Shout out to (mostly in order from my friends list) Rhint Kaven Kantherian Lixalia Arvokai Baelyn-tiel Jakkaru Sylio Ol'Doc Kamie Rylee-Rose Smolder Zigfreud Brunnhilde Ellscari Ran'som Patrician Goldenstar/Windstorme/and all those other alts Ded'i Jon-ik Daphnii Siddain (just ... try and keep it chill, ok?) Vothil Zojata Large Crazyeights Miraluna Phil Tolgid Draec Jai-din Ar-phanad Obhrim Irialle Kaylee'jade Katbrona Kimberly Reinhold Zakaros Rapid-phyre Meetr'ika Klank ("Big Bird to B") Mattisack Dasum Numa'rar Archarlins (may you always triumph over evil) Uix Ruiji Pitiful Arca Torvalo Bexley (without a doubt the best pilot I've ever flown against, and fun in flashpoints too) and, last but nowhere near least, Rainous, who taught me in the space of exactly one match why gunships need focusing and how to do it. Thanks. The game was fun with you all in it.

He just spent five pages or so telling me I'm crazy and that I can't possibly have done things that I have actually done. If he wants to revisit that whole post, I'm game. If the idea is to convince me that I don't have anything to learn from him, that post was a good way to do it. This seems to be the key right here. You guys think I'm not giving you credit you're owed. Which, to be blunt, is your problem. If you know you're the hot stuff, it absolutely doesn't matter if someone less skilled isn't impressed. Just blow him up and go on your merry way. Either he'll change his mind or he'll keep blowing up. Or, y'know, neither. I have seen you all in action. I stand by what I said. Nothing I've seen any of you do is out of the same order of magnitude as the other particularly good pilots I've seen. It blows my mind that this is a claim that upsets you! - "hey guys, they're pretty good, but they're not so good you can't learn to handle them." THIS is belittling and insulting? If you really think that, then that is a problem you're going to have to work through. If you object to my bringing up Scrab, I can only say that being good in just one ship isn't (in my eyes) any sort of disqualification for truly exceptional skill, and he's done things I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't seen them. What makes it difficult to handle you is that an attack on one immediately has the others supporting their friend, and yes you do that very well. It's not belittling to say so and it's not unnecessary: I am convinced it's the key to getting people on this server to be able to handle you on a regular basis. If pubside does get to the point of having equally good teamwork and/or is able to negate yours and you're still stomping all over them? Then I'll have reason to reconsider. Until then, this is all monumental overreaction to a completely neutral and possibly mistaken observation ... and is completely divergent from the main point I was trying to make, which is that it IS possible to beat non-strikes with strikes as that's what I've been setting myself to prove since GSF launched, that the "need" to switch out of a strike is largely in people's heads, and if Verain wants to actually discuss that claim, as I said I'm game. Rhodogast / Kelril

Calm down, dude. Stop being so hyper-aggressive or hyper-defensive or whatever it is you're doing. I know it was Gunsheep's post. That's why it says right there that I'm quoting phoenixjon. What I meant was simply that in scanning the replies I got focused on everything you were saying and didn't read his carefully until after. Stop always assuming the worst of people. It's really kind of funny that all I said was "the Bastion group isn't impossibly superior", with the goal of motivating TEH pilots to actually try to get better and beat you, and your response is this frothing rage.

I missed this in Verain's wall'o'text. You have NEVER seen this because it has NEVER happened. The last match I ragequit was back in February or so and it was Obhrim's and Lixalia's doing. I have NEVER quit out of a match against you guys, specifically for the reasons you cite. It is entirely possible that you have seen me leave one or two matches against you. About 1 in 20 matches, SWTOR will crash to desktop about 1 minute into a GSF match. This has been happening since GSF launched for me and customer service has been giving me the runaround ever since. But that's one or two matches at most, not the repeated times you're pretending. For you to claim otherwise is a dam ned lie, and I don't know why you'd do that. Rhodogast / Kelril

Same names. In levelling up in regular (ground) missions there I was noticing regular lag spikes between me and the server of about 100-1000ms, at least once a minute, at any/all hours of the day, consistently the whole time I was connected to the server. GSF is going to be unplayable under those conditions, so I stopped wasting my time. As for the rest of it, I'm content to let what I said above stand. e: 2180 total battles, 1018 of them in strikes.

