I feel like one of the big focuses that I'm going to push on is the feel of space combat and also the ground combat. This is a CR quote from the SQ42 vertical slice, and it was great to hear. 3.0 adds a ton of major new features, but it also leaves combat in a pretty messy state. The good news is that drastic improvements can be made without too much effort. Dialing in the feel of combat in SC is more than changing a handful of things every 6 months and hoping it works out. To get it right, we need a lab where a certain scenario can be run and tweaked over and over and under tight control. That's where Arena Commander and Star Marine come in -- because a combat scenario can be controlled and repeated exponentially faster than in the PU, AC and SM should be the experimental lab for Star Citizen combat, used to tune in feel, balance, new features, and anything else that needs to be done for the PU. But to be useful for this purpose, they need to be modified to more accurately reflect situations and incentives that players will see in the PU. Fixing AC in SC 3.0 This is the simple list, but I explain each of the points in the section below: 1. Incentivize play around team work and objectives 2. Use round-based gameplay instead of instant, limitless respawns 3. Remove incentives for farming noobies and avoiding skilled pilots 4. Consolidate AC games modes into ones with PU-esque objectives 5. Remove pick-ups and artificial factors 6. Balance teams around player ranks and ships 7. Give appropriate REC and other rewards for AC 8. Separate leaderboards by ship and focus on showing stats over ranking Objectives and Point Incentives If AC is going to be a useful testbed for the PU, its gameplay should reflect PU situations. A savvy player will not fight just to fight -- there should always be an objective. Currently, neither BR or SB have objectives -- literally the only thing that matters is points gained through damage and kills. Kill streaks are particularly important. These incentives create some pretty poor conditions: - good players ignore each other since they can't get many points that way - ganging up on new players to rack up easy points - kill stealing - ignoring ships like the M50 that are nearly impossible to kill - running out of bounds or leaving games to avoid losing points That's not what SC combat should be about. Instead of random fighting and picking on newbies, players should be fighting over something. Maybe it's protecting a ship or station. Maybe it's to survive long enough for reinforcements. Maybe it's air cover for ground forces. Whatever it is, it will put combat into the scope of the PU, which means combat under these situations can be used as tiny experiments for balancing how they play out in the PU. Just remember that how points are given matters -- they should be rewarded for playing the objective. Respawns and Pickups If you die in the PU, you're out of the fight. There will be very few conditions where waves of players simply return over and over. Because SB and BR have respawning, no one flies like their lives actually matter. To recreate the cost of dying, the AC game mode should be round-based, meaning that everyone only has one life per round (much like Counter Strike or World of Tanks). If this is too onerous, the spawn points should at least be moved far from the action and based on longer timers. Currently, pickups (ammo, fuel, missiles, and repair) exist as a fake way to add cost to consumable items. Why not just give us the real incentive? When we run tournaments for SC4, we basically have to fake this whole scenario. And from personal experience, round-based fights are not only great for testing, they are way more intense and fun. Teamwork and team balance Random Free-for-alls between 10+ people are never going to actually happen around Crusader -- you will know factions and reputations. When combined with round-based fights over objectives, you have a very realistic scenario: two opposing groups of players approaching each other at distance with intent to fight. Now, this does present a major problem with SB: team balance. Instead of just filing players into random teams, team balance should actively happen during the match itself. And the match should start only after it balances teams based on rank and ship. To tie into incentives/points, the performance of the team should be more important than the individual. Rewards I often see and hear players recommend racing as a way to quickly earn REC. None of these people want to actually race -- they just want the ability to advance in the game via earning weapons and items. The REC reward for being in AC for 20 minutes should be pretty substantial, even if that player gets their butt kicked. Additionally, the leaderboard algorithm is pretty bad. And I say that as someone that has done pretty well on every single season so far. It needs to account for more factors than just points per minute and length of the match. ATM, if I'm in a BR with no one in it, I'm going to lose points just from being unlucky. It makes no sense to rank Sabres against Auroras... each ship needs its own board. Consolidating game modes There just aren't many people playing AC. On a typically NA evening, I've been seeing 4-5 people in BR and no one in SB. At the start of 263, there were 20+ people just in SB. But the problems of AC have taken their toll, and 3.0 activity is shockingly low. The community needs to be consolidated to actually create active games. BR just needs to die... not only is it a totally artificial situation, but it's inherently unfair and unfun to have random enemies come out of nowhere. Even VS and PS seem redundant. That can easily be consolidated into a single Swarm game mode. ## Space Combat Feel Alright, just to comment on the state of combat in 3.0, ships are way too hard to hit right now. Two good Gladius pilots squaring off 1v1 are never going to kill each other. Ships manage to feel both floaty and too jerky. EMPs are also insanely overpowered. But to really hash this stuff out, we need more people in AC. And a better AC...