Before 3.14, we had meaningful component and weapon stats. The weapon differences were miles above what we have today. Components such as shields had a lot of gameplay were you could customize your ship in a meaningful way and to your liking, and it made a large impact on gameplay. Yes, it was not perfect, and there were some OP outliers that should have been fixed (FR-76 and C-788 comes to mind). We had meaningful shields stats that seperated ships into categories, so large ships were not so easily defeated and required multiple smaller fighters to e.g. overcome regen rates. After 3.14 shields were so ineffective that a lot of shield inflation was necessary (e.g. Connie had 2x size 2 shields prior to 3.14 for those that no longer remembers). Along also came the non-sensical changes to shield ballistic penetration that totally ruins balance between energy weapons and ballistics weapons, and goes against any logic of shields protecting against physical objects. This is totally and utterly backwards. Energy weapons should primarily be effective against shields, ballistics against armor (once the shield is down). It also necessitated a large inflation of hull HP making everything bullet sponges. It negatively affected gameplay and player participation too. Nobody likes to take damage, and with weak shield/strong hull, most players preferred to run when the shields went down (leading to run, regen, run, regen jousting). Prior to 3.14, most players would stay in a fight until shields went down, which would take a lot longer, and at that point, running was more difficult because most ships had a lot less hull HP. And for the major offender introduced with 3.14: Capacitor "gameplay": This introduced the rythmic/braindead switching that was pure motor skills or macros (or "creative keybinds" as some liked to call it). This is single handedly resposible for a large drop of players engaging with combat. It increased the skill floor, not because it was difficult, but because it required a fair amount of practice to get the motor skills right for new players (or knowledge how to set up an effective macro). And because of the design of the system it was mandatory to use. A new player that had not yet learned the rythm would simply get destroyed. "Tri-cording": "Tri-cording" has always been in the game. Did anyone at CIG ever stop to contemplate why it didn't become a problem until 3.14? Or why there were zero complaints about "tri-cording" prior to 3.14? Find me a thread on Spectrum complaining about tri-cording from 2021, I'm waiting. Obviously, you massively increased the strafe accelerations in 3.14. This is what leads to "tri-cording" issues. You combine extremly powerful strafes with forward thrust and you get a much too large combined output. I wrote a dedicated post about this issue, and I will spare myself having to retype that again: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/4/thread/removing-excess-tri-cording-g-s-was-a-big-mistake- The assymetric up/down strafes further exacerbated the issue. Because now players had powerful side and upstrafe to combine with thrust. Prior to these not-so-well-considered changes, combined inputs just didn't make that much of a difference to the total vector to be an issue, mandatory, or even a strategy in fights. Anyway... going back to 3.14 would not be a good idea, because 3.14 sucked too. We should to go back to 3.10 and work from there!