Please bring it out to play every once in a while. I'll never betray your secret. Missiles Only is my single favorite pilot ever, just spamming his missile locks away until they burn a missile break and then finishing them off. You made me want to own a Pike/Quell just from watching how you owned that ship. Question. This is the part that really gets me with the strike. Once someone fires on you, what's your strategy. I'm guessing hold your quick charge until you need it, force a missile lock, break it with barrel roll, turn with the increased turning, then face them and start spamming the clusters until they turn away, but I wanted to hear your take. Also, I'm curious why Quick Charge instead of Directional Shield?

It's been a busy week. I swore after running one guild that I'd never do it again and now I'm running two. The good news is that both guilds have alts of other good pilots from this game in them that are interested in what I'm trying to do. The bonus for this is that I'm not the one giving advice (since the amount of useful advice I can give them has a ceiling). Had one person in my Imp-side guild that I decided to try to reform after he was in the process of rage-quitting in Ops Chat. Took him into the tutorial, explained some of the keys that the tutorial doesn't tell you about (function keys, R, C, etc). He was pretty appreciative of the help. Unfortunately, he later got upset in another game and started dropping F-bombs and then N-bombs in GSF chat. I'm pretty tolerant about a lot of things, but racist language is not one of them. Fortunately, he quit the guild about two seconds before I would have booted him. The moral to that story is that I will invest my time in absolutely anyone, even the ones that are long shots, in an effort to grow this community. Where the rest of you can help me is this. Since I am only in so many matches per day, I won't possibly be able to spot every unguilded player that goes into GSF, nor be able to whisper encouragement or an offer for tips or grouping with other good players as much as I'd like. So if you would be willing, look at the scoreboard after your match and look at the bottom of the scoreboard. Whisper at least one person off that list whose name you don't recognize and offer them encouragement or assistance. As I've found, you get a lot more non-responses than responses, but you do get some. And if any of them are interested in joining a new player friendly guild, tell them about my guilds. I will literally take anybody, regardless of age, frustration with the game, whatever, and see if I can help keep them around long enough to start having fun with the game. What both guilds need right now, more than anything, is a lot more beginners. We have some in each guild, but we could use a lot more. Thanks.

Just wanted to say what a great thread this is. I'll probably have my own questions at some point, but I figured I'd read the whole thread first cause the answer is probably in there already. If I find anybody looking for advice, this will definitely be one of the places I send them. Also, just a small LOL. Heh.

I have a ship where that was the tree I picked, so I've been messing with it a bit lately to see if I can make anything of it. Probably not, but it adds another bit of diversity to the game.

