Did you bother to read the rest of my "passive-aggressive diatribe"? I don't know how much you've flown sting-on-sting, but every sting joust ends either with insta-gib or no damage. It's expected. We're talking about 3-4 shots. Max. "Raw damage output" means jack **** when you're unlikely to hit more than one of them. The difference between "shield damage" and "shields gone, hull damage" is one hit vs two. The difference between two hits out of three and one hit out of three is... 33%. Oh. OK, so your RoF gives you four chances, an extra 33% of shots. You have 0 additional accuracy, though, and you're up against a sting with DF that has 33% evasion naturally and popped DF for an additional 18%. Your extra shot is a coin flip, while theirs were 4/5. If they had RI instead of TT, then we're comparing you having 20% chance of hitting vs them having 60%. It's still pretty grim for you... and that's even assuming that the times work out perfectly for you to get the extra shot, or if the improved rate of fire just means you can fire again after you pass them sooner than they can. Yeah, if you connected with your raw damage, they would be dead. Except realistically, even with the additional damage from BO, it's not jacked up enough to be a two-shot, you still need to land 3. If you land three, BO or not, they're dead. If you land two, BO or not, they're getting out. The extra damage is effectively useless, the only utility from it with BLCs is getting an extra miss in before you fly past. Sure, yeah, great, you do more damage vs a turret or a bomber who doesn't know how to evade. BO is not ideal vs high evasion targets. Add this to the fact that you're talking about "nearly every single time" over a tiny, tiny sample size. Find a coin and flip it three times. If it's head 3 times in a row (an outcome which has a 1/8 chance of happening), is it hacks? If the RNG had been a tiny bit kinder to you that day you would never have posted here.

OOOooooh so you can farm foodships in stomps FOR your team as well. Awesome, grand, surely you can never be wrong about basic math. Ok, please explain to me how a 35% difference in hit rate (from TT and wingman, two abilities that any non-terribad sting interested in fighting other scouts runs--come to think of it, they could also have been running RI, which would still add up to a 30% difference total since they'd have 15 extra evasion) that is constant over all ranges (since you're approaching each other, you'll obviously have equal range bonuses at any given time) has no impact on the relative amounts you're likely to get hit.

Congrats, you can farm food to scrape out some kills in a drastic loss. Ten whole kills for five deaths. Wowee. Truly, your amazing skill is so great as to bend the very fabric of reality and change the fundamental rules of accuracy and evasion that this game mode is built on. Probably the only possible way someone could overcome your blinding greatness is by hacking. You're getting all caught up on the talk about ranges because Ramalina (misguidedly) wanted to help you be better rather than simply calling you a moron for thinking the only way you could lose was hacks. You've consistently been ignoring the fact that you have 0% buffs to accuracy and a well-geared opponent will have up to +30% (plus, in effect, an extra 5% from the dispel effect). You complain your DF "didn't have an effect" despite the widespread availability and use of these abilities that completely negate it. All the while, you've been consistently neglecting the fact that you are not using any of them, making their DF extremely effective. Once again. With feeling. Your chances to hit another sting if they have DF on and you don't have any accuracy buffs are TINY. Another sting's chances to hit you if you have DF and they have TT/wingman are SIGNIFICANT. The difference between "my shields are gone and my hull is hurt and his shields are barely hurt" can literally be caused by him landing two shots and you landing one (again, sting shields are 1400 or less, which is less than two BLC shots). That's ENTIRELY CONSISTENT with a 35% difference in hit rate, and that's assuming you're landing every shot--which, given the fact that you posted the linked screenshot as an attempt to brag, is unlikely. On top of all of that, you ***** over and over about how 3 games is this impossibly huge sample size when we're talking about maybe 30 BLC shots total between you. Flip a coin 30 times and see if it's exactly 50/50--make sure you go crying about HACKS after you find that it isn't. Given that the "coin" in your games could have been weighted by up to a third... and there's literally nothing noteworthy about your experience. Even when it is 50/50, I've found in my long experience in jousting other well-built, high-skill sting/flashfire pilots that, given that we both have DF up and accuracy buffs, any of the following outcomes can easily happen: I kill them but take no damage, they kill me but take no damage, we both make it out with no shields and heavy damage, we both survive unscathed. All have happened to me, sometimes 2-3 in a row. Since you're talking about two ships that will die in 4 hits for sure, 3 hits probably and are exchanging hits that have a low chance to connect, the results are extremely variable... and that's without the heavy weighting that your build provides. Once again, this wasn't begun to put your build on trial (even though it's bad). It wasn't even done to put your MAD L33T SKILLZ on trial (even though they're nothing to to write home about). It was to point out that the things you observed are 100% clearly explicable using (what should be) completely common game knowledge, and (as with 99% of posts in "omg hax" threads) do not provide any convincing evidence of the existence of hacks. In that vein, at the end of the day, we have two options for explaining that you were gibbed. 1) Your opponent used the components well-known for making it possible to insta-gib other stings and extremely common in builds as a result 2) Your opponent has discovered a way to fudge numbers that, to all appearances (due to observable latency issues) are calculated serverside. They did this using some kind of advanced hacking that you have no other evidence of whatsoever. You can post as many screenshots of you getting trashed as you want, but at the end of the day the second will remain an incredible amount less likely than the first.

