I've been traveling for the last ten months so my time has been very limited to play. I also have been without a HOTAS the entire time, as well, until now. (Think HOSAS + throttle + pedals, basically) I have been backing this project since the very first day, way back in 2012. I have been testing since the very first alpha. I remember the iterations, the bugs, the mistakes, the reversals, the long, long path we have taken until here, where we are now. Mistakes are to be expected. CIG has made... a few along the way. (Interactive Mode one click warrior, anyone?) Successes also have emerged... But not without CIG acknowledging their missteps, and working with the community, constructively and actively... to resolve them. What never works, however, is ignoring the problems--or worse, pretending they don't even exist. So after a bit of time this weekend, three issues really stand out that bother me like no other. 1) Master Modes - this is obvious. I've been vocal about this. But I wanted to give them a shot with my HOTAS before passing more judgement. They sucked with Mouse + Keyboard, and still suck with HOTAS, albeit combat is immensely easier (for me) with HOTAS. Despite not having to mess with cruise anymore, I still have to dial the speed limiters with a rotary, and watching the ship acceleration halt at SCM speeds because I'm not in a master mode is... well, irritating. The space braking when dropping out of Nav is also retarded. Sure, I can hold boost easy by pressing one of my toe brakes down--but this feels wrong and gamey. If players want to tard things up in combat and go fast, let 'em. I think this can be accomplished while removing trichording--if that's what the dev's really want. However, trichording is a very realistic result of multiple points of thrust contributing to acceleration. This isn't simply strafe running in Quake. More on this in a moment... 2) Green Space. Just WHAT THE F*CK, CIG? Who in their right mind thought this was a good idea. I have accumulated thousands of beautiful screenshots in the PU over the years. Green space kills all future possibilities: a) Space is vast and black. Just look up, at night, in dark sky country (somewhere out west in the USA, far from cities). You will see millions of stars. b) Distant nebulae, while sometimes slightly colored through a telescope/astronomy binoculars, are mostly a whitish blob. Those fancy photographs of them you see? They are colored by computers to enhance light outside of the visible spectrum. This is for effect. c) Distant nebulae are often hundreds--thousands of light years across. If you were inside one... the space would be... BLACK. Because the particles are spread out over vast distances. d) Distant galaxies are a dull, white blob, as well. Even our own Milky Way is fairly dull, yet beautiful, in Dark Sky Country. FYI I just spent 10 months under Dark Skies. e) Nowhere in space is space... GREEN. Or RED. Or ORANGE. Or PURPLE. Space is BLACK. Here's a thought on Green Space, CIG: The day space stops being black is when our expanding, accelerating, real physical Universe finally rounds the cosmic curve along the hypersphere or snaps back like a rubber band and crushes everything into a singularity. In other words, CIG, this ain't happening anytime soon. You get to continue to puff up, along with everyone else, like a rising gingerbread man stuffed full of too much yeast in a oven. Space is gonna keep being dark. That means this green, puke space is simply... WRONG. Get RID of it. Give us our stars back. And when you do, take things a step further and procedurally generate them like Elite Dangerous does, making a new skybox for every system you visit, based on your location in the Galaxy. If David Braben could do this in 2012, so can you in 2024, CIG. If you can't, pay him some money so he can, for us. Heaven's knows you have ENOUGH DOUGH to afford this. Get it done. 3) Helmet straps. :wink: This is a reference to the new inventory. Annoying kiosks and boxes. Whatever. This has been talked about for a while. But what's annoying is we can't take off our helmets and attach them to a belt loop or something if all we are wearing is our flight suit. Why not? Maybe I'm missing something? If we want to RP and take our helmets off in a station, we should be able to do so, like any reasonable person, without needing a backpack or stuffing them into a box. 3b) Outfit PRESETS are needed. IF we are going to be forced to suffer through this new inventory system, at least give us some convenience, instead of nothing but inconvenience. 3.23 and 3.24 have been about timesinks. You are disrespecting us by giving us timesinks for the sake of "content." Let us predefine outfits/loadouts for our characters, so all we have to do at a kiosk is click those predefined profiles and everything we need will plop out into our arms with one click, and equip. That would make things more "realistic" and be a huge quality of life enhancement for the player. Addendum: Trichording As I mentioned above, Trichording is a real phenomena. Physics supports this. And we were promised fairly realistic physics over the early years. This was a big focus for Chris. However... I realize trichording can be abused, and CIG wants to have a middle ground to keep combat fun. Reducing top speed is not how we do this. There is another solution--that can also be realistic. Consider a jet engine on a VTOL aircraft. Typically they use one engine and have multiple exhaust outlets to redirect thrust. The sum of exhaust can never exceed to the total thrust produced by the single aircraft engine. In fact, due to how physics works, the sum total can actually be less due to drag from the thrust redirection, converting some of the lost thrust into waste heat/vibration. This isn't my point, however. No matter how many outlets are engaged, the thrust cannot increase, thus no magic angular bonus acceleration can occur. The way thrusters work in Star Citizen, presently, is they are additive. They have no central core they draw from. Also, previously, forward and reverse thrust had the same value, or close to that, despite the thrust in the back of the craft having far greater visible capacity than the reverse thrusters in the front. Instead of having thrusters be additive in the ships, with their own independent values, have them pooled from the total available thrust produced from the engines. This means that... the sum total of thrusters in use can never produce more thrust than the present available output from the engine, dependent on throttle setting. In simplest terms, if you are at 100% thrust: Forward thrust engaged + Side thrusters engaged + Up (Z axis) thrusters engaged + = only 100% total thrust of the capable engine output. Not 110% Not 120% Forward thrust will be reduced to use the side thrusters and the up thrusters, keeping the value at 100%. No more boosting rate of acceleration to absurd values anymore. But that's not realistic, Blastman. Without how thrusters work in modern spacecraft, presently, no, not really, but kind of. If they are all drawing from the same bank of reactants, then use, there is a physical draw limit of the plumbing to the thrusters. Piping simply has volume throughput limits. There's no reason this couldn't exist in Star Citizen spacecraft, as well. This solves problems: No more additive thrust allowing "Quake strafe jumping" No more need to limit max speed in combat to SCM. Reverse being slower than forward, from thrusters alone, is plausible (not explained, but think reverse thrusters are smaller than forward). No more need to override decoupled spaceflight and magically slow a ship down because they flipped over and are going "backwards" If someone wants to hit 1100 meters per second in combat with shields up, fine! But they can't dump thrust into lateral thrusters to boost their rate of acceleration. There simply won't be additive output anymore that exceeds total engine thrust. And likewise, no more magic space braking when changing modes, since we won't need modes, because we've solved the problem without them. End result: less button presses, no more screwed up mining/salvaging/seat hopping nonsense because someone forgot to swap modes. The modes simply won't exist.