This is a mentality that is all too common and flawed thinking in GSF. Why? Because when you face an Ace you're going to get squished, that's why. Then you have to decide if you're the type to scream "cheater!" because you can't understand how that ace an do what he does, or are you going to step up your play. . For you yeah, but not for a Scout Ace. How easy is it to kill Scout Ace? Not easy. P-dive + disto, a nuch of evasion and double turning is not easy to shut down unless the team composition doesn't suit a Scout.

This is the real trick, isn't it. That's what a proficient Scout Ace can do, get inside 2000m even in TDM and deal out tremendous damage. If you apply the things I talked about in those videos, and keep practicing, it will come together. I assure you it works fine in TDM. Its just situational. Of course there are situations where you can't fly a Battle Scout in TDM without being peeled too easily, but the same can be said of Strikes and Gunships. That's the ship adaptability I mention.

Ah fair, didn't know that.

This is a common problem. Firstly let me say don't be discouraged - I felt exactly the same as you at one point. Even the dislike of Burst Lasers. Its just practice. Scouts are the highest skill ceiling class in the game. They require knowledge and understanding of the game as well as abilities with your buttons that long range Strikes do not require. I would suggest you watch these analysis videos from my channel which go into good detail on how to fly Scouts proficiently. Apologies for Grav's analysis being split up, that was before I figured out why I was restricted to 15min videos. Basically it comes down to positional flying, speed and efficiency. When I say speed here, I don't mean ship speed. I mean speed and efficiency that you can execute kills. Which in turn will come from positioning your ship correctly to do the most damage. As for Burst Lasers - again pretty common problem. The slow rate of fire and very short range is tricky for most people to get the hang of. The videos cover how to use it, but seriously, it is the best laser choice on a Battle Scout, bar none. Go back to it, work on it. Also read this thread - Luc's everyday tips - and pay particular attention to the tips that cover how to shoot.

On the subject of learning Damage Overcharge locations, Drakolich has covered it. We have it easy compared to the guys that actually compiled those maps. Bioware didn't even tell them there was a DO cluster. So they not only figured that out, but the locations too. For the record, I learned them while playing. All I did was have the cluster maps up at the same time. When I came across a DO, I would check that location against the cluster map. If it was on the map, bam, you just learned one spawn point. If it wasn't on the map, ignore it because its a random spawn point. Rinse and repeat. Took me about a month to get it all firm in my head. The Iokath EO cluster was a bit different. There are far more spawn points than DO clusters have, and there is three active at any one time. I had about half of them figured out using the above method, but for this one Invis took me into a custom match, and that was all it took. I had the rest learned in the space of that one custom match.

A perfect example of what I am talking about. This was a game from last night. I lost, but it was winnable. Full disclosure, this is a high kill count game. But the intention is not to brag, its to show you why I lost and what I could have done differently. I end up with a Scoreline of 34-2-4-100k. Most people are going to look at that scoreline, in a match that ended 42-50, and say, you did all you could. That's just matchmaker...... right? Wrong. This is a perfect example of the mentality I am talking about. I let my foot off the gas at the start. It looked early on like the match was going to be a walkover. So I went into cruise mode. You can visibly see the point where I start to work faster, to work harder, because I realize the match is not going the way it looked to be going. There is also one self destruct. If I had played the whole game at 100%, rather than only three quarters of it, and if I hadn't destructed, I am confident I could have snatched the win here. It would have ended up being 40 kills to do it, but that's the difference with people who can net 80% win ratios. They look at a match like this and still blame themselves for the loss. They don't accept that matchmaker and luck were not on their side. Then they correct what they saw, for the next time the same situation arises.