If you really think "I really don't care about your opinion on me or anything else" is an insult, then you just simply aren't very mature. You clearly have a high opinion of yourself in this game and it provides some level of self-satisfaction. That's fine for you, but it doesn't mean that I have to care about your opinion any more than you care about mine. But you can't seem to want to just let it go and agree to disagree. My impression is that Drakolich and I have reached an unspoken understanding that we are both invested in the success of the game and that we put our efforts into different aspects of it. But we both want there to be more good pilots, which lead to more fun matches. Other parts of the group that play with him regularly, much less so. I've encountered some unprovoked abuse both here and within the game. I've decided to just ignore it. Presumably eventually they'll get bored with it. Maybe not. I know you think this is insulting, but when other pilots who are as good as you disagree with you and are willing to join my little insignificant guild because they think what I'm trying to do with my free time to try to help the competent pilot base of this game grow (which I never imagined would happen, I just wanted people to know a few basic things that would make a tremendous difference in their ability to make a positive contribution in the game), I don't care if 500 other good pilots think I'm an idiot or incompetent or whatever other types of things you're trying to convince me of. It didn't work in chat the other night, it's not going to work in the forums, so you may as well stop trying. If it makes you feel any better, I haven't berated anyone for playing with what I consider to be bad sportsmanship since you decided to take it up with me the other night. So consider that a positive accomplishment. For what it's worth, another pilot messaged me and spoke positively about your efforts to make the game better. Unfortunately, you're not really enhancing their opinion of you in this response. As far as my enjoyment of the game, I'm already enjoying the game. A lot. Even though I know perfectly well that I'm not even in the top 10% of all pilots who play the game even on my own server. And I'm fine with that. I'm fine with the fact that there will be some matches that I enter into where it will be an automatic loss. Sometimes I'll stay, sometimes I'll decide to use my time working on another aspect of the game until the supergroup either self-regulates or decides to move on to whatever else they do with their time. But I won't rush to switch to the winning side because honestly, participating in those matches on the winning side bothers me much more than being on the losing side. If I'm on a low level ship, I don't worry about it because I'm as easy for the other team to kill as it is for them to be killed and they'll get the satisfaction of killing a low level ship. Most of the time, I'm trying to get in my striker at the first kill to make things harder on me and easier on them. I'm an awful striker pilot. But it also gives me a chance to think about whether there's a way that the damn ship could be effective or perform a niche role in a domination game to make it worth flying. Side note: MissilesOnly is kinda my hero. If I want to level one of my leveled ships, then I have a problem. How do I balance out the fact that I want to finish the double requisition portion of the day on that ship with the fact that I'm now part of the problem? Today how I dealt with it was I only took one shot at each player and then moved on. Or I tried to see how many powerups I could collect. Or sometimes I died cause I was typing in chat, rather than worrying about whether I died two more times or not. Ended up with zero kills and a fairly modest amount of assists and very little damage. And now I have my first ship where at least one talent in every section is at T3/T5. Which is great. Now if I'm on one faction and the games are imbalanced on my side, I can switch to the other faction, play that ship, and feel OK about the fact that I'm not taking advantage of another player's inexperience or lack of req invested in their ship. Then I can try to work on improving my actual skill in the ship instead of feeling bad about what, in my opinion, is griefing players that I want to stay interested in the game. I'm familiar wtih those words. I don't think a conversation like that has much benefit, just like I didn't think the conversation you were trying to have with me last night had much benefit (although as I said, I thought about it and modified one of my behaviors as a result). But then, I have a thicker skin than most. And I don't anticipate having any of those conversation because I go way out of my way to avoid ships that I can see are still trying to work things out or learn the keyboard and try to focus on players that I know are good or at least have established that they can kill me better than or at least at a roughly equal level to how much I can kill them. I think there's a lesson in there and I think it's not a good thing that you don't care anymore. I care. I think ground PVP is largely beyond repair because of the personality type that gravitates towards the game, but I did finally end up with a transplant guild from Bastion that's committed to good manners and not griefing and I do enjoy playing with them. But as I said, I'm a little burned out on ground PVP right now. I'm much more interested in GSF. And because I'm much more interested in it than the other aspects of the game, which have either become too easy or not fun, that's where the majority of my time and effort is going right now. The rest of it is merely "what I do I do while I'm waiting for the next GSF pop." So I'm having fun. I'm invigorated. I'm hoping that the changes in 4.0 will reinvigorate my interest in other parts of the game, though what I've heard sounds like a very sharp departure from what we're used to. Could be good, could be awful. Given how EA has botched so many things with this game (the initial launch, the great server purge of ought 13, the debut of GSF and lack of development once they realized it wouldn't be the big money spinner they were hoping for), I"m leaning towards the side of "Here's comes their next big mistake which they will then have to recover from 3-6 months later." But maybe I'll be surprised and they'll have learned from their mistakes this time and create something compelling. But if it doesn't, I'll still have this part of the game. At least until the point where either it becomes too easy (Can't see that happening), or the queue waits become too long as they are on the other more lightly populated servers. But the single best thing this game has going for it is that the grand majority of the best players in this game (and I'm assuming this is across servers since I'm discovering that a lot of the top pilots play on multiple servers) want this game to be better. But it's going to fall on us to make it better, because I just don't see EA having any interest in the game anymore.

I have no motivation to transfer characters to yet another server unless I wanted to instantly boost my legacy on another server. I've already spent enough cartel coins recently (great price, but still) parking toons that I don't want to play any more on Bastion (until such time as there becomes a reason to play on a PVP server again) and moving some of the Bastion toons I had and liked to Harbinger so I could have one of every role on one server for when I want to do ground PVP and play any role. I am gonna put an alt on the Shadowlands server because I think that event sounds like a great idea and I'm thinking a similar event on Harbinger would be equally great and a good way to promote more involvement in GSF, which is far and away the most compelling part of the game for me right now. I'm doing very little ground PVP at the moment, even though I like the pub PVP guild I'm in very much. I'm just a little burned on ground PVP at the moment.

