Quote:In 4.85 I think the engine now favours co-operative play - that is to say, organised and eclectic fleets that work together.
But unfortunately we still have a server player limit, which drastically reduces the ability of any faction to form large enough groups to cover each other's weaknesses. As has been said hundreds of times over the past week, escorts may seem like the perfect solution, but it's an unrealistic one, because 90% of the players on this server are flying completely solo 90% of the time, and when they do have allies with them, they're either not in the right type of ship, not in the same area of space, or the number of allies are too low to matter.
Another issue is missions, not everyone wants to do missions, but some people do still need to rep up or make money from missions. However, with this whole "NPCS should be just as powerful as players!" philosophy that has suddenly weasled it's way into the developers brains, it generally ends up taking a fleet of fighters, bombers, and caps just to finish even the low end missions.
It's not fun doing a 400k mission, having 4 BHG destroyers show up, and getting owned just because you didnt want to split that measly amount of money with another player, or just because no other players are around to help. Missions should be just as profitable for players as trading or mining or smuggling, not everyone wants to spend 5 hours a day trading for one hour of real fun. This was an issue in 4.84 because missions didnt give enough reward, but now it's even more of an issue because... the reward amount went unchanged, and now missions are a dozen times more difficult than they used to be.
Quote:I like the mine idea, but not as a fighterght fighter fan. The days of buzzing between two caps and watching the pilots shoot each other as they tried to aim at me would be gone.
8 mines capable of dealing enough damage to instakill a fighter. Bad idea. Plenty of people would not favour any ship having instakill power. Oh wait, except maybe bombers... oh dear, what have I said...
Never said they would instakill anything =P If the target's shields were down, they would instakill any fighter with less than 10k hull strength, but most VHF's have 12k+ -before- armor, and most bombers have 15-20k before armor. Considering nearly everyone uses a mk8 armor uprade, it'd take around 5-10 of these mine explosions to destroy a single bomber, but they would do enough burst damage that the bomber would definitely crap himself if he gets too close to the ship.