Alright, so in direct relation to my How to Win thread, I happen to have a perfect example of the things I talk about. This was a game from last night. I lost, but it was winnable. Full disclosure, this is a high kill count game. But the intention is not to brag, its to show you why I lost and what I could have done differently. I end up with a Scoreline of 34-2-4-100k. Most people are going to look at that scoreline, in a match that ended 42-50, and say, you did all you could. That's just matchmaker...... right? Wrong. This is a perfect example of the mentality I am talking about. I let my foot off the gas at the start. It looked early on like the match was going to be a walkover. So I went into cruise mode. You can visibly see the point where I start to work faster, to work harder, because I realize the match is not going the way it looked to be going. There is also one self destruct. If I had played the whole game at 100%, rather than only three quarters of it, and if I hadn't destructed, I am confident I could have snatched the win here. It would have ended up being 40 kills to do it, but that's the difference with people who can net 80% win ratios. They look at a match like this and still blame themselves for the loss. They don't accept that matchmaker and luck were not on their side. Then they correct what they saw, for the next time the same situation arises.

So I was having a conversation with a fellow pilot on Malgus. This is someone who I personally consider to be an Ace. My metric of an Ace is someone who can fly all ship classes to equally high standards, works well under pressure, and regularly tops the board even on bad teams. But, he struggles to get a high solo win ratio. 70% or above. So I decided to make a thread about how to win. Its very difficult to cover everything, as its hard to say what makes someone able to get a 70 or even 80% solo win ratio. To that end, guys with high solo win ratios, please feel free to add anything I have missed to the comments, and I can add it to the main body. Drakolich, Sriia, I am sure you will have stuff to add... Anecdote. Some time ago I was shocked to find out that many old school Aces have solo win ratios in the in 70-80% range. So I set about learning to get better. I have now achieved that goal on all servers. These are all things I figured out or learned from someone else along the way. Please note that this is a guide for solo play, not team premade play. Step 1 - Ship Adaptability To do this you absolutely need to learn to fly Strikes, Gunships and Scouts all to an equal level. Bombers are not so important. To quote something Drakolich told me when he was coaching me, "if you are the best player on your team you should not be in a Bomber." To do this you will more often than not be the best player on your team, so forget Bombers for now. Encompassed in this first step, is the assumption that you have learned defensive flying in these three ship categories too. To put it simply, you should be difficult to kill in anything. If you feel you are stronger in one class and / or a bit weaker in another class, you are not ready for a high win ratio yet. You must feel supremely confident in all three classes, and know for a fact that you aren't kidding yourself. Don't persist with one ship if its not working for that match. Know which ship to be in to give yourself the best chance of winning. Is your Gunship being pressured too much for you to be effective? Switch to a Strike. Is the node too heavy with Bombers for a Battle Scout? Switch to an EMP Strike or EMP Scout. Does the enemy team have a Bomber / GS ball? Switch to a Gunship. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. Step 2 - Work on your Average Damage. In order to get win ratios over 70%, you will need to average 60k+ damage. This is your Av.Dmg in your game stats. Achieving 150k damage in an easy match means nothing if you can't break 75k in that close call competitive match where you are being pressured. Work on getting faster and being more efficient. Never stop thinking you can't improve. The faster you can net together damage and kills, the more chance you win. Even in Domination - just do it on nodes. Step 3 - Learn Power Up Locations. All TDM maps have Damage Overcharge clusters. These win games. Period. One DO can net a bunch of kills even in tight matches. One DO cluster spawn point is active at the most. Iokath also has an Engine Overcharge cluster. Three EO spawn points are active at once. In descending order the Iokath EO cluster is most useful for Gunships > Scouts > Strikes. Learn all these cluster maps. Also know what every power up does and how long they last. Step 4 - Work on Objectives. By this point you should already be proficient in flying a Scout within comms range of a satellite while confidently taking out enemy ships that are also on the node. So when we say "objectives" here, we are not talking about that. That is a given. Objectives in this step means you go into the match with a plan, be it Domination or TDM. In Domination your plan is to know which nodes are a priority. At Kuat that is B. At Lost shipyards its B+ whichever side node is nearest your spawn. At Denon its whatever you can get, but a fast ship to B at the start helps. Be adaptable. If you can't cap one node, try the other one. In a TDM you need to know where the first DO is. Is it going to be too risky to reach for the first one? Can you mitigate that risk if you play a different ship? If you decide against going for the first DO, can you cover off whoever does get it? Either take him out or make him waste