Calling the OP ships in this mode FOTM is baffling to me. T2 scouts have been FOTM for running on two years now and there is little to no chance there will ever be a balance patch. It's like criticizing a chess player for a standard opening that was first proven effective in the 1800s as a "fotm player" or a football team for using "FOTM" forward passes. The mode is what it is. Some ships are better suited for it. This will probably never be changed. Why does it have to be shameful to fly the ones that are good? I get that when you fly a strike, you always have the excuse "well, sure I lost, of course I'm still a better pilot but they were using FOTM." Personally, I'd rather win more than have excuses ready for when I lose.

Your inability to comprehend really basic **** is starting to strain belief. Ramalina just laid it out for you in the simplest possible terms. YOU had a 3.5% chance to hit (given what you told us your build is, and for sake of argument assuming you were firing at range). THEY had a 81.4% chance to hit (assuming for sake of argument they ran TT/W and assuming they correctly held onto their blaster power until they fired 2-3 BLCs at knife range). One of these numbers is BIG. One is SMALL. You were instagibbed because you chose a build uniquely unsuited to fighting sting vs sting, and this could very well have been compounded by player error. Stings have extremely low hull/shields but extremely high evasion, this is why every sting who wants to duels others must stack accuracy. One would think you'd know by using them that mastered BLCs have MORE than enough damage on them (~700 per shot, ~1000 if crit) to 2-3 shot you. Personally, given my choices, my mastered sting has 1.4k shield power per arc and 900 hull--if two regular BLC shots and a crit land I'm dead. If I've taken any other shield damage (or if my shield power is depleted a bit because I'm running power to engines or blasters, like 99% of the time), then it's two crits to the respawn screen. No need to "generate enough bonus damage." That rarely happens, though, because evasion, which I have at 33% naturally plus more from DF. It is, however, very easy to have a build that negates evasion by running TT/wingman. You don't need to hack to do this. I'm going to put this in caps because you seem to have a really really hard time reading. YOUR BUILD IS BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD. YOU GENERATED A LOT OF "BONUS DAMAGE" THAT HAD NO CHANCE TO HIT. THERE IS LITTLE TO NO CHANCE THE OTHER STING WAS HACKING.

When did I say anything about powerups? I was just talking about build choices. I've obliterated a ton of battlescouts in jousts they opted into when I had all my actives up--TT with Wingman can overcome DF pretty convincingly. To second Ramalina, many pilots also cannot convincingly land shots in that situation, meaning my own DF is stacked with their natural miss rate. Given that you're running a build with no accuracy buffs by taking BO and Bypass and wildly speculating that they have a build like mine (the little tooltips showing enemy buffs are notorious for not always showing up), and you have a battle between a ship that has a high chance to hit, and another that has little to no chance to hit. You are the latter. The fact that you lost in this situation shouldn't be surprising. Even when you have two perfectly skilled pilots who always land every shot and with identical ideal battlescout-on-battlescout builds, there are going to be iterations of duels where one scout leaves at 100% and the other is dead. When you only get a few shots, each of which has a relatively low chance to land but with the chance to crit for a third or more of a sting's total shields+hull, the outcome is going to be heavily flavored by RNG. It's not out of the question for that outcome to happen several times in a row. Add that to the fact that you were running a build that is specially unsuited that particular situation, and your report is less surprising still. You've done nothing to demonstrate in any way that the opposing pilot did anything outside the normal parameters of the game. I'm not saying your choices are necessarily bad, since it's not like this entire mode revolves around battlescout jousting. If you know you have a build that isn't optimized for it, though, don't opt into jousts. Definitely don't come onto the forums ************ and moaning because you brought a knife to a gunfight and got shot. It's pretty simple. All that said... I do second your desire for a combat log.

