sats in the beginning of a game.