it? Is there someone on the other side you know will hound you for the entire match? Which ship is best to handle him? What does the other team's formation look like? If they have lots of Bombers, what ship is best for this?. Speak to your team at the start. Ask for a tensor, ask for Bomber support for your Scout, ask the team to keep so and so off you so that you can maintain damage output. Again be adaptable, if the needs of the match change, be willing to change ships. You're most likely getting to be a well known big name by this point... so if your team is struggling to cap a 2nd node, can you draw the red ships off by solo attacking one of the red nodes and keeping the enemy focused on you, while your team cap another node - improvise. Do not prioritize KDR in Domination. If you staying on a node until you die means you keep that node longer, then you stay there until you die! Leaving the node because you might die is flawed thinking. Think ahead, always ask yourself how the enemy is gonna react on your next move, e.g. when i go attack C, what is happening to A and B. Step 4A - Target Selection. A sub-category of objectives. Know which target's are a priority. This is very often Bombers in both modes. Bombers on a node can turn a game, even if they are low skilled. Take them out fast. These days Dominations usually have two or more bombers, so get good at it. Next up is any target on a node. Try not to go after people off node unless you have to. In TDM bombers provide area control and safety. More often than not if a team cannot take out multiple bombers they will feed the bomber nest until they lose. Is there another Ace on the other side? Is it better to go after each other for the whole match or farm each other's teams? Neither is wrong, neither is right. Its circumstantial. Be ready to change if you made the wrong decision. Don't go on revenge hunts. This wastes time. Don't let emotions rule you. Do it only if you need to make a point to someone who won't leave you alone. I can't stress this next point enough. Work out which player is holding the other team together. Take him out. Sometimes that is an Ace. Often its a Bomber controlling an area. Or a Gunship who can snipe well if protected but can't do anything under pressure - so take out the person protecting him. Often its the best player on the other side, who probably isn't an Ace, but still gives his team confidence. By forcing him to fall back you break that team's moral and they all fall back. Teams that fall back usually lose. Sometimes its someone who is pressuring a good player and effectively taking your team mate out of the match, and hence letting the other team push forward. So go take him out so that your team mate can get to work. This happened to me recently. I was in my GS and being hounded by a slicer. I had to get very defensive because it was a close match. I asked my team to keep him off me, they did, and we turned the game around. Get an early lead, quite often done with the first DO. Usually teams are cautious at the start. If you can go in with tempered aggression and quickly take out 4-5 of them, that usually puts the momentum with your team. Step 4B - Map Awreness. Another sub-category of objectives. You may be doing really well clearing and defending the node you are on, but are you aware that your other green node has lost all of its turrets and is flashing? Can you go there? Should you go there? Which node needs you more? Are you over reaching in TDM and getting yourself into unwinnable situations? Do you tunnel on one person completely oblivious to taking damage from someone else? Do you see that mob of red blobs on the map? What is their composition? How are you going to handle it? Are you planning your attacks with an escape route in mind and timing your cooldowns? Or are you just getting aggressive? Can you peel that guy from your Gunships? Can you protect your bombers? Can you suggest a different composition to your team that will secure the win? Step 5 - Mentality. You need a never-give-up mentality. Sure there are matches where you cannot win, but at this stage that is arguably as little as 20% of matches you are playing. When you regularly turning matches around by the decisions you make, you will realize what a never-give-up mentality does combined with all these skill sets. The difference between the guy that can get 65% win ratio and the guy that can get 80%, is this. The guy who gets 80% knows that when he loses a match, there was no way to win it, period. If a match is a lost cause, a truly great pilot will still find something he can get from it. Whether its learning how a certain person flies, testing out ideas to see if they are effective, and mostly, figuring out why he lost and asking himself what he could have done differently. Step 6 - Miscellaneous Be logical about this. If you know you're going to face a premade, do you want to fly your try-hard win toon? If I think I am going to face one of the many premades on Tulak, or I see one of the known 3 stronger premades on Malgus is active, I'm not going to ruin my win ratio by playing solo against them. I did it for the 100 try-hard matchers per server experiment, because for that I had to face whatever came my way. But there's no need to do that now. Have a different toon for facing premades. Or, group up to counter them. Balance it. There is no shame in that. No one is saying you have to achieve an 80% win ratio while flying solo facing premades. Solo win ratios mean you only have to worry about machmaker. If premades are in the mix, handle them appropriately.