Thank you for the kind words, everyone! I think that match really highlighted how much a few individuals can swing GSF matches. It brings up a large debate in the community that I have mixed feelings on between sportsmanship and competition--how OK is it to latch onto one name and focus them on sight? It feels very unsportsmanlike, yet as that game demonstrated, it's extremely effective considering the impact an unmolested gunship can have on a game. How sportsmanlike is it to let your team lose because you're too "honorable" to do what's necessary to win? For an even more stark demonstration of what one well-piloted gunship can do when given the infinite peel of a bomberball, see the massive loss in the series. Rewatching them to sort out any audio issues/add little pop up notes, I realized that I did that a lot. Would be narrating to fill some boring silence, then suddenly action and I'd have forgotten entirely what I was talking about. I think it was just that, in many ways, recognizing names is as important as recognizing ship silhouettes when it comes to situational awareness/threat ranking. There times I'll dive a sat with 3 players on it solo and come out with them dead and the sat captured, and there are times I'll look at a sat with 1 of theirs already under attack by a teammate with all the turrets dead and I'll nope off to a different one, because that teammate is soon to be dead. I think it depends on what ranges you tend to engage at--I'm so programmed from sting and gunship flying that the range I'll fight at is either <2-3k or >15k. Just not comfortable in that weird middle area where heavies really shine. The other thing I think is that, while concs get damage on moving targets, my style is generally to find or force players into being unmoving (either by waiting till they're on an attack run, hitting zoomed-in-gunships, or baiting into a joust) where spamming rockets on a hittable target really shines. As a result, most of my time is spent positioning for damage and then dealing it in quick, high-impact bursts than consistent performance. Scouts are just better suited. And all that said.. I still don't want to advise new players "play strike if it fits your playstyle." The fact is that I built my own style almost exclusively because it's the one that's rewarded by two of the best ships in the game right now (and, given no mention in any roadmap, probably forever). For a new player who's going to accumulate req eventually, I'd prefer they get the experience into a style that will be useful down the road than learning to be effective with the strike mid-range style that will get obliterated by both ion/rail gunships and evasion/burst scouts in serious competition. For sure, though I don't think I was the best role model in containing my nerd rage . Having been involved in more than a few of those on my main, I do believe that their lack of truly good scouts would have meant I could have manglered up--between clearing out the mines to help my teammates and likely being able to occasionally get the drop on Jainenenah from max range the game might not have been a win, but it would have been much closer. At the end of the day, a successful bomberball really needs all 3 elements--bombers, at least one gunship with solid aim and positioning, and scouts that can punish enemy gunships seeking to break your ball up. They had two of the three, meaning they were vulnerable to the gunships that I didn't have and nobody else on my team played to any effect. I do my best.

The thing that I hate most about "hacking" being a concern in people's minds is it causes them to turn off their brain and refuse to acknowledge mistakes. "He couldn't possibly have made much better gear decisions than I did since I'm obviously perfect, he must have cheated!" There are a few ways to explain your opponent's higher damage output. First, were they using pods? That would drastically increase damage within the window. Second, they might have brought TT (and even maybe wingman on top of it), which in Sting-on-Sting violence is dramatically better than BO (given evasion, hitting more shots is always better than having a damage bonus on all those shots that are missing). Third, they probably brought frequency capacitor, allowing more rounds of BLC in the same timeframe (if you did not). Fourth, you do not understand what penetration is apparently; far from doing extra damage to shields, it means that damage ignores shields, so you'd absolutely expect an opponent's shields to be in better shape than yours (while having slightly more damage on their hull). That upgrade on BLC is honestly never much used since you strip shields so fast and taking the more direct-damage option on that tier gives you higher lethality overall. Lots of potential ways to make yourself better before you shut down any self criticism with "welp they must have hacked."

