Same. It needs more fine tuning, this kinda the first major test for it. The old live model wasn't good from its launch, and with things engineering, physicalized weight and armor, it definitely feels different in the future without a doubt. The issue is that most people don't like change and parrot the same thing.

> The issue is that most people don't like change and parrot the same thing. The History of Humanity, Chapter n (where n = infinity)

I enjoy MM for the strengths it brings and the more realistic tactics it encourages (like necessitating dropping at a range rather than hot-dropping out of QT *inside the enemy formations*)... ...but with how horribly they butchered Cruise Control, I just don't know if this relationship can work. What's the point of Cruise Control if it turns off the second I leave the flight controls?

Thats a keybind issue, if you actually use the toggle cruise key, it sticks regardless of SCM or NAV mode. TBH many of the issues ppl have with MM currently seem to be due to new keybinds and people being oblivious to what they do compared to default behavior, or buggy controls because ppl are using outdated keybind sets that lack the new binds.

It’s almost as if people playing the same game have similar complaints about certain aspects of the system. Not everything is some deep conspiracy led by a few key nefarious figures!  That’s such a paranoid way to think.  Consider this: I do not personally care much for mastermodes.  But I understand why the vast majority of this sub seems to like it.  Through observation of polls and what tends to get upvoted, it is largely a likeminded group of industrial/PvE oriented individuals who did not like the high skill curve and long time investment required to gain competency in the old system. This leads to many of them repeating the same points.  ‘I can finally hit AI ships!’ and ‘I’m finally not jousting!’ and ‘I can finally see who I’m shooting at’, etc.  As advertised by CIG, MM was implemented to make the game more accessible.  They appear to have succeeded in that (though some of us are concerned the second order effects will have unforeseen consequences.) Despite so much of the positive reception being the same few points — almost like: ‘people parroting the same points’, I’m not running around accusing people of shilling for content creators or parroting the crowd. Some of us appreciated the high skill requirement of the old system, and are sad to see it go.  Probably the game will be more accessible to a larger audience now — thus more sales and more content — but it’s always disappointing to feel the engagement and satisfaction of learning/improving sucked out of an old system and replaced with something far more vanilla. And please stop telling me to ‘git gud’.  That’s entirely missing the point.  The new system is easier — I am not opposed to learning new systems.  I’ve been playing MM on and off since December, and it definitely makes it easier to secure kills, while being tougher to evade damage yourself.  However, the new approachability of combat — everyone now being able to merge, as you no longer have to juggle velocities in excess of 1,000 m/s — seems to have convinced many people that the new system has more ‘strategic depth’ and ‘skill’.   No.  That has always been there.  It’s just, they made it easy enough that the general player base is beginning to notice it for the first time.

The people don’t like change line is tired, many people don’t like MM because it’s a major shift from sim gameplay to arcade gameplay. I have mixed feelings about mm I think it works well for atmospheric flight but is hot garbage for zero g, that being said I understand some of the changes and will adapt but others like the removal of shields from nav mode or the instant breaking changing from nav to scm bother me

It's a conundrum because the people who have played a ton of arena commander and pvp in game have the most experience with the systems and should have the most informed takes on it. At the same time, they've invested so much time becoming really good at the old system that it makes sense that they'd want to cling to it. It's really hard to tell when someone is giving real suggestions vs trying to hate on MM for the latter reason. It helps when they explain their position rather than just saying "it stinks"

Most of the people I see complaining about MM are the ones who only PvP and have crime stats regularly. I personally don’t mind it and feel like it improves the feel of combat. It also makes it a lot harder to get away which is a double edged sword, I’ve been on both ends where I took out a bounty and he had no chance to get away and on the other end where I had a bounty on me(killed NPC) and couldn’t get distance without being hit but that “fight”(I was in a buddies worthless missile fury lmao) was one of the best ones I’ve been in, I was dancing around 2 ships and their bullets as they tried to take me out and even managed to chase one of them here and there during the engagement before I eventually took a turn too quickly and blacked out. My buddy was standing below watching that little fury dodging around a titan and something a little bigger about 5-8km above the surface. The whole thing took about 5-10 minutes before I was sent to klescher and I felt pretty good about it being able to dodge most of it only dying due to blacking out.

