Then the solution is clear, they should implement an account wide system a that permanently prevents people that engage in repeated self destructing from grabbing the GSF dailies and weeklies.

You claim to value your time, so you'd rather self destruct than waste time on a losing match. Maybe you should stop wasting your time at all playing a game you don't enjoy, sounds like a much better investment.

Shame, was looking forward to the collections unlock sale. Made good use of it back when we had a -75% unlock sale, but have added a bunch of stuff since which would have been nice to unlock.

That was a fantastic match! I was at the edge of my seat during the whole thing! I haven't been flying as long as most of you, only 5 years or so, but I still remember my first match. It was painful and very confusing, but I was instantly hooked. I've enjoyed my time flying, and it's mostly the only thing I do in game by now.

Please add a "Not learned yet" toggle to filter searches so they don't output: Cartel market Armors/Weapons/Vehicles/Pets/Color Crystals/Companions/Companion Appearances/Toys/Tunings/Titles/Flairs/Emotes that have already been unlocked on your collections. Non cartel market pets/vehicles you already know. Crafting Schematics you already know. GSF ships and customizations your character has already unlocked (and those for the opposite faction)

Have you considered basing the Quick Travel cost on Legacy level instead of Character level? I think it's a much better metric of a player's potential wealth.

I respectfully disagree, but I can definitely understand why it would seem that way. Now, I personally think the game would actually be better without gunships (Or more specifically, railguns. But without railguns, what's left for gunships? Missile specialists? There's some big overlap with two of the strikes there). I don't think the whole sniper archetype (Slow, accurate, heavy hitting, long range attacks) leads to fun gameplay. That said, they are already in the game, so we'll just have to deal with them. Thing is, gunships have a low skill floor but a high skill ceiling. It's easy to get a few kills with a railgun, but it's very hard to top the meters with one. They just lack the toughness and mobility to survive in the chaos of battle. It takes an extremely skilled pilot to survive being focused while flying a gunship. I prefer the dogfighting aspect of the game, but will swap to a gunship if the situation calls for it, and it has taken me several years to not die instantly when a strike or scout wants to kill me. And yet they still do, quite often. If your team can't cover you, an up close scout or strike will out turn you and most likely kill you. So really, the worst thing you can do is ignore a gunship. If you do, yes, they would seem to be completely overpowered.

Wait, what?! Have you even seen the steaming pile of hot garbage that ground PvP is? The MMO medium is not fit to be a PvP game, yet that didn't stop you guys from implementing seasons. It's like you guys don't even realize the gem you have in GSF, a completely independent PvP mode that causes no interference on PvE balance (which should be your focus as an MMO). We pilots might be few, but we love GSF something fierce. Maybe you should give it a try, you might end up loving it.

This is excellent news. I hope you mean to add enough objectives so GSF is a viable way to finish the season, without having to engage in ground PvP. It is also a great time to fix the bug that prevents medals from displaying on the scoreboard, and the one that made them all gold instead of bronze (1-7) / silver (8-14) / gold (15+). The number of medals required would depend on whether you are restricting which medals count. I'd rather you didn't and all medals count. A good pilot can usually get around 7-10 medals (15+ can happen, but are definitely not the norm). An average pilot might get 5. A rookie will often get nil. How much of a time investment do you want an objective to be? If you set it to a decently large number like 100, it would take an average pilot 20 matches. Probably what I'd set as an upper limit. 60-80 if the time investment should be smaller.

Biggest issue with the current implementation is that it disproportionally affects newer players, who barely have credits at all. People have suggested the price increases with your character level, but I think a better approach would be to have it scale with Legacy level. Probably a much better indicator of how much time has been invested in the game.

Being able to buy and sell stuff without having to use trade chat, I'd love for a "Usable items only" option that filters out recipes, pets and mounts I already know, as well as items I have unlocked in collections, either per character or account and decorations I'm capped on (50/50, etc.). Would be nice if there was a toggle for the rarity filter to only show the selected rarity, instead of that rarity or better. Price history would be the obvious answer. Big undertaking, of course, but it would allow for informed decisions instead of having prices vary wildly. Bonus points if the GTN becomes cross server.

How long were you waiting for a respawn? Did you see actual damage numbers or just heard the co-pilot bark? Co-pilot seems to think you sometimes hit someone when you didn't (evasion, maybe?) My guess is there's some latency between the vote kick system receiving enough votes to kick you and the actual kick. For example: You are fighting for your dear life and are flagged as "Not contributing". One of your teammates notices you flagged as "Not contributing" and votes to kick you. Server checks if you are flagged as "Not contributing" and accepts the vote. Three (?) more teammates vote to kick you and the server accepts the votes. You hit an enemy. This clears your non contributing flag. You are killed. This should clear your non contributing flag but you are no longer flagged. You get lucky and instantly respawn instead of having to wait 10 seconds for the next wave. Server counts the votes every few seconds, realizes it got enough votes to kick you and proceeds to do so, without checking if you are still flagged as "Not contributing".

Sounds like what a Remote Slicer would say!

Why is crit still being scaled? is the concept of a percentage so hard to grasp?

Does this mean items in your personal cargo hold or legacy cargo bay aren't taken into account when considering bad luck protection?

I haven't flown much in the past few months, did a few matches this week and the skill level on Star Forge seems to have improved significantly. Small sample, I know, but even matches late at night have been pretty good.