I don't know why I didn't put this in here. I completely blanked on how many bugs there actually are in the game. Sound bug too, totally forgot about that one.

Bypass + shield piercing + hull damage on BLC is brutal. I ran that build for a while for lulz. You can still hit stuff on turns with it. Its a jousting monster. Itsnot bad, its just not the meta choice, because arc and tracking + wingman does so much more. Pods have more in common with a lasers than they do missiles. I could definitely get behind improving their arc and tracking, so that they have more synergy with BLC. Its still a very high skill build, so its not like you nerf the game by doing this. Blaster Overcharge is like CC on the T3F. Its a good component, but the other options are better, in most applications. You tend to find a lot of people trying to get to grips with BLC use BO to start with, and then eventually switch to TT. The increased range and rate of fire are like stabilizers on a kid's bicycle when learning how to use BLC. I think it serves this purpose of "training wheels" well. QCS is perfect as is. The shield regen and cooldown are not enough to stop being killed to any large degree, it just makes you a bit more tanky. The engine regen is an absolute necessity in a game that has a multitude of slow / disabling debuffs. One counters the other. Extremely good. But its a very high skill ability. Most pilots will not appreciate its full potential. Maybe I should do a Demo video about this. I think this is the meta choice actually. Its what I use. With so many armor piercing weapons. Over charges shield is a better option than charged plating. The prevalence of low skill players forming Bomber spams, and area controlling a map, is enough of a problem as it is. If you buff Bombers any amount at all, this will get worse. These days only Aces know how to clear bomber spams. 99% of people just feed straight into them. There are a select few meta choice co-pilot abilities, the rest fall somewhere between limited usefulness and utterly pointless. A re-think would not go amiss. No quads are not a good option here. I think the only good choice for Quads is when Piledriving, but even then, Rapids are better. Don't get me wrong an Ace with Quads will still wreck, but its still not the meta choice. As for Quads on the Battle Scout, pre5.5 that was the pre-eminent jousting build. If you want to build a jousting Scout now, I think you are better off using BLC with shield piercing and hull damage, Bypass, maybe even CF, and frequency capacitor. Maybe even Blaster Overcharge.With BO and Frequency cap you can get BLC to fire very quickly and do tonnes of damage. A jousting dream. Which all nicely pertains to your first question

That's a bit like the doping scandal in cycling. That assumes we would all "dope" and then it would be fair. A lot of people still would not use them even if they were publicly made aware of the locations. I would not use them. Same reason I don't slice. I have a code of honor in how I fly. Even Drakolich commented on this back when he coached me. Saying "you might be too honourable" for certain things. I like people to know that when I beat them it was with skill, not with slicing and not with some one way textures. Everyone in my guild on Malgus is of the same mentality. So the reality would end up being that the playing field would not be fair, there would just be more people using them. The swtor community has been making fun of Bioware since day one. Don't think that would change anything.