Hello GSF community, Many of the major complaints I hear about GSF relate to the skill curve, how hard it is to start out with the very limited info in the game itself, and the handicap of low requisition. I spent this afternoon recording a series of games I played on Jedi Covenant with a completely stock Blackbolt with a twofold purpose: One, point out that it's very possible to be successful in a stock ship Two, give as much advice and direction as I can to help new players be successful in stock and near-stock ships. The playlist starts with an exhaustive 17-minute rundown of each UI element and how you should be using while playing. Then are the 6 games, against a variety of opponents on a variety of maps. Finally, I have a pretty long video running down crew choices and what to do with the first infusion of requisition you get right when you start out. It can be found I welcome any and all constructive criticism. I'd love to know if this kind of thing actually helps anybody, and if so if there is anything else I can do that would also help--my main priority is trying to grow the community of players who feel like they can hold their own. I'd also love any advice from the established GSF videomakers on here about what I did wrong--was a little plagued by audio issues (the part 1 gameplay is especially atrocious). I ended up using OBS for video capture and it seemed to be OK, not quite the highest quality but not indecipherable either. I'd also welcome any tips on editing or how to avoid saying "um" every other frikkin' word when speaking into a mic (gave up and just let 'um' rip after a few takes...) Let me know what y'all think!

My... my..... you've now put soooooo many qualifiers on your statements that they've been rendered almost meaningless. So in conclusion, we're all sooooo stupid for not immediately interpreting your blanket "t1 gunship is the best ship in the game, here's a video to prove it where one beats me despite me having them dead to rights" to mean "in certain rare and limited situations where there are four non-bads on each side but they're all perfectly organized in their ship choices but nobody is talking on voip and all the scouts have all the others on ignore so they can't even type "I'll chase xyz, you focus abc" in chat, t1 gunships can be preferable to t2 scouts. To prove this here's a video that does not show any of those situations in any way, shape or form." OK, you've finally moved the goalposts to a point where you can smugly claim victory because few can argue with your final statement. In doing so, though, you've sequentially abandoned pretty much every position you've held. Cheers, hope to see you at Super Srs tonight.

*Yawn* did you not read my post a little? I've read through this topic way more than it deserves, and you've repeatedly maintained that t1 gunship (and, inexplicably considering its position of doing 2 things badly and nothing well, the t3) are unquestionably the best ships in the game. My argument is that none of us should listen to you because your comparisons are all founded on flawed data. The data is obtained by comparing the strengths of ships when one of them (the one you're attacking) is being used poorly 90% of the time, and the other one (the one you pilot) is being used poorly 100% of the time. I agree the Mangler is definitely not unhittable, but what everyone and their mother has been saying (and you've managed to miss) is that a scout pilot of equal skill to the gs would have killed him in that situation long before the opportunity to BR. He has no allies hitting you with ions. He has no allies doing much of anything, really. You posted a video of yourself getting pantsed and are trying to make this about the ship classes. It never was. Edit to add to your response: Well, moving goalposts extraordinaire, now we're talking about 4 scouts vs 4 gunships. If the 4 gunships are on voip to call targets, can't the 4 scouts be? In that case, can't they organize themselves so that each scout will be dedicated to chasing one of the gunships in the manner that your video shows even you can do? In that case, how can you possibly believe the gunships would win? When you're solo with nothing but food on your team and the enemy has gunship walled, then going gunship yourself is unquestionably the best choice, since trying to chase a gs when there are 3 of his friends lining you up is stupidity incarnate (and even then, if the gunships aren't good enough to run immediately, you can get 2-3 kills per death on t2scout vs a gunship wall if you are capable of timing cooldowns and landing lasers on motionless targets). That's 4v1, though, and "xyz is not good enough to reliably win 4v1" is not really a convincing argument of weakness. At any scaleable level of equal skill and coordination, scouts counter gunships. Hard.

I'll be there impside on bugglesley. I have mastered sting and bad mangler. Looking forward to it!