There is this assumption all through the past page or so of posts that if a strike is confronted with a non-strike, the strike pilot will derive an absolute undeniable advantage from switching ships. This is bullcrap. Verain's blandishments about firepower notwithstanding, it is entirely possible to suppress a gunship with a strike - I've gone after Aimbot often enough, successful and not, to be confident in my own mind of that. I'm pretty sure it's equally possible to suppress a team of gunships with a team of strikes. I'll grant you that it might take a higher baseline level of coordination on the part of the strikes, but once that's met there's not much the gunships can do. As for "bad" flashfires, it's downright EASIER to kill them in a strike than in most anything else. If you want to make strike night a thing, if you think it's worth doing, fly a strike, learn how to fly it better, and stop yourself from running to your comfort zone every time things get iffy. Losing a match isn't such a bad thing, and you won't stop losing if you don't learn what's causing it. The reason the Bastion group win all their matches is not because they, as individual pilots, do impossibly superior things with the ships they fly. They're good but not that good; the only pilot in GSF who is that good is Scrab. It is not because they fly ships that are inherently overpowered. (Inherently easier to fly, sure; but not overpowered.) The Bastion group win all their matches because they fly and fight as a team, and they do that better than anybody else on this server - they do it in a way that hardly anybody else on this server even tries, the Pylan/Aimbot pairing being the one notable exception. When they're up against veteran pilots, it's not the particular ships they're flying, it's that they maximize their advantages and their opponents don't. That's not something to complain about, or to go running to mommy gunship for. It's a reason to learn to fly better. A well-flown T1 strike can hunt, suppress, and kill any T2 scout you care to name. A well-flown T2 strike can hunt, suppress, and kill any gunship or bomber you care to name (with the one exception of a sat-hugging bomber, in which case a wingman will be very helpful). Either of those can also do decently well against near everything else. A team of such strikes can handle a team of lolwtfpwn ships. Yes, even when YOU, reading this, are the one flying the strike - IF you and your teammates know what you are doing. It's a question of practice. I was giving myself a couple months' break from the game but now y'all are making me want to cut that short. In the meantime, here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=7527484 Rhodogast / Kelril

