Eight months ago, Bombers were slightly different animals. They were tough to kill, required no dogfighting in order to excel with, could sit on a satellite and fart out as many kills as they wanted, whether they could see their foes or not. They were new. They were shiny. Everybody wanted to see what the fuss was about, and everyone insisted they had broken GSF completely. Now. Present day. The shine's off. Pilots have gotten wiser. Bombers may not be peoples' favorite part of the GSF meta, but it's one that can be overcome. Make no mistake, I think this was a majorly jerk move and it's a reminder of why I don't appreciate this particular group of pilots. But I also think that these days, pilots may be in a better position to handle it if something like this were fielded against them. I still think the VOIP Double Bomberball would win the match, but their losses might be more serious if today's pilots could field today's anti-Bomber tactics against them. This is not an invitation to reprise this event.

8) Deliberately hiding our keys and asking us to go to the grocery store because if you don't get tampons in the next five minutes, it's not going to be pretty. Start slowly ratcheting up a simulated whining discomfort as we scramble to find said hidden keys. 9) Blaster Overcharge, In Your Sights/Concentrated Fire/Wingman and a well-placed Burst Laser Cannon shot. 10) Waking up before we do, and gently taping bubble wrap to the bottom of the toilet seat, then waiting for us to head to the can in a bleary morning haze and filming the results on your phone. 11) Approaching a Gunship with a slight lateral drift instead of taking the direct A-to-B route. It confounds Railgun shots.

Two thumbs way, way up here!

Kin, I don't know if the end-all answer, either, is for Repside to start pulling punches. A lot do, although, to be fair, I don't know if me rolling out my T3 Gunship as opposed to my T1 is making it any easier for anyone flying against me. What I'm trying to do is see if I can't get folks from the Repside GSF channel to put their mains down for a month or two, fly exclusively Imperial, queue with new players and be social with them, and help Eclipse talk up GSF and get people interested. I've already gotten some soft commitments from a few players. We'll see how it goes.

I actually share the sentiment, I recognize that it's not fair to you, and I'm at a loss to explain it myself.

Believe me, I'm not blaming anybody for anything. I think Ebon Hawk may reaching a point, though, where a very serious effort needs to be made to help build things up in order to make things more fun and competitive for everyone, as opposed to doing what we've been doing, fielding our best pilots and then telling them to pull punches.

Drako, Verain, while I do appreciate you migrating on over to help us keep Repside humble, I don't know if sticking your head in, blowing some of us away and wandering off is the best thing to help Impside right now. Believe me, the Repside GSF channel has been sitting down and having a long conversation about this for at least the last hour. The problem isn't that Repside's getting too big for its britches. Okay, let's use an exercise to agree on terminology before we proceed here. GSF has pretty much always had a stratification of pilots, usually according to ability (more than ship mastery, though that does contribute). On the top, you've got, let's call them, 'Rogue-grade' pilots. These are server aces, or ronin GSFers who hop from server to server, the cream of the crop, the really deadly pilots. On the bottom, we've got noobs. Two-shippers, maybe F2P accounts just sticking their heads in for the first time who don't know a missile break from their own butts. And then in the middle, you've got, again, let's be nerdy and call them 'Wraith-grade' pilots. Pilots who aren't the best, but can still churn out a decent performance. In terms of numbers, maybe a guy who comes out of a match with 3-5-and-3. Ebon Hawk Impside can muster Rogue-grade pilots. They've got great flyers. Some of the deadliest people to fly, in my experience, are exclusively Imperial pilots. The problem is not that Impside can't muster good pilots; it's that when those pilots aren't on, there's nothing to fill the void. That core group of Wraith-grade pilots is missing from Ebon Hawk Impside right now, and everything else is just getting bulldozed by the Republic Rogue-grade pilots, who queue over and over and over again, because for them--for us--it's fun. This is something we've really been scratching our heads about recently. It's a problem with many facets: in one part, it's a problem with Republic Rogue-grade pilots getting too entrenched in their characters and bulldozing any up-and-coming competition. It's also a problem with Impside Rogue-grade pilots either not being online, or not contributing to helping their newer pilots. And it's also a population problem. We're in a slump right now because the kiddies are all in school, other games are showing off new and interesting things, and nobody wants to stick their heads up just to have some jerk in a Gunship who also acts on stage and posts long, convoluted posts about faction balance (...that sounds so familiar! It's like I know that guy!) blast it off. It's been suggested that we might get some people back in the period between 3.0 and when the kiddies get out for the holidays, but having a planned groundwork in place before that happens will help to retain some of those folks. What we need right now isn't a one-off shoot-'em-up to tamp a perceived 'faction imbalance' back down. What we need is a concerted effort towards building the Impside GSF community. Leveling new characters, all the while, taking new pilots under our wings and teaching them the basics of flying, communication, dogfighting tactics, game strategy, and bringing up a new crop of Wraith-grade pilots. This isn't a problem that can be solved by blasting folks into not queuing. This is going to require a bit of community-building.