Superb answer, Ramalina. I often run protons on my T1F but I rarely expect them to do much. They are easy to avoid, unless you launch one at someone you just saw use their engine break. Otherwise, I'm actually surprised when they actually land. I don't carry them for the damage, I carry them for the threat of the damage. As Drakolich mentioned, the consequences of being hit by a proton torpedo have to be large for the threat to be relevant. I could carry concussion missiles and get higher DPS out of my missiles, but I like being able to threaten people at 11.5km when needed and some people actually keep track of what you use, thus losing the threatening part of them. Most importantly, living across the globe also means actually getting a missile lock isn't as simple, the system seems to suffer greatly from above average latencies so I don't use missiles much. Similarly, I rarely get hit by protons, unless there's several people locking missiles at me at the same time and I misjudge the threat, or I use my engine ability in the open and someone takes advantage of the opportunity. They do force me to fly defensively, so they have an effect.. they just rarely deal actual damage.

You don't balance PvP by completely messing up PvE balance, though. The right way to address it is by making abilities behave differently in PvP and PvE, pretty much what WoW did. They can tear damage and healing numbers separately for each mode.

Empire also needs more distinctive ship designs. Two years of GSF and they still all look the same to me. I can tell it's a scout or strike, but which one is beyond me.

Ion Railguns can also drain your engine/weapon power from 15km away. If the railgun is fully upgraded, the T5 ability will add a debuff (either reduced movement speed or reduced energy regen). But being hit by a railgun has a distinctive sound effect, so it's hard to miss.

Clarion and Spearpoint are definitely the sexiest ships.

A training mode vs AI (or even stationary training dummies) where you can try out different builds, or explore the existing maps (get familiar with the Kuat maze, powerup locations, which way is up on Iokath, etc.) would be great. Would be great if the game gave you more information while flying, like your copilot informing you your engine ability got disabled, you got hit by slicer's loop and can't regen power, an easier way to know what debuff corresponds to which debuff icon (say a sidebar where the name of each debuff and it's icon is shown), a death summary where you can see recent debuffs and damage taken, and from whom, with timestamps and the name and weapon of whoever dealt, and in addition to this, a death cam from the point of view of the person that killed you, showing you where he was and how he did it. This would go a long way to make people understand why they got killed and what they can do to avoid it in the future.

750? At 160 ms, missiles are really hard to lock, you can keep the enemy target in the center of your screen, at 8k range, and the torpedo lock will break midway. Or you get the missile lock sound, release the missile and it won't launch.

And this is exactly why new players should get a big juicy carrot to tempt them to spend the time. GSF can be ruthless for a new player, especially if they get matched against a veteran pilot. So much that many people stop playing after their first match, I've seen this quite often when trying to get guildies into GSF. Sadly, it's too easy to lose interest when your first experiences are soul crushing. Having a tangible reward for enduring a horrible experience makes it a slightly less bitter pill to swallow. Becoming a better pilot is not just about watching GSF School or reading Vulkk's guide, it's also about flying. You need to spend time flying, experience all the different mechanics, be confused as to what the heck did just happen, then look it up on the web and find an explanation. The game sucks at telling you what happened, so learning is a slower process than it could be. And that's definitely on the game. With time, a pilot that gets more experience and gets better will start to enjoy the game. We like to take part in activities that we are good at. And we tend to avoid activities we are not good at. I don't recall much about my first match, I know it was a very confusing and frustrating experience, but since it was during a double XP event, I got a ton of XP from it. That made me queue again, and again, until I got a slight idea about what was going on. Shortly after I started looking up information about GSF and that helped me understand why I suddenly blew up from 15k away or why I couldn't use my engine ability. And I've been flying ever since. But if it weren't for that big juicy carrot, I might not have. As Stradlin mentioned earlier, a fun match is a match where both teams are evenly split in terms of skill. For this to work, the matchmaker needs a large enough pool of pilots of various skill levels to be able to create a match with equally skilled players. In particular, this often isn't a thing when it comes to aces and veterans, so you end up with teams full of new players where one ace gets 35 kills. This might be mildly amusing for the ace, but it gets old after a while. It's certainly not fun for the opposite team. Ever since the CQ changes, I've had way more evenly skilled teams where during the whole TDM match there's a difference of 2 points. Seems there's a lot more veteran pilots flying now, names you didn't use to see a year ago. I strongly disagree with this statement. After ten matches, at most you have a basic understanding of the controls. Would probably take a hundred or two hundred matches to actually know what's going on most of the time.

Some crowd control mechanics in GSF are definitely too powerful, chief among them engine power drain and the massive, unavoidable area slow from interdiction drones. There's several components that drain some engine power, but it's usually a small amount, which could cause some inconveniences, but aren't usually deadly on their own. There's 3 abilities that drain enough engine power for it to be crippling, and they are the easiest to use. Those are Ion Railguns, Remote Slicing and Lockdown. These last two can be combined for a truly devastating effect. Having no engine power means you become a sitting duck, and that's just not fun. We are here to play, not to be prevented from playing. Ion Railgun and Remote Slicing do enough already without the need for engine power drain, and could stand to have it removed from them. Lockdown just by itself is not really a problem, I think, mostly because it competes with several good abilities. Problem is when you combine it with another big drain. If engine power drain should be somewhere in the game, it should be on a missile. There's ways to deal with missiles, either by breaking LoS or using an engine ability, which means you have a skill based way to avoid being crowd controlled. I mentioned a while ago Ion Missile could be a good candidate for this. It already drains some engine power, but not enough to be devastating, though I personally would prefer if there was no crowd control at all. It's just not healthy.