Current master modes tuning heavily favors high dps and high hp due to an inability to truly be evasive. 3rd partying is so easily effective that the gameplay loop of combat will become largely a numbers game, where the player or team that has higher numbers, dps, and hp will almost guarantee a win. Here are the concerns that AVS has with MM 3.22 EPTU that hope to address this problem. We will be covering 6 main points: -Speeds -Overly defensive play styles -Power management -Boost dependency -UI -Evasion Speeds: The speeds of MM in 3.22 EPTU are too low. 250 m/s feels sluggish. The problem with such low speeds and the dependency on boost to increase that speed is that there is a slim of getting away from a fight. In team fights, there is near zero chance of survival once a primary target is called. This creates a scenario where everyone should pick ships with the most health and DPS, creating a loop of call primary target, shoot target until they die, call next target. Once you are the primary target of the enemy team, there is almost nothing that can be done in order to survive this type of engagement. Defensive play styles: Playing overly defensive, or “kiting”, can be a huge problem in the current flight model when considering a 1 on 1 engagement, and it persists in master modes. It gives the defensive player a massive edge against their opponent by forcing the aggressor to use significantly more resources and lose time on target. Master modes has addressed this problem fairly well, though the ways this can issue can be recreated have changed. By holding a constant lateral strafe direction away from the opponent, the overly defensive player is still able to gain a significant advantage. This is because the speed limits going in any lateral direction are too similar to the forward speed limit. Power Management: In duels, this creates a one dimensional fight where both opponents are “pedal to the metal”. The entire fight is spent holding the boost key down, never letting off the trigger, and power management is often not used. If neither one of the players in the duel die, then it becomes a staring contest while they wait for a small portion of their resources to come back. In a team fight, these problems are exaggerated, where a ship is full of energy at the start of a fight and within a minute they are reduced to being nearly ineffective. When a player is reduced to being ineffective for such a long time, it encourages a numbers advantage as the main way to win and no longer becomes fun for the player having to sit on the sidelines if they manage to survive. Boost Dependency: Boost is an extremely valuable resource in the current flight model, making it critical to manage otherwise you become an easy target. In master modes, we are adding the additional uses of increasing turn rate and going over SCM speeds. This creates a flight model where there is never a point at which boost should not be used. Conservation of boost for opportune moments cannot happen because the opponent can force you to use it by holding boost down themselves, gaining an edge that is very difficult to recover from. The ramp in boost, while a very welcomed feature, seems way too long which all punishes careful use of boost and encourages holding it down. This creates a problem where ships are essentially on a self destruct timer, and that timer is the boost bar. Once the ship is out of boost in master modes, there is almost nothing that can be done to be effective in a fight while also being extremely vulnerable for a very significant amount of time. This feels like we are going back to 1.3 where the running joke was to tape down the boost button and eject when it ends. UI: The targeting UI is not good. The large green spinning box is distracting and gives less information than the current UI, which shows orientation. The red and greed pip display is too small and often hard to see against backgrounds, especially for color blind players. Evasion: Cone fire is largely a welcomed addition, though it needs a little tuning. The cone is too wide, making it too easy to land shots under 1000m. Though shots at that range are largely ineffective, it can create other issues. In master modes, it is almost necessary to disengage several kilometers just to get shields back, creating a stale fight. Another issue is at closer ranges of 300m or less, the cone is so wide that some shots will miss because of the spread, creating a small element of RNG. Currently in master modes, the primary way of staying off of the opponents nose is to joust through them. This derives from the massive amount of forward acceleration and the lack of reverse acceleration to. The lack of reverse acceleration makes fighting in close range very hard to do as it is absolutely necessary to backstrafe in certain situations for a positional advantage, as well as not being able to reduce the delta of a jousting opponent. The velocity of weapons is too high. With the welcomed addition of ramp in boost, this has the downside of evasion being extremely hard to pull off, often leading to a DPS race between opponents. Largely, the lack of evasion in master modes stuffers from the problem of “too much of a good thing”. Overall, we like the direction master modes is going and see huge potential for success with good tuning and balancing. We would be happy to organize sessions to test any combination of tuning values to see what feels good, but here are some recommendations to help brainstorm ideas on how to address our concerns: Speeds: The speeds of the current flight model in Live are obviously too high, where even the top players in the game struggle to effectively and consistently merge with other high skill opponents that do not want to be engaged. Having a middle ground between the current flight model and master modes may feel better. We’d love to try out SCM speeds in the range of 400-600 m/s, while reducing the boosted SCM speeds in the forward direction to only about 10-20% higher than SCM. Defensive play styles: We think that introducing the “egg” shaped speed limits from the boosted SCM to the normal SCM speed bubble could possibly fix this issue for good, creating a more fun and balanced engagement between two players. We would be happy to test something like this and give feedback. Power Management: The low regeneration of the capacitors exponentially increases the value of boost, shields, and lasers. We think that the power management in the current flight model is our current preference as it creates a nice flow of dynamics. A possible removal or complete rework of the system may be needed, and we would be happy to test these. Boost dependency: We think that the difference in SCM speed and boosted SCM speed should reduced, which will also reduce the dependency on boost. Reverting back to the power management system of low capacitor/high recharge rate we have in live would reduce how valuable boost is with low recharge rates. We think the feature of using boost for increased turn rate should be removed, as this can create too big of an advantage without counters. Reducing the time it takes for ramp in boost to reach maximum output slightly would also help here, as well as evasion. UI: We all think the targeting UI in the current live flight model is much better than the targeting UI in master modes. We think that testing a UI system with color customization would be best. Evasion: We like the mechanic of cone fire, but we recommend trying out a reduction in spread by about 50% in order to promote better accuracy. Increasing the reverse acceleration of ships could allow for better positional fights and less jousting. Combining this recommendation with the egg shaped speed limitations applied to SCM would allow for higher reverse acceleration without running into the problem of kiting. We think that with the lower speeds, boost ramp in, and cone fire, lowering the weapons velocity could allow for more evasion and creativity in fights while also bringing fights closer range. MarkyMark2145 - Avenger Squadron @YogiKlatt-CIG