*grin* 'Difficult', I said. Not 'aggravating'. Head-on! Apply directly to the Gunship! Head-on! Apply directly to the Gunship!

Needs another O-word. Then the server abbreviation can be 'Ooo'.

Oh, I know you! You were making my life real difficult the other day!

Ootch. Yeah. "Bob". I almost forgot about him... *winces*

Nem, uh, can I mention that it's very, very ironic to me, that after creating the GSF channels on both sides to begin with, you would at any point advise people (yes, of one faction only, but still!) to not use it. That just blows my mind, I would have thought that you'd have tried to stick with it despite the difficulty of trolls. Any channel's going to have troll troubles at some time or another. That I haven't seen any on the Repside GSF channel doesn't mean that they haven't occurred. But to speak of the Repside GSF channel for just a moment, that is, in fact, the primary draw for me to stay flying Repside. Most folks know that I have Imperial alts that I fly, and have even mastered ships on. But I don't fly those alts, because Impside just does not have the same sense of community as Repside. I know everyone Repside. I enjoy hanging out with everyone Repside. There are very, very few people in the channel that I would say are real jerks, or out for themselves, or are out to make other people unhappy. Most everyone has some level of skill, wants to attain some level of skill, or just have fun. Impside is a different story. And if those in the know want a condensed version of that story, here you go: The last time I flew regularly Impside was when Rainbow-dash was around. And folks will remember the vitriol that was thrown around in the Impside GSF channel in those days. I didn't enjoy it, I didn't enjoy being a part of it, I didn't enjoy being around it, and I made a conscious decision not to be. Now. If the regulars of the Impside GSF channel are willing to make an effort to be friendly, regulate the bad influences on the channel, and promote the best interest of the server as a whole (in short, what Eclipse Squadron is doing!), then I'll be happy to try and move over.

I want to give a shout-out to EVERY SINGLE PERSON on this list, after one of the closest, most fun, most incredible-finish Domination matches of my almost-a-year of flying. The story here is that my team was behind for nearly all of the match, until the "bad guys" got three-capped, not even joking, at 993, with us muttering around the six to seven hundreds. We three-capped, held, blew the bad guys out of the sky, only to have them wrest A from us, and putting the race back on again. You can see the result, and it's just one more example of what I always say: "Never stop fighting 'till the fighting's done." The best part was, it was a wargame, so all of us could laugh about it afterwards with no hard feelings. I love that my fellow Republic flyers are not only skilled enough to get a match THAT close and neither one of us ever gave up or surrendered or just said, 'Oh, it's not gonna happen', but that we're all friendly and professional enough to not take either the win or the loss as a personal indictment, either positive or negative. Nobody's ego took a hit, nobody's ego took off. Just another match.

Don't jinx it, luv. I want to give a special shout-out to a few Scout pilots that have really made it their business to get in my face and shut me down over the past couple days. You guys are doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing in order to keep me out of the game and give your team a good chance at winning. Specifically, Kresta, Stiletto, Briellyn, Gwendolyn, and Scherieke. You guys have cost me a lot of time I could otherwise be using to slaughter you.

Flew against you today. Silly Ded'i can't keep away. Oh, thank you! Really, this makes me smile. The time in particular, I think Ren, Pylan and I were grouped up together and chatting over Mumble. I mean, it's really tough to get one over on us when we're all grouped together; throw voice into the mix, and it's a lot more difficult. But I really appreciate being told that I'm tough to kill, thank you! That, I think, is the real sign of a good Gunship pilot. If a Gunship can get big damage and lots of kills, it's not necessarily because they're skilled, but because their targets keep giving them opportunities. No, a good Gunship pilot displays his or her real skill when they're forced to try and survive. Having good backup helps, though, and I'm glad I can always count on my GSF friends. I wanna give a couple shout-outs to some friends: Rahima, Lija, Kantherian, Jai-din, Thorvalder, Onyarra and, as always, Sookat and Sriia. Thank you for making it fun to fly with y'all. And I also wanna give a couple shout-outs to the bad, bad Impside peoples: Echol'ya, Drevar (Doctor Dre!), Layecc (for sheer persistence!), Kalphitis, Yaegren, and an extra-special welcome-back shout to Mae-thon and Kami. Haven't seen you guys in forever!