(2nd in an irregular series that began with http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=741051 ) This works best when flying a T1 strike, set up with heavies / ions / clusters / retros, customized for maximum turn rate. Also I use the DOT upgrade on clusters, so I can spam them as often as I like; I use them for shield suppression rather than raw damage, and rely on heavies for the kill, but that's open to pilot preference. 1) Sting or Flashfire or something similar decides you're prey, comes zooming in, probably starts blasting. If you can, get a cluster and maybe a few ion shots off on him as he approaches; once he's within 3k, jink and boost to dodge past him. 2) He's turning to get behind you. Turn a bit yourself, boost hard unexpectedly to get some distance, then hit the brakes and turn towards him. 3) He's reacting to your move, setting up to close the distance to you again. Probably just as you'll be getting him into the middle of your targeting reticle is when he'll boost a bit and zoom right up close to you. So what you do, as soon as he's close to the center of your reticle, hit the retros, while blasting with ions and locking and firing a cluster. His shields are now gone, maybe some hull damage. (Right here is where you are going to hit a rock if you're not careful. Situational awareness in setting up the retro move is key.) 4) He's now pretty far in front of you, you've gained several seconds from the additional distance the retro move gave you, and you're pretty much out of his range. Swap to heavies and pound him a bit. It only takes a few hits to pop him. His lateral motion across your field of view is slower the farther away he is, so keep your brakes on until/unless he gets close again. 5) Repeat as needed. Some comments on things to expect 1) Between your ion hits and the fact that you're making him constantly chase you (especially with the retro move) you can make him use up his engine power a lot faster than he might expect. If you're good with the ion hits both in initial approach and after the escape-and-turn, you might actually manage to leave him dead in the water for your heavies. This probably won't happen with the really good pilots, but against anybody who's in a battle scout because they think it's easy kills, it's a really nasty surprise. 2) You can keep firing ions and locking/firing your cluster right through the retro maneuver. Do so. It's only at the tail end of the maneuver that you'll have been moved out of range for them. (Range upgrades and range capacitor help prevent that from becoming any sort of problem.) If you in the initial approach he's coming at you head-on and you get a few good ion hits on him, you can optionally retro right then and there: he's already right in front of you, and already probably slowing down to sit next to where he thinks you'll be to blast you, which puts him in a perfect position for the heavies once you've retroed. 3) He might be expecting you to retro and be ready to boost right in on you as soon as you do. If that happens, just boost yourself forward again to get some distance and be ready to do some dodging / opportunistic potshots / jink-jousting until your retro is ready again. In the meantime it's entirely possible to kill him just with the ion/cluster combo if he's not super-careful. 4) Watch your engine power. Keep power to engines, pulse your boosts when possible instead of keeping it constant, dodge behind terrain for a second or two of not-moving when you can. If you ever run dry on engine power you're dead. Remember, he's trying to catch you, you're not trying to catch him (unless he starts running, in which case you may well have the advantage). 5) The most important thing is situational awareness; knowing where the battle scouts are and if any of them are trying to make a run on you. If two or more gang up on you, you might be in trouble; that's where a teammate might come in very handy to peel one off. (The BEST ship to target is nearly always the one that is chasing one of your teammates.) 6) As a general rule, you're trying to convert the fight from a scout-friendly "2 seconds of burst" situation to a more drawn-out strike-friendly battle of attrition. The strike will ALWAYS win such a fight if flown correctly. Blaster overcharge and concentrated fire are 1 per 40-60 second abilities; retros are 4 times per minute (and quick-charge+regen shields or directional+turbo shields are energizer bunnies that absolutely no scout can match). If you can effectively dodge the moments of high DPS, you will win. A variant on this is possible with the T2 strike also. That relies more on cluster spam to wear the target down and good jinking to dodge the burst cannons, and uses occasional barrel rolls when needed. Rhodogast / Kelril

I understand exactly what Rhint is saying and, in the context of ground PVP, I'm convinced he's completely wrong. I'm mainly a GSFer but did some ground PVP this spring - not nearly as much as GSF, but some. (Used dailies to help powerlevel a couple alts to 50 for unlocks, for example; and screwed around a little bit in the 55 bracket.) I hate, hate, hate 50-0 or 3-cap blowouts in GSF - both being on the end dishing it out or on the receiving end. It's soul-crushing for the losers, and making people miserable is not what I'm about. In ground PVP ... it just doesn't matter. Yeah, we lost, big deal, crap I gotta q again for the daily, hey I got some kills! Why the difference? I think a big part of it is that in GSF it is much much easier to lock a target down and burn them fast, before they can do anything, and have them be completely unable to respond effectively. And then they respawn and it happens again, and then again, and again. In ground PVP the net overall effect of burst and CC is, as far as I can tell, really much much less (I am totally serious about this). You can run around a lot more, you're harder to nuke. I've NEVER seen a winning team set up a camp around the losers' spawnpoint and just cut them down as they come out; in GSF that is completely doable and happens a little too often. It is nowhere near possible to kill someone in one hit in the ground fight, or even two - you have to beat on them a bit, or hit them simultaneously with several teammates. In short the need to be nice is just not present, because it's a lot harder to be nasty. Lessons from GSF are just not very applicable to the ground game. I'll also say that in the matches I've seen the imbalance wasn't so crazy as is being made out in these threads. Certainly less bad than it has been in GSF at various times. Sometimes there's a pub team that just doesn't know what it's supposed to be doing ... but I've also seen imp teams that couldn't find their asses with both hands. And sometimes an imp team that works like absolute clockwork and it feels like we're babies reaching for candy and getting our hands slapped down before we're even halfway there. From a completely casual-PVPer perspective, I really don't see it as that big of a problem; it's seemed like there were always decent chances for either side to win (assuming a lack of derp), and I've never seen anyone suggest that we should all just give up and wait for the match to timeout. Rhint, I love ya (in a manly brotherhood sort of way), I know you mean well, but before offering advice on topics like this it does help to actually have played the game system in question. Rhodogast / Kelril

