So, you have one person saying "We are trying to avoid a Meta game", and another saying "Ship progression is a thing, we start with one and progress to another, we don't just stay with that original ship forever", but if I like flying my Gladius, shouldn't it be balanced in its class to be as unique and good as it can be or are we going with the older Freelancer game model where the first starter ship is mostly awful and it's better to immediately go to the next? Wouldn't that mean that everyone will be pooling towards one "better" future attained ship? Why not just balance all ships to be good and unique, why force progression in this way? What are the ultimate end ships if we are forcing progression? Backers should know? Is it the F7A and something like Glaive as seen in Squadron 42? Really confusing ~ Then crafting is even more confusing, so we can craft our own ships from scratch? What's the point of pledging at this point if all that people get is the "stock" variant. Will our "stock" ships be modifiable in the future or upgradable or are we locked in permanently? It sounded materials and metals greatly changed the performance of a vessel, so my crafted Gladius with special metals could be far better than my stock monetary pledge currently. Will CIG allow existing stock ships to be modifiable in some type of metallic forge so we can upgrade metals and components over time to make our existing pledged ships better? This prevents buyers remorse hard in the end. Also Jared gave the example of F8C performance by stating that it might have the aesthetic of the ship people want to fly and the role but in reality it might not be the right one for them as its intended to be quite different in its final performance (every ship has a place). But that goes counter to what CIG is actually doing, when CIG releases a ship they buff the crap out of it so people buy it with real life money, then nerf it months later, that's why people complain <---- not because of misunderstandings regarding CIG's final intention of the flight model or a misconception that players may have had regarding the ship, and that's something that's common consistent practice. Wouldn't it be better to have a live test bed first for the ship? So people can test it then if they like the performance (and CIG can do their best to tune it to a point where they are roughly certain about how it should fly), they can then buy it. This approach prevents mass confusion and uproar later. What is CIG actually doing to curb uproar instead of putting the blame on the backers? Isn't this a silly approach? Right now the ship purchases are a form of gambling, people gamble that they will be good or as originally portrayed when purchased, described and as initially released - only for the characteristics to drastically change over time. I myself am a bit of a unfortunate victim of this with the Redeemer - Hey Jared, what about my Redeemer? What is it, a drop ship, a gunship, a modular ship? At this point I recommend that on the day of the sale of any "released to flyable ship" that it be given freely to everyone to try for the duration of the sale. People should get to play with it for a while and if they like it then they can purchase it. CIG can do its best to lock in the flight mechanics to as close to final intended as possible. F8C as an example flies really differently from the original release, I feel sorry for people who own this ship even though I don't own it myself, but my point stands. What is CIG doing to mitigate this problem? Lastly, F8C "Heavy fighters are fine but get beaten by smaller and bigger ships" and "Heavy fighter are too tanky", what is going on lol... Does that mean that measures are taken to improve the flight model of heavy fighters and thus removing the need to make them so tanky? Will making them have less armor allow them to actually dog fight against smaller fighters? It seems like there is a massive disconnect with ship performance, quality of internal pilot testing and expectations! It would be good to get the best proven pilots like Avenger 1 and someone like ver9jL onboard at CIG to give constant ship feedback! F8C even with 5 times the health pool as mentioned would get crushed in current meta by Gladius (equal pilots and all). I think there needs to be far more quality testers, I'm raising my doubts regarding internal testing. My general impression of this entire video was that ship balancing was a total trainwreck and everything is up in limbo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLvVp-dEfKo&t=1249s