All that measures is the number of tilted matches a player has participate in, by bulk. There is a player on Harbinger who I will not name who is widely acknowledged to be a horrible frontrunner. Unlike most of the good pilots (of which he is one), if one side is getting the better of the other, he will *always* switch to the side that is having the easier time. And when he loses, he will almost always claim that the only reason his team lost is because the other team focused him the entire match, as if that strategy weren't valid. Heck it's a compliment to any good pilot for another team to feel that you are such a threat that you are worth that amount of attention. But because people are so damn precious about their W-L%, there are people who will do literally anything to avoid losing much. Including queueing four man supergroups every single time they play, never solo queueing unless everybody else is solo queueing for an event, and transferring to the winning side rather than stick it out on the losing side. The truly good pilots don't do this. They always switch factions to try to balance out the matches. The other pilots who refuse to do this are frankly demeaning themselves and the esteem that others hold them in by putting their selfish interests over the interests of the game as a whole. And I will tell you that a lot of the other good pilots who do switch factions are talking about you guys who refuse to break up your supergroups in unflattering terms (the word most often used starts with an h). And the interests of the game as a whole are definitely served by doing whatever it takes to increase the population of this niche within a niche game.

We play on different servers. Which is good, since I really don't care about your opinion on me or anything else. However, since you have decided to continue to be a dick about it, I'm going to give you a little information to shut your fat mouth up for awhile. My recruiting efforts today were totally unsuccessful. Part of it was that I was busy with real life stuff and didn't have a lot of time to put into it and part was that the people that I whispered to didn't respond one way or the other. Not with rudeness (your way) or with a kind "Thanks, but no thanks." However, I do have new members in both guilds right now. Today on the Imp side, an excellent pilot asked if he could join the guild. Intially I thought he was you or one of your pals just pulling my leg. But no, he liked what I'm trying to do and wanted to help. Then another excellent pilot put one of his alts on both factions in each guild. So now it's not me trying to teach them the very basics of the game (which I agree is not optimal). It's actual excellent pilots. So if it gives you pleasure to keep targetting me as one of the "bads" who shouldn't be trying to create a welcoming environment for new players because I suck so bad, keep at it. I think you should be able to do what makes you happy and if beating on me makes you happy, who am I to deny you such pleasures. But know this. Other pilots that are, in all likelihood, better pilots than you are on the Ebon Hawk, are interested in what I'm trying to do. If either of them were willing to take the job of guildmaster, I'd gladly give it to them and eat the 120K credits just to give the guild some more street cred. I personally always think a guild benefits when the guildmaster is an expert in whatever portion of the game that guild wants to focus on and that is most definitely not me in any aspect of the game (other than selling green stuff on the GTN, I'm legendary at that). But that's not their interest. They'd just like to create a welcoming environment for new players, something that you and many other players aren't at all interested in based on the negative feedback I get both here and in the game. Maybe it's just a personality conflict or you just are really worried that there might be fewer clownstomp matches on my server someday and you consider it a personal affront. Either way, I don't care what you think is the right way to play the game, nor what you think of my slowly evolving abilities. You play the way you want to play and think you're right. Free country. But I'm gonna play the way I want to play because I think I'm right. And there ain't a thing you can do to stop it.

I know I'm not that good. That's why I say they should leave my guild and go join real guilds with real pilots. But if you think you've somehow wounded me, well you go ahead and think that. What you posted says more about you than it ever would me. Of course. I don't spend cartel coins on anything except stuff that makes the game more convenient for me to play. Not on GSF, not on levelling, and certainly not on random rolls for fashion. As for the rest of what you said, I know that you fall into the category of pilots that are so precious about their W-L percentage. I would say exactly who you are cause I'm pretty sure, but it doesn't matter to me. If you feel like a superior being because you are a better GSF pilot than me, bully for you. But yes, I am going to teach pilots with zero skills basic skills and then pass them on to someone to teach them advanced skills. And no insult you can come up with can stop me from trying. And no lack of success at finding people interested will stop me. So get used to it.

I know that people have tried things and gotten frustrated and just decided it's not worth the effort. Well, I'm the kind of guy who likes to bang his head into a wall. So I'll stick with it, no matter how little luck I have with it cause I'm having a good time in GSF and I want more people to have a good time too.

