5.2.0.9

[Oggdo Bogdo]

This argument that "it makes things easier for bad players to aim" isn't a valid one.

What makes it not valid? I wouldn't exactly say I'm bad, but I'm no 'ace' either. On a good day I'm above average. These changes to me really bridge the gap and make PvP feel a lot less hopeless. I don't want to be forced to play missiles if it's my only option for dealing meaningful DPS.

Because there are simpler and more precise ways to go about it than to overhaul the entire feel of snubs. It's hard to think of a more extreme solution than to edit the most important stat of every snub in the game by 33%. Everything you do, whether it's EK, turning, strafing, reversing, thrusting will be affected in some way by mass.

Missiles are not the only solution. Class 1 guns are not the only solution. Mass is certainly not a solution when it is this drastic. There's plenty of creative ways to introduce things that are fun instead of slowing the pace of the game down and changing the vanilla-ish feel of snubs. We've had maxims before, corona railguns, scatterguns and other weapons that were phased out of the game. You can't possibly be telling me that mass is the only viable solution to fixing the skill gap.

At what point do we stop and say the skill gap isn't an issue that overrides everything else? Strafing was brought up as an issue because of balance problems with slow VHFs and newbies getting outturned immediately and bludgeoned to death because they can't strafe out of the way. Did this fix that? It penalizes you more heavily for vector switching compared to pre-patch, which means you either eat more shots playing the same way as before or take your chances going in a circle which is what the other player wants you to do.

I'd rather draw the line here before we take the current stance to the extreme and decide to just delete strafing since it provides non-zero skill expression.

My counterpoint to this is that grinding in conn for hours in duels is just simply not fun. And I think most people can also agree with that. Duels outside of conn is unrealistic. In my time back I've only had a single one verses a gazillion group engagements.

What you find fun is irrelevant to the fact that plenty of people still do this and they are adversely affected by it. Just as there are new players adversely affected by decades of skill gap there's also players that are just starting out that keep having to readjust to complete overhauls of balance and snub feel. Whether or not duelists are the minority is not for me to say. On Saturday I was in a VC with 10 people in the PvP discord across all the skill ranges, that were all in conn dueling. There are people that enjoy it and make progress because of it. I also don't really think you can say that it's unrealistic to have duels out of conn since there are snub players that fly alone and you aren't really allowed to gank them anymore. Besides that there are also plenty of situations in group brawls where knowing how to duel helps you.

By the way, I do not fault players for thinking this change is good. It's easy to look at common use cases by grabbing pre-patch meta loadouts and say that this helps new players. But I suspect a meta shift will occur after people have done enough testing. The game already has a huge problem with broken and extremely tryhard loadouts being exploited by certain top level players. Continuously overhauling the game means these kinds of issues will never be fixed to even a reasonable degree.

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