There is a player on Star Forge who is notorious for this. Someone told me that there was a whole group that did that on Satele Shan. The motivation supposedly was to end matches so fast that they could get their weekly (and big conquest points during some conquest weeks) as fast as possible. It is not that hard to figure out what is happening. Zero damage and double digit deaths match after match is pretty obvious. If someone dies 14 times and the difference between opposing kills and deaths is more then that, it is clearly self-destruct. I say ban them, or at least ban them from GSF.

Get well soon, we need you to terrorize the void.

Gunships are not overpowered. It is true that the top gunship pilots would have made it a lot tougher for me in that match. But that only proves it is not that gunships are over powered, but that the top pilots are really hard to beat. If gunships were overpowered, then gunship pilots of lesser skill would be able to match or beat better pilots who are not using gunships. If you think gunships are overpowered fly one for yourself. I don't have a solution for the steep learning curve that causes a big skill gap for new pilots. Try to group with other pilots, discuss what went right or wrong, and use the many guides and videos available for learning gsf. Don't forget that you don't just need flying skills, but situational awareness skills. Spam the "r" key to find out the closest enemy, and don't be afraid to run away if badly damaged or low on energy, or even if you don't know where the nearby enemies are. Run towards your teammates, they will be happy to attack anyone chasing you towards them. The one thing that Bioware should consider doing is improving the tutorial. Let you be able to use any ship in your hangar for the tutorial so you can practice the actual abilities you will be using with those ships. Have the tutorial do occasional missile lockons so you can practice evading, and provide moving targets to practice your shooting. Unfortunately I don't think Bioware has the development budget to spend on that, though I suspect it would not be all that difficult to implement some of these suggestions.

I added a few more matches, this very close match is the most recent:

Queue times vary a lot. I'm usually on Star Forge and queue times in the evening 7 to 9 Central Time can vary from instant to half an hour, occasionally longer. During the day queue times are sometimes a lot longer. Later in the evening you usually get pops, though sometimes when a strong premade gets on it might drive some people away after a couple of one sided matches. If you are lucky enough to get in a match with strong pilots on both sides you can see some interesting matches. Just don't feed the opponents (flying all alone close to a group of veteran opposing pilots). There are a lot of resources online, especially in this forum, for learning GSF. Last week the GSF weekly was a big conquest point objective, so a lot of people were flying then. I don't know how fast the queue is on Satele Shan these days. If you are on that server and are not getting enough matches, try starting a character on Star Forge.

I added 3 more matches, all from the last week. I might return to my archive to look for interesting older matches for a bit. I will be adding matches at an irregular schedule (whenever I feel like it and take the time to do it).

I think the strike fighter buffs have been a good thing, mainly because it helps newer pilots survive a bit longer and do a bit more damage. Pilots always used to complain about being disabled by 1 ion railgun hit. That is no longer true, and if pilots are paying attention, they can learn that getting hit by ion probably means it's time to go on defensive and los or run towards friends. More survivability means less frustration about instant death and more time to learn to fly. The fact that a strike can survive more blaster hits give the newer pilots a chance to get away or at least shoot back. Also the ability to engage at longer range makes it easier for newer pilots to do damage. Finally the buff to hydro spanner makes it much easier to continue to fight if you can survive the initial attack. People still complain about the learning curve and one sided matches. But I think the biggest problem is most are still solo queueing, and when they get into a match with opponents that include a strong 4 man team they know they have little chance. I do think that there are fewer one sided routs, 50 - 8 or 1000 - 100.

I added a couple of more matches. I have a big backlog of recorded matches, I am going through them trying to get interesting ones. I will also try to add some more recent matches.

I have added a few more matches. I will add more on an irregular schedule, I have about 100 matches recorded, but do not intend to post all of them.

That amount of detail is fine, if you want to take the time to do that. I expect that a lot of the things you criticize are habits I got into while solo queueing. I do prefer TDM to Dom since I tend to have a lot more choice where I fight. These days I have been using Pike/Quell in dom matches, because of EMP missiles. It seems to be more effective. I will add some more matches this weekend, I'm out of town now and my files are on the desktop.

Thanks for your interest. I would be most interested in any general pattern of mistakes or just the wrong idea on strategy. If you want to pick out 1 or 2 specific instances that is fine, but I don't expect you to go through my matches in complete detail. Replaying these matches I see a lot of mistakes myself. I intend to get some matches where I have more difficulty, especially domination matches where I have to attack enemy held sats, or at least make it more respectable when the other team is just better than ours. Also maybe I should play and record a few matches with the Clarion to practice remote slicing, right now I get better scores with Starguard or Pike. One of these days I should spend a few days where I just play gunship to practice strafing!