OK, returning to the firestorm I have set off by resurrecting an old thread. I have thought on this problem a lot in this past week. I've watched as matches have proceeded. Been part of ROFLstomping teams that won, been part of teams that got ROFLstomped. Been in great matches that went down to the last five seconds. Been in a match that ended after one kill because there weren't enough players. Played with a myriad of different players. First and foremost, there will never be a solution coming from EA. EA only puts money into things that make them money. GSF, with all its flaws, lost its money making potential long ago. The cartel market makes them money. So there will be no development energy, thought, or anything else going into GSF. I seriously doubt they'll ever permanently fix the unequip bug they creates. Secondly, my three favorite players, hands down in this game and nobody else on Harbinger (my server) touches them. 1. Despon 2. Sixofone/Lucklessa 3. Rose The rest of you aren't even in the same zipcode. I don't care how many videos you've made, how many groups you've been in, what your winning percentage is, etc. None of it matters as much as what these three players have in spades and 90% of the rest of you don't. Inasmuch as I sense Despon's irritation with what (to him) is a recurring discussion with no solution, he is the most patient pleasant person I have ever had the pleasure of playing with on this server. He will literally group with ANYONE at ANY level and that, more than anything else, is what helps this game. Never ever complains about losing. Never blames anyone directly for the loss (though after the match, he will discuss how some people didn't contribute much and that's undeniable, though it's probably not due to lack of wanting to help). He believes in allowing weak teams to capture sats (earning them req), and then recapturing the sat (earning his team more req). This allows newer players to practice basic skills like destroying drones, flying near the node, capturing it, and thinking about how they can defend the node better as his gunship or scout comes over to take it back. Some people, whom I shall not name, but have observed over the course of a few weeks NEVER invite anyone into their 4 man group other than other aces. Feel free to dispute this point. Don't care. Seen it in action and know it for a fact. See it happen most often on the pub side, where most of the ridiculous ROFLstomping teams are assembled and when those teams aren't playing, the level of play on the pub side is often pretty low, other than when people like Cap'n Hardcase are playing. They don't worry much about whether they are on winning or losing teams. They just play. Happens some on the Imp side, but I would say there are more good pilots on the Imp side who are willing to solo queue then there are on the pub side. Over half of the people playing, whether they are capable of admitting to it or not, love to get in their best scout or gunship and farm weak ships for easy req. Again, deny this all you want. I've watched a lot of matches. I've told a lot of people to take it easy on weaker ships. Most of them ignore that request. Over half of what I would consider the *true* aces of this game on Harbinger (of which there are probably less than 20 who deserve the title), whatever their personal philosophies are about how to conduct themselves in a tilted matchup, do not do this. They have the best interests of the game at heart and even if we disagree on how to achieve the best interests of the game, they absolutely do not want to chase new players away. They are just frustrated that the myriad of different things that have been tried haven't worked and they've given up putting a lot of effort into it. The surprising thing (and the part that I only just realized is the real driving force behind all of this is this). 95% (and this may be low) of people who have played GSF regularly every week for six months are incredibly precious about what their W/L% is. I've seen people giddily comparing their 70% plus win rates (and I know many are higher). I can't think of anything more laughable than this. It's a number that no one else ever sees, other than you, unless you care to post the link in chat so that other people can see this. And that's why deep down, a lot of you like these clownstompings. You want to balance out the number of tough matches you have with 10 times as many sure-fire wins so that your win percentage looks good. To that, all I can say is the people who are that precious about their win percentage probably have never had a child and don't understand how one operates in a game where an adult competes against a child. Shorter version: LOL at you. As a side note, my main Imp GSF alt that I play has about a 45% win percentage. I've done a lot of hard learning on that alt. Could not possibly care less that it's that low. When my oldest child was young, we used to play chess. Incredibly complicated game for a child. So many things to think about. An adult who has played many games of chess, whether or not they are at a level that can compete with adults who have high win percentages in chess against any class of adults, will stomp a child at the game because the child cannot "see the field" and see how one move affects 10 different things. It takes incredible skill to be an elite chess player, but it takes almost as much skill to allow