Anyone I catch suiciding, I will personally scare TO DEATH.

Yep. And for that reason I virtually never use them.

Ol' Strix will be there, provided I'm not working. I should warn you, though. I aim straight for the butt. (also, I'll need a team ^_~)

There being two Strixes that post here is confusing. Saw a post addressed to "Strix" on the previous page and was like, "...but I haven't posted in this thread..." then remembered that there was another. Hi, other me ^_~

I'd be happy if GSF achievements gave mounts, stronghold decorations or armor shells. It would be pretty cool if mastering a ship gave you a decoration of that ship for your stronghold.

A training sim would be excellent. Could show new pilots the ropes instead of throwing them to the sharks. Sadly I doubt terribly much dev time will be spent on GSF in the future. I'd love to be proven wrong in that, though.

Well, well, well, another Strix. Because of the excellent choice of purple text in your signature, i will refrain from eating you. I wasn't familiar with that MTG card, however. My name comes from this. . Nocturnal aerial apex preditor, etc. etc (Plus I just like birds ^_~)

Me? Nah, I only play on the Bastion currently. ...However if there is another Strix flying around out there, I must find and devour this imposter at once.

GSF rewards skill to a tremendous degree. If you're getting stomped repeatedly it ain't the ship, it's you. Lousy team work can also bite you in the arse, as even a great pilot can be on a really bad team and lose. I've gone 19/17/0 with 4 bases captured solo in a Dominion game and still lost because my team couldn't hold anything. If you keep losing because your team stinks, find some other good pilots and queue as a group. But it's probably not just your team. You probably stink. My advice is to read the guides on this forum and to not be so quick to assume that you couldn't possibly get owned so hard in a game that was balanced.

Yeah, that really is a problem. I mean, it's just one part of why some people get turned off of GSF, but it really doesn't help things that both of the two ships immediately available to newbies use the worst gun in the game. Which RFL definitely is. Can you kill things with it? Sure. If you're really good and use it perfectly, can it be deadly? Sure. Is there ever a situation where it's better than LLC or BLC? No. There's no reason to be tickling people to death with RFL when you could be blowing them to hell in a second or two with other weapons (unless you just really love the way it looks/sounds, which is admittedly pretty damn cool).

I would have come but I was too busy tonight. ><

Longest wait I've ever had was 40 minutes, but it's usually more like 5-10. Yesterday I actually had a couple instant queues.

Be careful what you wish for ^_~

That F3 thing is legit. I do that constantly in warzones when I spawn.

Sting, Blackbolt, Mangler. There's no ship or situation that one of those three can't handle. This is of course assuming I'm just trying to go for the most powerful group I can. There are other ships I like to fly, or that have interesting niches, but if I were going to fight opponents that can actually threaten me and try my hardest to win, those are the three ships I'd want to have available for sure.

Don't feel bad. Not everyone who is good or well known gets mentioned in these threads. The majority of players don't read or post in the forums. If it's any consolation, I've flown against you a few times, and y'aint bad.

I never saw it before today, and only ever with thermite (never with proton) so I assumed it was a bug. If it is indeed just lag, well, there's one more reason for me to not really like thermites

Yeah, thermites seem to have this problem. Lock-ons will just break repeatedly. The first few times I saw it happen I assumed it was latency....but then I had a target in the center of my firing arc that didn't turn at all and the lock broke 3 times. He didn't use an engine ability, and as it was a strike fighter he couldn't have broken it with distortion field or EMP pulse either. I'd be sure it was server lag, but in the same set of matches I never had any issues with proton torpedoes, which also have a small firing arc and a long lock on time.

I play GSF most every day and never see any of this except when it's quite obviously lag. If you're a bomber and go form full shields + green hull to no shields + orange hull from 1 set of clusters from a scout, you probably ate a crit from BLC and just didn't realize it. Everything else you mentioned sounds like lag. I know people keep suggesting that it's lag and it keeps getting dismissed...but it's almost certainly lag. If these things were hacks you'd see the people "using" them do extremely well. As it is, most of the ships I see "teleporting" around are obviously lagging like crazy and their scores reflect as much at the end screen.

Quell/Pike with heavy laser cannon, proton torpedoes and concussion missiles is excellent at killing bombers. You can slowly pick them apart with missiles and heavy lasers and never even get in range of their mines. If you're having trouble getting missiles off, work on the direction you approach the bomber from. If you do it correctly you can usually get a concussion off before they can LoS you. I hit even very good bomber pilots with proton torpedoes all the time. Just be smart and don't get closer than 5k or so. Fire a missile, hit a couple times with heavies then back off and line up another missile. I mean, if they just sit there and let you hit them, great, but odds are they're going to circle the satellite, so you need to break off and realign yourself for your next missile. Some of them will get bold and charge you, but if they do it just gives you even more time to line up a missile, as they turn and move extremely slowly. This is only tricky at all if they're already at the sat, btw. If you spot them on their way between satellites, you can kill them with absurd ease with just about any ship, but with the type 2 strike you don't even have to get close.