HEY bioware is handing out free weeklong subs so I can post again for a week, aren't you all lucky. Man, the dick-waving in this thread is intense. It's only made worse by Ol' Challintra (you're blueghost3 now, eh?) declaring that he can't kill t1 gunships and so they're OP. Of course, he ignores that, as shown in the video, even a t2 scout pilot who is totally incapable of landing a single BLC in massive windows of opportunity and has to rely on cluster spam can completely shut down a t1 gunship's offensive output for minutes. I've been holding forth about this in the JC impside GSF channel for a while, but any discussion of player skill in this game is always mired in either false modesty or completely unfounded epeen expansion. It also frequently includes a ton of talking past each other. There are many of "stomp aces" who can put up huge numbers eating food but wither totally when faced with an even fight. There are many who play t1 gunship and can put the blue dot on the red dot and thus get 20 kills in TDMs, but can't for the life of them figure out they should do something beyond throwing up feedback shield and sitting put when they're being hit by TT-empowered blcs and pods for the fifth time this game. There are many who play t2 scout and think that the fact that they can land double-volley clusters again and again on people who don't know how to use missile breaks or evade makes them uber leet haxxor. They're also masters of confirmation bias; any game they did well is saved for posterity and their ego, games where they were shut down probably had a premade on VOIP or whatever (even if it was one guy ******** on them), so there's nothing to be done. They can also trawl through their extensive collection of epeen-boosting screenshots to find one where their scores were nominally higher than someone else who regularly ***** on them for whatever reason (taking it easy, unbalanced game, off-day, you know--all the excuses the stompace uses to disregard the non-screenshotted games they did poorly in). I have a screenshot of a game where I had more kills, higher damage, higher hit% than scrabs when he was playing impside (it was a 50-1 TDM), and another where he was pubside and 4 of us (not on voip, just agreement in typey chat) basically spent the entire game focusing him and held him to 0 kills (the rest of his team was bad enough to lose 4v7). Am I a better pilot than scrabs? The stompace might be stupid enough to say yes, but I am not. BTW, Chall/blueghost3, this is where I see you, and that's how I regard your "proof" that you're anywhere near Saevius' level. You also have your hipster aces, who refuse to fly OP ships but pride themselves on being "better flyers" than the folks using "FotM" (in this the longest month in the history of forever) because they fly strikes or whatever. Their scores and winrates are generally very low, but the fact that they've handicapped themselves means that any bad result can be immediately excused. A loss is expected, a win is proof that they're amazing. Their assertions are founded in some reality by the fact that they can indeed 1v1 the stomp aces. Then you have a small contingent of KDA aces, especially on JC, who think their pristine 0 deaths is the single most important number in the game. They'll either fly t1 GS or t2 Scout and will act like stomp aces, with the corollary that they will pop barrel roll and engine recharge back to spawn if any name they recognize so much as targets them. They'll also get req on their bombers by planting miles away from any conceivable objective or contested territory. Their teams lose a lot, but isn't that really their team's fault? All of these people consider themselves aces and will easily look down their noses at anyone who doesn't follow the rules they've set down to define how amazing they are. Maybe they're actually good, maybe they're not. Who knows? I say this because the simple fact that all of us spend 80% or more of our flying time killing people who can't play the game makes us completely incapable of evaluating our relative skills (at least in cases where it's not blindingly obvious, like Scrabs or Drakko teabagging everyone or Saevius vs Chall/bg3). Which do you evaluate; who can eat food faster, or who can win in a 1v1? How can winrates be meaningful when you regularly have 3-4 members of any given team with under 5% hit rate? How can KDA be meaningful when you can avoid any real challengers and still pick off 4-5 kills on food? That's why I'm looking forward so much to Super Serious Soloq tonight--finally I will learn how bad I really am.

Not so much a shoutout, but a question for The Community: How do we feel about tucking a bomber up in between the little tiny fins on the back end of a sat in dom matches? Personally, I feel it's bad form. It's a noobstomp behavior. The strength is that you mean there's basically one angle you can be attacked from; the weakness is that if someone figures that angle out and attacks you from it, you're literally a sitting duck. Also tends to be very vulnerable to the "OK fine, we'll take the other two sats" strategy" (one of my favorite matches last week had 3 pub bombers who created an invincible fortress at C while the rest of their team played a 5v8 against us to take the other two sats, it was kind of sad). Against teams that can't figure it out (or that have only one or two players who can, but who can't make it through the mines/the rest of your team), though, it's free wins. It's incredibly frustrating for new players. I dunno, it just feels icky. I wish people wouldn't do it. Maybe this is just because I love being mobile and free-wheeling and setting up as a high-armor turret nestled in the warm embrace of a sat doesn't tickle my spaceship pilot fancy. Am I totally off-base?

You can advise/order the sun to not rise as much as you want, it's still going to happen.