There are enough of us that disagree with you that I guarantee that once people notice you doing this, you will be repeatedly focused in every single match to the point that you can not do anything, in any match, ever. And people on your team will not be stopping them from doing it. You may not realize this, but the aces on this server are all on pretty good terms with each other, even when they're shooting at each other, and nearly all of us play both factions. The worst thing about this tactic is that it is most effective against those who are newest to the game and don't understand what is going on. It is a noob-killing tactic. It is lame and it is destructive to the playerbase we are trying to build and maintain for GSF. Therefore it is out of the question. GSF is a team game. If you think you can toss off a great big "screw you" to every single other person you play the game wtih, go ahead and try, but I strongly advise you, for your own sake, don't try this. It will not end well for you. Rhodogast / Kelril

Ion railgun spam. (With the AOE upgrade in particular - it's not really worth trying without this.) Be warned that you will get a LOT of aggro. On the plus side, you don't have to worry about actually trying to kill anyone yourself.

And obviously it's got nothing to do with any of the previous half-dozen times you've sworn off GSF in whole or in part (with great fanfare), nor with the fact that you've been such a raging blowhard recently that you've been antagonizing everyone around you, to the point that I've repeatedly seen random people bringing it up in guild or ops chat and going out of their way to be nasty to any team you're on, simply because it's you. You're not known for diverting attention for newbies. You're known for berating them incessantly for being bad players - berating right through to the end of the match, berating people who just don't have experience with the game, as if that is somehow going to fix anything. I've seen you do it myself, I've had multiple people complain to me about it. You need to stop doing it and you need to stop making excuses to yourself about what the problem is and you need to stop thinking you can impose your wishful thinking on everyone around you. You're a fun guy when you're on an even keel. It has not been even recently and it's causing you to screw with other people's games for no reason except your own ego. The way you tried to justify your repeated self-destructs was just laughably hypocritical. Do you really think you have the right to deny me and others the chance to try to beat you fairly? Do you really think you have the right to rewrite the rules of the game on the fly according to your own ideas without checking whether anybody actually agrees? You need to stop. If your wife wants you to stop playing GSF, she may well have a point. Rhodogast / Kelril

Shout out to Halassia, Calanar (?), Imacca (?), and the rest of those imps queueing today between 12:30 and 1 PM - and apologies if I haven't got your names right. REST ASSURED that the next time I see you people in a match I will take very careful note. Mae'thon and I were marvelling afterwards in gsf chat about how we haven't been spanked like that in a long time - and by strikes and non-T2 scouts to boot. Halassia, I don't think I got you even once - every single time I was about to do it, your friends came in and saved the day. Excellent use of ion missiles and EMP, excellent teamwork. Rhodogast / Kelril

Drama. It does seem rather harsh to punish the character for the player's faults. But those sorts of decisions are part of what's causing the problem. I'll miss seeing the pilot name, but not the drama. Rhodogast / Kelril

My Flashfire is almost mastered. Total flight time: zero. Rhodogast / Kelril, The Ebon Hawk