During the Subscriber's Town Hall interview I physically cringed while they talked about controller balance. They are basically telling us to go and play HOMAS. "The best of both worlds." Jared said: Mouse control may be better for novices, for people who are just coming to StarCitizen, .... Uhm....... you have not played against Malagos or someone equally skilled with mouse aim so far, have you? Sure, the gun size DPS difference is a big thing, but gimbal IM aim is not just something used by novices. Then Jared said: but you look at the leaderboards: look at the number of M&K players and the number of joystick and HOTAS players... Leaderboards? The few things we can tell from the leaderboards are unreliable at best. You should know that. We have people who mostly use missiles in the top 50. We have people like me who tried HOMAS play and would be more effective with it, but CHOSE to play dual stick because it is more fun.... and I was hoping for gimbals to not be so effective as it has been - in the long run. The leaderboards at this point can say anything. Either way. So basically nothing. Jared also said this: A skilled player with a HOTAS can out-fly a mouse player any day of the week. Dear Jared, the problem with mouse+gimbal+IM is that the extremely responsive, direct aim negates any maneuvering done by the target, no matter how good. All the fancy flying the stick user does against a mouse-aimer, makes his own aim a lot worse than that of the mouse aimer. Even with very strong fixed guns and the DPS advantage the gimbals simply force a aim-based fast DPS delivery instead of flight-based gameplay. That is the main Problem for me, not the winning or losing against gimbal players. AND: With HOMAS I count as a mouse player - and I can fly perfectly fine using stick+mouse. I have also seen players fly pretty well even with keyboard. (Especially in open space where total precision in combat is not so very important) Yea, they say that they are working on the controller balance and yes, I agree that mouse will always be better at aiming and yes, a stick will always be better at maneuvering control than a keyboard .... but I just don't feel from this interview that they actually.... well... played enough AC matches. What I mostly hear from this Q&A is that IM is gonna stay - and that would be fine, if they would simply say more clearly that they do recognize the problems with it and want to address them...... but as you read above and can hear in the video yourself: They do not seem to. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The WORST part is that they make it sound like a controller problem! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is NOT a controller problem. It is a problem about how gimbals can be used, no matter by what input device. If sticks could use gimbals as effectively as the mouse can right now, sticks would be a problem. If eyetracking could use gimbals as mouse can now, that would be a problem. The problem is that gimbals can react faster than any ship can maneuver evasively. The DPS difference between gun sizes makes fixed guns slightly more deadly - which still requires a DPS race which is very much only focussed on aiming and neglecting flight & maneuvering too much. In addition to that, the gap between gun sizes is forced to be huge to make this difference really count, which is rather sad in terms of variety options for guns from a gamedesign point of view. If the DPS gap is too big, gimbals are useless due to the low DPS and it would even then STILL be more of a DPS race than it should be. If the DPS gap is too small gimbals would be the only way to be competitive. And I really don't see how there can be a sweet spot in terms of the DPS gap. Not unless the top and bottom gun damage rates of certain gun sizes are very restricted. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- One more thing I would like to add: When bigger ships come along and turrets can be slaved and used like gimbals (as stated in the Hurricane Q&A) then the size reduction will be worthless when encountering ships that are bigger. Then the only advantage a small ship has is its maneuverability, because it does not matter if a small ship gets hit by eight S3 guns or eight S2 guns. Both is more than enough to kill it really fast. If in one second by fixed guns or two by gimbals... meh. Same difference. When a ship is big it has slower turn rates and such. Good, ok. But with fixed guns on all ships a player in a smaller and more agile ship (relative to the bigger one) can rely on the speed and agility advantage to at least put up a good fight. If the bigger ship has gimbals though, that advantage is nullified. It makes the slower turn rates and such of the bigger ships basically irrelevant, because it is easy enough to get the other ship into view often enough. Simply put: The gimbal sizing system is broken when looking at it on a larger ship size scale because it takes out the entire balancing of movement and rotation speed. https://youtu.be/Cm8EpvHeRZc?t=28m17s