Situation Back in January, in 3.22 MM, I was in a small double elim tourney with Faithful Knights (FFK) and was getting whooped, and I spent a week writing dozens of pages about potential ways to bridge the gap in skill. I synthesized strafe patterns, beat counting power management, and manual gimbal techniques, along with specifically tuned vjoy, ui, and kb settings for each ship in the game. My mission was to make a replicable playstyle that could lower the skill floor so that my best friends, who love dogfighting, could actually play the game. After I cemented this playstyle into an algorithm, I took it and practiced it and went through trying to find every Ace pilot in the game that I could, which led us to the problem. In dramatic terms, I realized I had made Frankenstein's monster and hid it from most people in hopes of time so I could find a way to end it. Problem I challenged and defeated every Ace in the game that I could find consistently, most of the time without a sweat (I have videos to validate this from the first month or so), with the exception of a couple of players whom I could not envision myself beating in a best of 3, B6Jordan and Kotobuki. If the only answer to beat manual gimbals, which artificially lowers the skill ceiling by limiting your potential of throughput dps through rof reduction, was to have the top .00% aim skills in the game and still have close matches, the skill ceiling, even I would admit was too high to justify avoiding the implications. Implications The readily apparent implications are lose-win scenarios: nerf/remove gimbals or maintain them. I would hate a nerf because it would raise the skill floor and kill a large part of my mission: I have been working to try and get my friends into the game. Maintaining them, however, I admit, would cause such a loss to the expression of incredible flight skills I have seen that that, too, is unacceptable in my mind. What Is Needed Something that both pleases those who want to express their flight skills and those who want a more accessible game. Meat and Potatoes In the last week, Bogdoggle showed me that various systems in 3.23 can make fighting gimbal not just feasible but in favor of the fixed player, for a whole bunch of various reasons that took me and others 200+ messages to distill how he was wrecking me when no one else was. We have since replicated it and are now synthesizing a systematic solution, and it's even scarier than what he was doing and, in short, though reductionistic to a gross level, to quote StTosin, the answer is to get close and stay close. My Request My mission is not to beat the top 1% but instead to get my friends who like dogfighting to play, but also don't want to because they perceive the barrier to entry skill floor to be too high. In the last week, I have seen a new skill ceiling I did not see before, and while manual gimbal can allow for ez progress towards the "soft-cap" skill celing. This is the group of some of the best pvp'rs in the verse; before calling for gimbal nerfs, please push your hardest to hit the skill ceiling once more as 3.23 goes live before once again raising the skill floor. I urge that players put on chef hats and start cooking because players that I would not have previously considered the absolute goats have figured something out that is giving them a higher win rate vs me than some of the goats in 3.22 mm. Here is how I play, and I have seen it beaten with close-range positional knife fighting without any clear advantageous counterplay to perform, so now you all can hopefully find that out. I am giving you the recipe of how I play because I would rather see my playstyle outplayed by every pvpr here and lose every 1v1 than see it maimed before I can get my friends into the game. Balance Solutions: Concession - with other size solo ships, this could be an issue with gimbal balance, but the solution is ez. As weapon size increases, give larger gimbal pucks slower rotation speed and or smaller max angles of fire (for example, the talon is the strongest light fighter, and it's gimbals are utter trash; it's an act pilot ship). You have to currently science the heck out of ships to find gimbal dead zones and set vjoy settings to suit these and fly in a way that avoids them, this theme and improving or hurting it by ships is the key not rof and the common denominator that can be iterated on patch by patch is S#’s of gimbal pucks. Future balance solution of gimbal v fixed - with weapon size gimbal balance, larger weapons can be strengthened when we want to increase the effectiveness of ace pilots and raise the skill ceiling while also not raising the skill floor and hurting the new player experience that the great new manual gimbal experience has provided. BOTH player bases, those wanting a lower skill floor and easier reach soft cap, and those wanting a higher skill ceiling, can have a win-win. TLDR; Situation I was bad I found a system in MM that included gimbals to make the game more approachable for my friends who love dogfighting but find the entry skill floor too daunting. Accidentally, I started playing a style I beat a TON of people who are considered the top 1% of Ace pilots Problem The big issue I stumbled upon was that using manual gimbals lowers the game's overall skill ceiling, making high-level competition less challenging. I recently encountered effective counter-strategies focusing on close-range combat at the end of 3.22 and 3.23, which seems to balance out the gameplay. The counterplay looks and feels fantastic to fly. Solution My main goal isn't to win fights against the top 1%; I want to help my friends and other new players enjoy the game. I suggest tweaking the gimbal puck rotation speed and max angle of fire based on the gimbal puck size to keep a balanced skill gradient between newbies and veterans. I’m urging the community to experiment with these new strategies to find a fair balance before any drastic changes are made to the game mechanics. Let the community cook.