Missiles are a zero risk, and tedious experience for both parties involved(target and attacker). These issues can be attributed to: Lack of meaningful engagement/commitment in order to interact with the system. Increasing range of minimum lock distance Extremely far maximum lock distance Higher ship emissions across the board The current minimum lock distance for S3 missiles is 2km. This gives ~5 seconds for the missilee to press the H key. A simple and almost instant action which takes away the autonomy of the missiler. This then leads to a system that encourages flare attrition based gameplay where the missiler will stay far far away, 5km+, and fire singular missiles until the target runs out of flares. Once this happens, the missilee has lost their autonomy with no actions they can take to defend themselves other than to leave and restock flares or die via missiles. All while the missiler has done nothing but left click and maintain distance from the target. In previous patches with a lower minimum lock distance the missiler would be encouraged to get very close to the target (1.5km) and fire at the edge of min lock trying to catch the target off guard. But the missiler getting so close to their target leaves them susceptible to being interdicted or take chip damage which would force the missiler to make meaningful choices about returning to the fight or going after a different target instead. The minimum lock system being lower, as we had before, had more engagement for attackers and defenders. The attacker had to commit to a target by "diving" and intercept its vector as best as possible, time their shots as close to minimum lock as possible and attempt to get away before the target can react. The defender has more time to react if he was aware of the attacker's intentions and presence, forcing the attacker striking earlier by creating distance or pre-flaring before the strike, while also introducing vulnerability to the attacker by forcing him closer to be effective. Along with this a reduction to max lock distance to force missilers to get close to their target would give both parties the opportunity to be at risk where as in the high max lock distance system combined with very high signatures for ships means the missiler is under zero threat unless they choose to put themselves in harms way. See clip below for an example of the 1.5km min lock distance.