your child to win every five games or so without them being aware that you are throwing the game in their favor to give them a reason to still like the game and want to continue playing, even though they lose 60-80% of the time. It's the 20% that keeps their interest. At least until they discover their smartphone or touchpad. The biggest problem with this game is that too many people don't understand that a good portion of the GSF matches are effectively like an adult playing chess with a child. If you wipe them out four games in a row, they will quit before playing the fifth game. Plain and simple. Now as Despon asks, "Well, that's all very good ShallowHal you pompous ***, but what are YOU doing to make the situation better?" Well, here's what I do in game. 1. Once I realize a match is a clownstomping, after my first death subsequent to recognizing it's a clownstomping (and over 50% of the time, I can tell before the match even starts), I'm in my strike fighter that subscribers get for free. It's by far the ship I am worst at flying and easiest to be killed in. I still get some kills on people who don't know how to break a missile lock or get away from people who don't know what F3 is for, but on the whole, I'll probably die somewhere in the 4-5 times range and end up with a line that probably looks, at best, somewhere around 0-2 kills and 3-5 assists at best. Every now and then I outperform that, but it's nothing compared to the numbers I would put up with a bomber or a gunship against a team that has no idea what they are doing. 2. When I realize a match is a clownstomp, I ask my team to remember that the other team are people too and we all know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a clownstomping. Some people insist that this is when they learn the most, but I think they're either secretly masochists or they just aren't telling the truth. At any rate, 90% of the players ignore this request, either because they want to "get theirs" or because they think the other guys should sack up and do something about it in their gimped ships. I think that attitude sucks and I realize that I am Don Quixote tilting at windmills on this, but I try anyway for the one or two people that maybe might think about it and do it. And this is what I'm doing going forward I spent $120,000 tonight (because I didn't want to wait around all night for good Samaritans and because I couldn't find anybody who wanted to sell an abandoned guild for a reasonable price) to get six people to help make two new guilds that are literally dedicated to one thing and one thing only. Helping new GSF players learn how to play. I'm not looking to form a guild that will eventually morph into a top squadron. I'm not looking to keep anybody in the guild for an extended period of time even. I'm forming the guilds because I can think of no better way to desemminate the VAST amount of GOOD information that would help new players learn VASTLY more quickly than by simply saying in a match "If you are new to GSF and want to learn the basic skills, join (insert name of guild)" I have no delusions that this will be wildly successful. GSF is too much of a niche population in the SWTOR world for it to be. But if I could generate a running rotating membership of 2-5 other people and, over time, give them little things to work on (like instructing them on all the different buttons to press in the tutorial that the tutorial never tells you about), why flying to a node and guarding it all game is good, why spending fleet req to upgrade your stock ships is bad,bad bad, how to join the GSF channel, which pilots they should fly with, etc.), I feel like we could get a larger more interested population. Once they progress past that basic knowledge, I fully expect them to quit and join a real GSF guild with real pilots or join a general guild that encompasses all the parts of the game. But at least they will go to that new guild armed with the tools to stick with the game long enough to have a mastered ship and then be able to really have the fun that it is possible to have in this game once your ship is competitive. Why would I put myself through this when everybody says that GSF guilds can't work? Well, number one, GSF is the most interesting aspect of the game for me right now. I hate ops, think conquest is a useless grind, PVE lost me years ago, I've done all the stories, dailies get old, ground PVP is 80% equipment, 10% hackers, 5% people who aren't hackers but are jerks to other players, and 5% skill, and 75% of SWTOR is just a grind because you are doing the same things over and over and over and over. GSF, despite its limited maps and only two different objectives, is the most diverse thing I can do in SWTOR every day. Moreover, the population among the people who can play is generally speaking nicer and more mature than the population in the other aspects of the endgame part of SWTOR. But mostly it's because I'm happy when I'm helping people who actually need my help. I hate helping people who could help themselves if they'd get off their lazy asses. But when I help someone understand something better that they would have struggled to understand better without help, then I feel fulfilled. The pub guild is called Flight School The imp guild is called Flight Academy Tomorrow I will see if I can manage to get 2 people in each faction to join. I probably will fail. But I will try.