If you want to know what too much pressure in a Gunship is, pay attention to any video where I switch out of the GS into something else. The guy coming after me at the start was using a Tier 1 Fighter with Piledriver / Protons. That's a really easy build to evade in a GS. Stay close to him and LoS. He can't do anything close up in that ship. If he engages in a turn fight he loses to a talented GS with BLC. The big problem was my team were not peeling him, and I had a Scout on me too. If that Scout had been any good I would have switched ships, because - skill being equal - Scouts beat gunships every time once they are up close. Once those two guys gave up, it was "just" a matter of good positioning and a little strafing to start dealing out some good damage. The zero deaths was helped by having a bomber nest with repairs. Otherwise there would have been at least one death to chip damage. Edit - This is why when I teach I prefer people to learn Gunships last. If they learn melee combat (turn fighting) and evasive flying in Strikes first, and Scouts second, then that transfers to Gunships naturally, and they are not an easy kill, like most GS pilots are. They will naturally know how to turn that Gunship and use laser cannons. And since sniping is the easy bit, that mostly leaves me just having to teach strafing. And once you can strafe in a GS, that will transfer back to your Strike and Scout play, and you will be doing things in Strikes and Scouts you didn't realize was possible until you flew GS. This is why people who only fly one class and one ship are missing out. Because Scouts help your Gunship play, and Gunships help your Scout play. It all interlinks. I know someone no longer needs any teaching from me, when they start talking about compound strafing in a Scout on a node.

The one potential problem is that if we publicize where these spots are, Bioware do nothing, and now everyone knows them and more people use them to "cheat." So, I have mixed feelings on it. I will speak to Invis and see what he thinks. I do lean toward wanting Bioware's confirmation they will fix them, before openly letting everyone know where they are.

You will achieve it, I am certain of it, based on what I have seen. Precisely. You fall into a category of someone with a lot of potential if you keep approaching things the way you are now. Tenacity, is the one thing that a lot of people miss. I love that you made this observation. It bodes very well.

My problem with last week's Super Serious Night was the time. As a registered recovering (in remission) Crohn's patient who had major surgery 13 months ago, its critical that I get to bed on time. As such I stop playing GSF - or whatever I am doing that evening - at 21:00 and chill out. I make sure I am in bed by 22:00. As long as I am strict about this I seem to function well, but I don't have the stamina in me yet to stay up to midnight fully focused and wide eyed gaming. That said I appreciate US players can't play too early due to work and day time commitments.

Well done! Nice numbers! Good accuracy and good damage!

Unfortunately I cannot. While I know there are several in Iokath, I only know where one of them is myself. The reason for this is that Invis showed it to me during a training session. For clarity - because Invis is not a cheater - he was showing me from the perspective of "look what Bioware won't fix!." He then proceeded to tell me there were more, within the Iokath map. He would have shown me the rest if I had asked to see them, but I didn't. We were training other things at the time, and this was just by the by. I was far more interested in the other stuff he was showing me that improved my flying. I could ask him if he's interested in helping you, but I know he doesn't play all that much right now....

Also doesn't mean that it is, until proven otherwise. All this guy is doing is flying over to those coding errors when he's being chased. Simple. You just have to know where they are. Invis has reported all of them, Bioware never replied and never did anything. Still not a hack though....

Trixx, man, really. You're talking to someone who has played 20k games, and you have the audacity to tell him he doesn't know what he's talking about. Forget exploits. We all know what the exploits are in GSF. That's been covered many times. Send me a video of someone actually using a hack.

I spoke to Invis about you being banned Stradin, and his estimation was that Bioware must have had a new employee who had never seen D-Sync before, because come on? Being banned for D-sync. Someone really didn't know what they were talking about. And I tend to agree with Invis, I don't even think Bioware are that bad. Usually. Last week I was accused of cheating. The usual "too much damage" claim. My accuser said he was going to report me. I can safely assume he did and that Bioware reviewed it, because full disclosure; I received an email from Bioware the following morning telling me that one of my characters (the toon I had been playing at the time of the accusation) was breaking Bioware's naming policy, and I was force to rename it. This is quite an old toon that has never been flagged before, until I was reported for cheating. But note, nothing happened in regards the accusation of cheating itself. Bioware no doubt looked at the accusation and my scoreline (I'm sure said person took a screen shot) and decided my accuser was a clueless noob who couldn't hit water standing on a boat and hence couldn't fathom how I can do what I do.