I have just started a YouTube channel dedicated to my GSF matches, under the name of my original main GSF character Erannov. But most will be my alts. Most of these are on Star Forge, but there will be a few from Satele Shan. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp0nwsMAS5ILvkMBkQ8Lm8Q I just have a couple of older matches up so far, I'll get more up in a week or 2. Take a look, I would welcome any suggestions for improvements. I'll try to occasionally put up matches where I was very unsatisfied with my play.

I like regen thruster for hit and run attacks. For gunship killing I use Star Guard/Rycer with HLC and quads. A while ago, someone figured out the "pile driver" technique ( http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=944782). This method involves switching rapidly between HLC and quads while shooting. This gives high burst damage. It is much easier to do this against stationary targets, so if a gunship does not instantly start moving you can hit him pretty hard. On a gunship it is all too easy to tunnel on your target and miss an attacker coming from another direction until it is too late.

What is really unbeatable is teamwork. A mixture of ship capabilities working together is the hardest to deal with. I'm not a bomber specialist and not an especially good evasive bomber pilot but I do use them occasionally. I still solo queue most of the time and when I started I always took concussion and seismic when I flew that type of bomber, because that was the best way to kill attacking scouts without any help. When I had some chances to play with a group on voice they wanted me to switch to interdiction mines. If I had help from teammates interdiction mines made it easier for teammates to kill attackers. They also preferred I use interdiction drone instead of railgun drone on that type of bomber for the same reason. Hyperspace beacons are extremely useful in domination, try to put it close to sats but with a some cover. On the Denon map some coordinated groups will have a bomber delay spawning until another bomber has placed a beacon halfway to B, then spawn with a full engine power pool and get to B faster. A lone bomber can be defeated, especially by 2 attackers that make it harder for bombers to los both attackers. But if teammates are helping the bomber the attackers need a lot more attackers, or those attackers have to be way better than the defenders. A gunship at range behind the sat can stay out of range of enemy gunships and shoot any scouts or strikes that come after the bomber. A scout or strike teammate has an easier time dogfighting around a sat if the enemy has to watch out for mines. They can also go after enemy gunships trying to get good position, or try to intercept enemy bombers in open space. Protorps are a big reason bombers can be in big trouble in open space. While voice makes it easier, even without it a bit of common sense on the part of players should enable them to see when they should be helping defend sats. The formula for winning domination is simple, if you can ever get the middle sat and one of the others. Once you have 2 sats, put a bomber on each one, then most of the rest of the team should be a mobile force moving between the 2 sats as needed. The 3rd sat should be probed a bit to keep them honest, but never attacked in strength at the expense of holding the other 2. Never leave a sat undefended, unless you need to take another sat so quickly to have a chance that you have to take a risk. I have seen a group of ships rush away from a recently taken sat and rush to the next sat, leaving the newly taken sat undefended. A good player can knock out all 3 turrets and start capping an undefended sat in about 10 seconds. Even 1 defender can usually slow attackers down long enough for help to come if teammates are paying attention. That's why bombers should always take communication sensors.

Star Wars has been full of politics since it first started. Taking control of a galactic empire is a political act, and deciding to rebel against it is a political decision. You can't get rid of politics in a story about galactic level conflict. So I guess the problem isn't that there are political aspects to the movies. That is inevitable. The problem is that some people perceive the depiction of the political aspects do not coincide with their own political views. Maybe these people prefer depictions of warlord feudalism with plenty of anarchy around the edges, for people like Han and Lando to operate. In other words, situations where might makes right. Such situations make for interesting stories, though in real life they are hell for most people to live in.

I am thinking of trying to set up challenge gsf matches for training guildies so that the more GSF phobic among them can gain some experience and confidence. These would have artificial tasks, such as chasing me around trying to kill me without me shooting back, or conversely, trying to escape from me and keep alive as long as possible. Also have each team cap a sat, then once each sat has 3 turrets, each team moves to the opposing sat to kill the turrets and cap the sat. These are just possible suggestions, the idea is to let people practice skills in 2 on 2 or 4 on 4 situations where we can concentrate on individual aspects of the game. What I am worried about is if this might be interpreted as win-trading and get me in trouble. I assume that these challenge matches will give the same rewards to winners and losers, count towards daily and weekly, and count for the Ossus GSF crystal mission. Can I do this without being seen as a problem by the devs/moderators?