Just wanted to say LOL for this

I can't even post the URL here because it autofills with *******'s, but google swtor pvp hacks and you will find the forum. Fought an Imp team last night in a Pub vs Imp match on Harbinger at about 1:30 AM PST where it was so blatantly obvious that they were hacking that I actually looked into it for the first time because it was obvious it wasn't skill. I've seen skilled teams that coordinate via voice chat and all arrive at the same time and focus people down. This was guys one on one who were invulnerable, including a Marauder with over 50,000 hit points that could not be damaged, as opposed to say someone in there in 192 gear that dies in 3 hits from any class. At the end of the match, every single player had over 150,000 healing points. And it wasn't as if I didn't get any medals or do any damage. So for anyone who thinks is isn't real (looked up another thread), yeah it is.

Solved problem myself

Yes. The caring is why I'm currently more interested in this aspect of the game than any other. In wargames and world PVP, guys loved to grief the little guy. Inherently within the design of the game, you will be a little guy for a long time until you built up enough ship req. So it's a law of the jungle thing and you have to accept that as part of the deal. Still, I maintain there are more nice people playing this game than any of the other subsegments of the game (ops, raids, warzones, etc.) And so I want this to be a welcoming community for the new person who needs help getting from point A to point B before he gets frustrated and quits. I've already gone through my rough period and am still going through it leveling up new alts, so I understand that's just part off the way it is. But people who are trying it out for the first time wont'. And on that note, I think I've officially way over-contributed to this thread. It's up to other people to decide the best way to make people want to stick through the tough times.

Well stated. In fact, I suspect we were in the same group last night because some of this dovetails with what we discussed in the group.

I lose all the time. I have no issue with losing. But thank you for guessing my intent. Oh please. Let us not continue with the absurd notion that it is 100% skill and 0% equipment that dictates the outcomes of these matches. I know some of you hold onto that myth very tightly, but as anybody who is leveling up a new ship says in chat all the time, it just ain't so. I'm better now that I was a month ago. I am nowhere near as good as Drakolich and have zero problem saying as much. On a fully upgraded ship, he'd still slaughter me. I have a long way to go in terms of learning how to deal with specific situations (in particular, how to counter skilled scouts coming at you while you are in a bomber or a gunship, not to mention becoming a competent scout pilot myself, which I am not remotely yet). There is a problem and yes, I do think Drakolich and his group are part of that problem based on how I've observed how his team plays in a tilted match as opposed to how a team with Despon would play. I think the Despon way is the superior way to go and I feel that way especially when I'm on the team that is benefitting from the tilt. I feel better about the match knowing that we gave people a chance to work on basic skills like blowing up defense drones and capping satellites and getting medals for it. Better for them, better for us. I disagree as well. What I posted is only my opinion and I wasn't looking for an apology from him. If he wants to play the way he wants to play, there's certainly nothing I can do about it. I am only endorsing the notion that the game benefits from groups being mixed - some very good pilots, some OK pilots, and even some very new pilots and that the game is hurt by tilted matches. And since there will not be a solution coming from EA, it falls on the players who play the game to come up with the best solution they can on their own. I don't have an Imp main that has a fully upgraded ship yet. For that matter, I don't have a Pub main that has a fully upgraded ship yet either, although I have a couple that have ships that can be competitive in matches like that. But I'm not a frontrunner. I don't think 100% of those groups exist because Drakolich invited every one of them to play with him. I think they exist because once they know his group is on, they log onto their alts looking for easy req. I could do that too, but I'm not really interested in beating down overmatched teams. I know that a lot of you feel that way. I can tell by how you play, how you camp the spawn points against overmatched teams, and how some of you target the same player repeatedly. Well, since I know that he played more than the five games he talked about, I didn't particularly care to focus on that point. I know he played more than those five games and so does he. And like I said, I think it's a great thing that people are building teams to fight him. Look, it's already clear that you are one of the players that sees nothing wrong with beating new players into submission. We get that. I'll never convince you that my position is right and you'll never convince me your position is right. But since you like throwing around the straw men, I am not one of those people asking for a gunship nerf or banning people and I definitely don't think anybody should feel bad about being good. I have. But honestly, sometimes players want to group with other good players when they see the tilt is going the other way. It's not their responsibility to babysit me. I solo queue a lot. If I get invited to group or I get a response from asking if there are any openings on the GSF channel, I appreciate them making space for me because I know they could find better players to play with. I agree. He does help the community. I didn't know about the training pilots part, but that doesn't surprise me. Heck, I even watched one of his videos yesterday playing on a Rampart and compared it to how I play on a Rampart in a Domination match to see what things I should be doing differently. And I don't view my original post as an attack. I was specifically referring to something I personally say while I was playing one night and how it dovetailed with this thread.

So do I. By the way, I was invited to an 8 man ops group last night comprised of some of the members of the ops group Drak was complaining about. We were hardly a powerhouse. In fact, I felt like I was letting them down in a lot of the matches. But they didn't raze me for it. I did what I could do, ended up not playing in ships where I was more problem than solution, and had a good time, even though we won some and lost some. And you know what? When that group got into a match that was very one-sided and we were three capping the nodes, two of those people told the guy at the third node to leave it alone. He was rather resistant to the idea, but eventually went along.