Some goals for you. Learn to fly Scouts, Strikes and Gunships all to an equally extremely high level. Become good enough that you regularly get accused of cheating when you aren't. Be the guy that causes people to rage quit when they see you on the other side, before the match even starts. Break 20 kills. Break 25 kills. Break 30 kills. Break 35 kills. Get accused of cheating. Break 100k damage Break 150k damage. Get accused of cheating. Have a 60% win ratio over 100 games. Have 70% win ratio over 100 games. Have an 80% win ratio over 100 games. Get accused of cheating. Learn power up locations. Get accused of cheating. Teach someone else from the ground up to fly to the same level as you do. Watch your padawan get accused of cheating. Know that if you play certain toons, you will be hard focused in the first game you play after logging in, even if you are winning. Repeat all of the above on all servers. Actively look for premades to battle while flying solo, because you need a challenge. Achieved all of this? Well done, you are now an Ace and can retire from the game knowing you maxed your potential.

I'm still going with it didn't happen in 3s. That said, lag / D-sync can cause this. If you watched the video of Stradin where he was D-synced he appeared to move from one node to the other in 2-3s in a Bomber. Iokath. Now this is legit. You did see what you think you saw. Iokath has several spots where if you know the precise location you can go through a wall, but it only works one way and you need to be extremely accurate in your flying. It's a terrain exploit just like the one-way textures on Kuat TDM. I question how much you know and understand about what's possible here, because being quite frank with you, if you had studied and understood every component in the game and how they interact with other components, knew the visual animations for them and the audio sounds too, you would know that "the map with all the junk" is Iokath. Sorry, but, you just would. So I'm just going to say this. Stradin was recently incorrectly banned for lag switching. He mentions it above. He was in his bomber and his movement was chaotic to say the least. Someone reported him and he got banned. Thankfully he had recorded that match from his perspective, and with the help of some other long standing knowledgeable pilots he got the ban over turned. So just how "easy" to spot are these lag switchers? I know that every time I see someone lagging or D-sync'ing, I see numerous comments in game about how that person is cheating. Stradin had about the worst case of this you will ever see, but he wasn't doing it deliberately and he wasn't cheating. So just how sure are you that its that easy to spot? Because from the sounds of it, you would have been convinced that Stradin was cheating, and you would have been wrong.

Hello. So this is fairly common. What I mean by that is people thinking stuff is cheating when it's not. Everything here is explainable. GSF is a complex game mode and most people pay little to no attention to the multitude of buffs and debuffs in the game. They just think, "I can't use XYZ, so someone must be using a hack." I highly doubt it was 3s. But it is possible to do it quicker than you think. I don't mean to put too finer point on it, but usually people's recollection of what happened is not accurate. Something that happened in "3s" actually took "6s" and so forth. Video evidence is always useful for stuff like this. I video every match I play. By far most get deleted. But if I see something suspicious I can review it. Sorry to say it but claiming you saw "XYZ" just won't get you any results from the devs. Too many people don't know what they are looking at. There are multiple ways this could have happened. Ramalina has highlighted two of them. I bet if you had video of this we could tell you precisely what happened. One day I am going to share my collection of screen shots where people have called me a cheater. "You do too much damage." "Your aim is impossibly good." Your Gunship is too fast." Yadda Yadda Yadda.. You get the idea. You just can't come into GSF smash buttons and compete with Ace level players. Lewis Hamilton is not cheating. Lionel Messi is not cheating. Magnus Carlsen is not cheating. Top players in GSF may not be famous like those three guys, but they are also not cheating. I would urge you to watch some of my videos - link in signature - and realize what is really possible in GSF. If I may ask, how long have you been playing GSF? One thing we can always be certain of, is these kind of posts always come from inexperienced players. Period. I am willing to help you understand the game and get better. Very willing. But there is nothing here that makes me go "oh no someone is cheating!"

Hehe. nice one I'll check that out in a bit.

Its just practice from here on out. Your brain needs to get used to things where the synapses are natural and you aren't having to think about it too much. All normal, You're getting there.