it must depend on what server you play on and when you play. What follows are the scores from the 21 scoresheets I saved from Jan. 21 to Feb. 7, all on Star Forge. tdm 44 - 49 49 - 48 50 - 37 50 - 25 50 - 38 18 - 50 40 - 50 50 - 48 42 -50 50 - 15 50 - 39 50 -24 50 - 26 50 - 37 domination 788 - 884 1000 - 903 1000 - 541 1000 - 947 1000 - 404 1000 - 443 657 - 1000 I did not save every match, and there were some that were bad routs, there was 1 I did not save that I think ended up 50 - 5. But you can see that there were plenty of close matches, a few close enough that almost every player could ask themselves what would have happened if they had not had that self-destruct or could have held that sat a few seconds longer.

Don't need a hack, just a hotkey controlled file sharing app that likes hogging network bandwidth. I do consider that a hack. A hack is a hack even if you don't have to have much computer technical skill to do it. I had thought of a similar method but did not want to give people ideas. I agree with you that it is not a game changer and I don't worry much about that changing the result of a match. It just annoys me that someone would resort to trying to cheat the game. Even if it did help I would not do it because any success I had would not be very satisfying.

I have occasionally seen some suspicious lag. The ship is moving smoothly, then as soon as I attack it starts jumping around. I hope that is just frustration or paranoia and not hacking to lag on command.

There have always been mismatches, but I still find a lot of competitive matches. I went through the 22 matches whose scoresheet I saved during Jan. 1 - 16. I found 3 TDM with the loser having 40 or more kills, 2 TDM with loser with 30 -39 kills. There was 1 domination match with loser over 900 and 6 with loser from 700 to 899 points. That leaves 10 that were not as competitive, and even in those the losers often had over 400 in domination, or 20 in tdm. There were other close matches where I did not save the scoreboard, probably because I was not satisfied with my play in that match. I should probably make it a point to save the score of any match with the loser more then 40 in tdm or 900 in dom. The matchmaker has an impossible task, though I am sure it could be improved. Maybe it should take winning percentage into account more. One problem is if a strong team of 4 pilots queues, it is often difficult for the matchmaker to find enough strong pilots for the other side. I would be happy to help any of then newer pilots with tips, or by grouping with them. I think most of the other veteran pilots would do the same. Speak up in GSF chat.

I got 3 wins to see if it was just an error in updating the mission log. But that did not work, you get no credit for this mission.

GSF provides xp for leveling characters, and command points and unassembled components for lvl 70 characters. When the unassembled components became bound to legacy they became especially useful. Command crates and unassembled components from GSF have greatly aided me in gearing several characters for raiding. GSF has also occasionally been useful in Conquest.

I think the 5 ship limit is good for the game. It forces pilots to make choices, and thus offers more tactical decisions. Giving experienced pilots a bigger selection so they can get the perfect mix makes it even harder for solo and less experienced pilots. For instance, if someone wants to have a Clarion for remote slicing, maybe they won't have room for a tensor scout. You should not be able to have everything all the time.

Actually it is pretty simple. If both joysticks and mouse are allowed, then one or the other will have an advantage, depending on how the controls in the game are designed. Since everyone will have a mouse, and not everyone will have a joystick, the fairest way is to optimize the control system for mouse. Most SWTOR players are playing their characters in ground PvE or PvP. some will discover and enjoy GSF as a sideline, and a few will make GSF their main experience in SWTOR. if you want to use a joystick badly enough to adapt it to GSF, that's fine, but you cannot expect GSF to favor joysticks when doing so penalizes many SWTOR GSF players in a game that is not primarily about spaceship combat.

On Satele Shan at least I actually tend to get more kills on the Iokath map, using a T1 strike with HLC and concussion. I am not sure why, maybe it is harder for pilots to support teammates once the action starts with obstacles easily breaking groups up once they have to move a lot. That allows more isolated fighting. Also I seem to be getting more chances to attack people who are attacking someone else, which is always the best situation for offense. That might be because people are less conscious of nearby opponents in all the clutter. Of course the better pilots are difficult to kill, but that is true in every map. I have been surprised by how useful barrel roll is on the Iokath map. I think with all the clutter many pilots are more tentative following someone who is moving rapidly at a distance. There are some hiding places for bombers that are very hard to get at. But for TDM, my normal rule for bombers hidden in a tight space is to ignore them, on any map. The downside is if a well coordinated team gets a quick lead, it can ball up around bombers and be very hard to get at.