Of course, and that solution is never coming. Well, I think that a lot of people do come to that conclusion. I don't think anybody wants that though, not Drakolich and not me. The question is, how do you keep a new player wanting to keep playing when he's playing with two hands behind his back? 1. He doesn't really understand all the controls. 2. His ship is much easier to kill than the people he's facing. I'm glad you participated in this thread. You group with everybody. You've grouped with me and you've grouped with many other people that could hardly be considered aces. I think your stance of "Let them cap a node, more comms for every one" is exactly the right stance. I'm disappointed, but not surprised to see that the people that are grouping with Drakolich's team aren't up for that, because I think that it's an important step for the new player to understand that he isn't dying because he is being griefed. I think your approach to the game is spot on and I wish more people felt the way you do.

That's not true. I do care about his response. I'm disappointed in him that telling it exactly the way it was got him so irate though. I only have so much time in a day. I'm not going to watch someone else play when I could be playing myself instead. I realize that it's the nature of the game. I just don't think that Drakolich's mini-rivalries should dictate how he plays against everybody else though. I've played enough warzones and GSF to know that I'm not going to be the hero all the time. If that's what I really wanted, I'd just play PVE all the time and convince myself that I'm great. The question is, do you want to be part of the solution or part of the problem? I didn't suffer that much. After all, I kept queuing anyway, knowing that I was going to die a bunch of times. I just think the whole logic of the thing is ridiculous. I could go do dailies every day on my 60 and feel invincible, but that isn't fun for me. I want there to be a challenge, but I also want that challenge to be reasonable. And this whole game of oneupsmanship because other people dare create overpowered groups just like the one Drakolich plays with all the time doesn't fly with me.

I think that's a good thing. I think you should see how the other half lives from time to time. Maybe you'll curtail your 4 man slaughterhouse teams a little more often. By the way, all of that violin music above has nothing to do with last night. There were no 8 man ops teams going against you last night when I was playing you. I guess what's good for the goose isn't so good for the gander. So you're saying you played five games all last night with Mika? I don't see where the support of people who like slaughterhouse matches matters one lick to me. They're just as much a part of the problem as your pre-mades were last night. Not really. Why don't you guys make your own individual 4 man groups if you absolutely have to make sure you're grouped with other good players just to play? Then maybe you'd play against each other once in a while in a faction vs faction battle. Or maybe you'd be in separate battles altogether. Is that really *so* bad? I see you left out the scoreboards for every game I was in. I guess you didn't want to show those. I think it's great they're building 8 man teams to fight you. I'm not judging you on the matches where you have to sweat a little. I'm talking about all the other matches that you seem to conveniently forget about because of FIVE matches all week where you didn't roll over people like you're used to. I'm sorry that the truth is so bothersome to you

Speaking of your team... I was flying Imp side last night when your team (I don't know who all the members are, but I know one of them is Mikaboshi) were in something like 4-5 games in a row where your entire squad, save 1-2 pilots had a full hanger and were good pilots. And you guys were rolling over every team, 3-capping in sat matches and winning domination matches by about 40 kills. I know you and Mikaboshi like to fly together, but in 90% of matches, that's going to be vast overkill. And I didn't see anybody rushing to switch to the Imp side to try to even things up. Now I certainly could have switched to one of my Pub characters and been a frontrunner with you guys (assuming that you didn't have 3 4 man groups that shut out the PuG guys, but I wanted to level my ships on that toon. I didn't see you guys being particularly concerned about balance last night. And in one of the games, you didn't even allow people to get the token cap of the node before you took it back. Later on, you did allow us to destroy some drones and temporarily cap nodes, but not initially. So to some extent, even allowing for the fact that you have all the videos out there for people to learn from and have taken pilots under your wing to teach them how to fly better, you are also part of that problem when you see that the matches are that skewed and keep the team together anyway.

I agree. Having done plenty of both, there is no question that the trash talk aspect of GSF is pretty darn low and that the top end pilots are far more helpful than the top end warzone people.

Well how about that. You learn something new every day.

Hey Rose. I've flown with you under a few alt names, mostly Joras. I asked Sixofone if you ever all played the same and who likes killing the other the most if you're on opposite sides. I'll leave it to her to give you the answer. Us older folks keep each other's secrets. Heh.