(Originally this was a reply in another thread, but it spans more than just ballistics and capacitors so it merits its own thread) I want to start off by saying that before this, I was excited for 3.23 to drop, because I wanted to get my hands on Master Modes properly on every ship, I TRULY believed it was the future. I can confidently say that I am scared to death now of never being able to go back to 3.22. It looks like whoever is responsible for master modes doesn't have a clue what they are doing. You have a fun flight model in 3.22, why are you so hellbent on reinventing the wheel? It feels like you have had interns inputting random values for everything and called it "balance". I thought Master Modes has been in the works for years? What's been going on? I get it, this is the first actual implementation of MM into the game, but WOW! This is NOT THE WAY. Cruise Mode and Hover Mode flashbacks. We have been here before lads, and no one liked being shoe-horned into different modes. Master Modes is completely un-fun, slow-paced, no-skill, no room for improvement, leaves me with no desire to want to get better at the game because what is the point, there is no more flight component to the game. Why go bounty hunting or get a crimestat for some high-risk high-reward gameplay if the meta is to overwhelm the enemy with numbers because nothing else is viable? It has been 4 years since 3.14, you could have iterated on a flight model that has worked, that could have had its (relatively minor by comparison to MM) issues solved if you had spent any amount of time coming up with solutions. If you had spent any amount of time tweaking ship stats instead of giving us the excuse of "We are working on Master Modes, there is no point." Clearly Master Modes has not been in the works for very long at all, maybe you say it has been, but we players have our doubts. How you have made SQ42 without even knowing how the game will FEEL is absolutely mental, guys. Proper scary stuff. Did it occur to no one at CIG that maybe the reason people can't keep close to one another in fights, is because you have never put tutorials into the game teaching people what throttle-control is, what distance management is, what a corkscrew is, what pre-nosing and pre-turning is, what a merge is. It is literally as simple as TEACHING people what is possible! I have seen mildly decent pilots be accused of cheating because the accuser didn't have a clue that if someone is corkscrewing and staying 1000m away, they are harder to hit! Teach us these things when we first open the game CIG, it doesn't matter if you swap to Master Modes or not, it has ALWAYS been your lack of tutorials that hinders the new player experience the most! Master Modes is convoluted asf, so you will have to have tutorials in your game anyway, there is no way around it. You claim that you want to solve the issue of people running away from fights. But have you forgotten that you've promised us PERMA-DEATH? How can you have a perma-death game where if you misstep you are punished horrifically with an inability to run away from a group of 3? Sure we can NAV mode out, but when missiles are in a place to stop that, there will be no more running. Casuals will be more screwed than they are in Live. Plenty of MMOs have died because the meta was one that rewards sheer numbers over skill. It gets boring. Very quickly. You have a working flight model RIGHT NOW in 3.22! (All these suggestions you can apply to Master Modes as well, I don't expect us to actually revert things, as nice as that would be right now) Here are some ideas of how you can make it accessible without breaking the whole game by swapping to a flight model no one appears to like when they actually have to spend hours and hours and hours with it. - Add a video reel filled with short flight mechanic tutorials to the main menu, for example, teach us what a corkscrew is, teach us how to close distance, teach us the importance of not holding W and actually watching our speed relative to the target, teach us that in order to hit a very evasive pilot, we need to watch their ship and aim where they WILL be, not where the pip tells us to. Teach people that it's pointless shooting at small corkscrewing targets 1000m+ away, that they should close distance instead. Teach people how to pre-turn, pre-nose, teach people how to MERGE! Merging is SO FUN! - Ballistics should have significantly higher total ammo pools, with an internal magazine that needs, let's say 30 seconds or so, to reload. For example, if you gave the AD4Bs 8000 rounds total ammo pool, but only allowed it to have 250-500 (or whatever makes sense) rounds ready to fire between reloads, we could see an adequate drawback to bringing ballistics in that now the player has to manage that downtime, while still having enough ammo to keep them going without having to land at a pad after every VLRT. - An easy fix for the annoying playstyle of