The main ships I fly are Blackbolt/Sting/Quell, and I definitely kill them on my Blackbolt. It's just a matter of attacking when it's opportune, anticipating mines/drones and blowing cooldowns when they're vulnerable. You're so much faster than them that you can completely control the engagement. Zoom in and light them up, then if they manage to turn things to their advantage, fly way the hell away, loop around and attack them from below/above. They will run out of shields/hull eventually, and if you're mindful of drones/mines and shoot them down, you won't take much damage. This isn't theoretical, I do it all the time. Once you get through the shields, cooldowns + LLC and pods will melt them. EMP is also useful against them, but not because it blows up mines/drones (I usually just do that with my blasters). Locking out their System and Engine components for 15 seconds can give you a very nice window for finishing them off. Again, this can take a while. Unless you get the damage overcharge, they're just not going to blow up in 3 seconds like a scout, strike or GS can. Bombers can be tough as nails, but being as slow as they are, they kind of need to be. Also, personally, I still feel like GSF is still quite favorable to scouts. I do enjoy the superior firepower that strikes and GS's have, but despite their fragility I can survive focus fire much longer on a scout due to their speed, maneuverability and multiple (up to 3 on the blackbolt!) missile lock breaks. Yes, a rail gun can kill you in 1, and mines can kill you in 2. This just means you need to be mindful of your surroundings. Cycle through enemy targets and see if there are any gunships nearby (and if they have you targeted!), and/or check out areas where gunships like to lurk during a battle (around the fringes of engagements). They're almost always the first targets I go for on a Scout. As for bombers? They're very easy to spot. Look for the huge, glowing red circles around mines or the tell-tale glow around a rail gun sentry. To be fair, I do avoid fighting bombers on a blackbolt if it's a TDM game. If they're clever with LoS/cover, it can take so long to kill them that I'm better off just leaving them alone and going after a softer target. However, in TDM, their greatest strength (area denial) isn't anywhere near as powerful as it is in domination.

Bombers are fine. I can kill bombers on any ship I fly. They can't evade missiles except with LoS so my Quell can deal with them handily. They can't maneuver for ****, so you can do hit and runs with a Blackbolt or Sting until they keel over. With a GS you can easily ion down all of their toys then either rail them to death or swoop in and BLC them if they hide. Most of the complaints I see about them are about being 2-shot by mines...but really, this never happens to me in my scouts, even against good bomber pilots. The *only* time I die to mines is if I'm chasing someone other than the bomber, already have a lot of hull damage and accidentally fly too close to a mine without even seeing it. If you're paying attention and the bomber is your primary target, mines are pretty easy to avoid. Bombers are slow, clumsy, and their primary attack and defense is to occasionally poop out mines. With that in mind, you should know that if you're in a fragile ship, just flying up behind them and shooting will get you killed. Kiling a bomber that's circling a node can take a while, yes, but you're fighting them in the place where they're at their absolute best, so it damn well *better* take a long time to kill one and require skill to do so, or what the hell good is a bomber? When you do catch them away from cover they're absurdly easy to kill unless they have support.

D'oh. Completely forgot about this. Oh well. I'll be on later tonight....

I do love new ships and maps, but that alone isn't going to fix the problem with GSF. As I see it, the facts that: -GSF has few/no rewards that tie into the ground game -Many servers have very low populations of regular players -There's no cross server matchmaking (and likely never will be) -The tutorial teaches new players basically nothing and they end up as fodder, get pissed off and then never play again mean that GSF will pretty much just slowly march to extinction on many servers. I mean, I love GSF, it's almost all of what I do in SWTOR these days, but the queues get steadily longer and the opponents/allies get steadily fewer. For instance, on The Bastion, there are very few good Imperial pilots left, who all play at very different times, rarely group up and rarely end up together. However, there's a very regular group of Republic pilots who fly quite a bit virtually every day (Everyone on the Bastion probably knows who I'm talking about without even saying any of their names ). More than half of my matches are against them. I don't mind, but I have multiple mastered ships and can handle myself against excellent pilots. New players with 2 stock ships, however, die like flies. Again and again. Very frequently I will be most/all of the few kills Imp side gets against them. The last game I played against them ended at 12-50, with 7 of those kills being mine and nobody else on the team having more than 1 (most of which involved my assistance). I've gone 28 and 2 in death matches against pugs myself (Screenshot or it didn't happen). Most new pilots just don't stand a chance against veterans, and when their only experience in GSF is waiting 15-30 minutes to fight that same premade over and over, most of them are going to say, "To Hell with it." Yesterday alone I saw at least three people try it for the first time then express confusion/disgust with it after one match because they couldn't figure out how to land a kill and did nothing but get swatted down like a bunch of mosquitoes. I recall one of them said something like "I don't get this ****" and another said, quite plainly, "this is stupid". Don't mistake my meaning. I have nothing against that premade or premades in general. I like flying against them, and I have been in matches where we beat them (usually when I'm lucky enough to queue at the same time as several other Imp vets). I've won 3-4 vs 1 against average pilots (as in killed them all myself, not just survived), but it's virtually impossible for me to win against even 2 of that group unless I get very lucky, because they actually use team work and watch each out for each other. Their team work is tight enough that if I don't drop one of them in a few seconds I'm not going to, because help will arrive that quickly. But I like to be challenged, and if it really rubbed me the wrong way I'd just form a premade of my own. Basically, were it up to me (and I'm no professional game designer), I'd add cosmetic/fun ground-game items such as dyes, armor shells, mounts and pets that could be gotten from GSF, as well as more quests and game modes. Something to motivate people to bang their heads against the wall that is veteran players and premades, because right now there is little incentive unless you just really like flying. I'd also make cross-server matchmaking a supremely high priority. BUT, that would be an awful lot of work, and I don't see it happening any time soon. I still greatly enjoy GSF, but my interest is beginning to decline.

I can be there for a wee bit.