The vast majority of player skill right now is mastery over the aiming system. The nose of your own ship is less predictable than the maneuvers the enemy makes. Aiming is incredibly difficult, but hitting the target is trivial. It feels like fighting your own ship more than an opponent. It should be easy and comfortable to aim the nose and control the ship. You shouldn’t have to grind for dozens of hours just to feel comfortable aiming. Understanding enemy movement and gaining an advantage through maneuvering should be the primary focus. The aiming system should just feel like an extension of yourself. Because there’s little to no evasion and no positional advantage, the only thing that matters is how much you’re on pip. It’s all about how well you can micro-aim the nose of the ship at pip and stay as close to 100% effective as possible. And it’s not even the enemy’s maneuvers that generally force you to miss, it’s your own. You have to become a metaphorical turret to eliminate your nose wobble and aim as perfectly as possible. If you ever move aggressively, you’ll lose your own nose and just miss (resulting in a bad trade against a player who just sits there and shoots you). If I had to compare the skill in Master Modes to anything, I’d compare it to memorizing recoil patterns in an FPS. Right now, aiming is hard and hitting is easy. We need aiming itself to be comfortable, but landing shots on a target to be difficult.