constantly resetting fights to get shields up is to give ships more Hull HP and less Shield HP. This rewards pilots for doing damage because they are actually progressing towards the destruction of the enemy's ship and/or components/sub-systems instead of feeling as though they are wasting their time getting shields down only to see them fill right the way back up leading to endless, drawn out fights. This would also give us the fantasy of seeing our ships more battle-worn after a good fight. - Running away is annoying. But is it really a bad thing that people can disengage from fights? Let's explore that. Again it comes back to my point on perma-death. I will give an example! The other day I headed over to Jump Town. It was being held by 5 people, 2 of them in F8s, 1 Inferno, 2 Hornet Mk2s. I couldn't fight them because all I was in was an Arrow, but at the very least I could fly in such a way that I had an opportunity to get away. They could argue that me running away is annoying, but from my perspective I was glad to be out of there with my life, I was outnumbered. At the end of the day, they still win. They control Jump Town. That's the secret to getting people to commit to fights guys, give us meaningful objectives to fight over. Give us things to do that make us WANT to commit fully to a fight. And if I take a beating and decide to run away, there should be a bit more downtime between me having to repair my ship and being right back there at Jump Town within minutes. Finding this flow to gameplay where people can chase someone off and not feel robbed of a kill, but instead still feel that they have won because they've got control of whatever they're fighting over. With Master Modes, there will be no opportunity for people to arrive somewhere, see they are outmatched and leave. Because the instant the enemy can missile lock you while you are in NAV Mode, you are dead. You cannot leave like you can in 3.22, and this will punish casual players the most, because they are the ones who need the choice to stay or leave the most. They are the group who can't fight their way out of every engagement. You have thrown the baby out with the bath water. You've killed a fun, engaging flight experience to get rid of jousting? Really? Thanks to Master Modes, we have wiggling now worse than ever, jousting is just as bad if someone wants to joust with you, and heavy fighters handle more poorly than some exploration-focused multi-crew ships. The Redeemer flies worse than the Hammerhead. Afterburner/Boost in Master Modes feels disgusting, it's so jarring having essentially two different top speeds, and having to feather the afterburner key in order to cheese the system and maintain that high speed for longer. All the weapons as well - who in their right mind figured that hit-scan cannons and railguns could ever be fun? Why are the ammo counts on ballistics so low? Why have you butchered the capacitors? Do any of the devs actually play the game? Do you ever look at the leaderboards and contact your top 50 pilots for feedback? Games fail when they don't take feedback from the people who know their ins and outs the most. I hate elitist pro-gamers, but I admit that they know what makes the game easier and harder, so ask them. Another thing, in 3.22 a Hammerhead at Jump Town is threatening and can hold it down as long as it has an escort, but if you simply gave BIG MULTICREW ships longer range on their turrets and more rounds going downrange, they would be truly dominant at holding down positions. They wouldn't get kited by a single gladius. That's what they're for after all, not chasing down fighters, but keeping them away from whatever it is that the Hammerhead was pulled to protect in the first place. I see many Orgs in the current flight model staying close to their Hammerhead with all their fighters and by staying together as a unit like that, they are a formidable force. The Live flight model encourages group play very well CIG, but you never showcase this, or the theory behind any of this to your new players in the form of short tutorial videos in a visible place on the Main Menu, and therefore they never get to the point of enjoying combat. It will be the exact same with Master Modes, except with an onslaught of new, far worse issues, without fixing enough of the old flight model's issues to be worthwhile. AND PRECISION MODE IS ABSOLUTE RUBBISH! Why should I even bother to aim anymore?! Remove it and just give people a 2.5x zoom function, for the love of Chris. None of this auto-aim nonsense. You want to bring combat closer together, so why are you encouraging sniping? Huge contradiction. Stop it. Stop this madness at once, please. It's time to start listening to your player base. We love you CIG and we want a fun game, that's all. But this just ain't it. Sorry for coming off as frustrated, but this is proper frustrating stuff. 1 step forward and 4 steps back for Star Citizen, again.