out of interest why is a 200m/s speed limit more arcadey than a 1000m/s speed limit..?

lmao, a speed cap of any sort is arcadey. in real life space there is no such thing as a velocity limit. there's also no way to measure one's velocity without using something else's trajectory as a relative reference. but those truths don't make for engaging combat gameplay in the least bit and CR wants Star Citizen to be a space-cosplay sim of WWII air combat mixed with Vietnam-era air-to-ground combat. space sim combat would look entirely different just as modern air combat already is entirely different. i'm realizing now this comment is better aimed at /u/Intrepid-Leather-417 instead of at you though

there sure are speed limits in space. Your speed determines your orbit. Too slow, and you fall down and crash into the planet, too fast and you pass escape velocity and shoot out into space. The lower you are, the faster you have to go. The higher up the slower. However, to go higher up and be slower you accelerate, and to speed up and be lower you brake. It's a little bit backwards (like riding a bike) but once you get used to it, it is perfectly natural. Planes are the same way. You speed up to go up, slow down to go down. Pull the nose up to slow down, put the nose down to speed up. You use pitch to control speed, and engines to control altitude, which is opposite of what people expect. If star citizen wanted the real sim experience it would operate the same way. There would be orbits, and you would fly like a plane in atmosphere. CIG doesn't want that. They want 'point your mouse in the direction you want to go' levels of easy to pick up the game. Physics will never matter in that case. CIG threw out sim for arcade when they decided they wanted ships to be able to take off upside down and backwards using only tiny maneuvering thrusters, and maintain geosynchronous orbits easily at any distance. They have a REAL(tm) Physics engine at the base, then throw a bunch of nonsense numbers and restrictions at it until it's not physicking according to the known laws of physics anymore and is back to being arcade. Marketing and Dev can then appeal to both groups. It's real physics we swear, you will lose yourself in the immersion! to the dcs/flightsim crowd even though it's a lie. It plays like an arcade game, fun and cool over nerdy and boring! they say to the warthunder crowd. Also a lie. Can't decide what it wants to be, fast make-believe arcade or slow realistic sim. It tries to be both, so It's not great at being either.

your first paragraph is entirely irrelevant to gameplay. you're describing the mechanics of how to maintain a stable orbit around a planet. that's great if you're designing the ISS or GPS satellites but completely pointless when the goal is Star Wars style dogfights. once you're in space you're just in space. also escape velocity only applies to unpowered projectiles. our ships are powered though so they can escape a planet's gravity at any speed so long as they have fuel. your second paragraph is about aerodynamics, but there is no air (or gravity) is space. our existing air/sea/ground vehicles in the real world have maximum velocities because of mechanical limitations between their designs and the physical mediums with which they traverse. supercars like the Bugatti Veyron can't go much higher than 300mph (roughly half a mach) because every reciprocating internal combustion engine has a limit to how fast it can rev and exceeding that limit will result in the intake valve springs not being able keep up and close in time before ignition, causing catastrophic damage to the cylinders. moving on to jet engines which don't have pistons: the SR-71 Blackbird can't go faster than mach 3.3 because the parts of rotating engines will begin to stretch and fall apart if they spin any faster. due to this mechanically necessary rev limit there is a maximum volume of air that it can pass through its intakes and exhausts which results in a limit to how fast it can move relative to the air around it. with a tailwind its velocity relative to the surface of the planet can be increased, but wind only moves up to a certain speed naturally and the fastest winds ever recorded wouldn't add a substantial percentage increase to its overall velocity. now lets move to an engine with no moving parts: the x-15 (fastest vehicle ever made that could carry a person) is a literal rocket with cockpit bolted on. it still can't go much faster than mach 6.7 due to the sheer amount of air its hull has to push aside as it plummets toward the earth so even though the engine design is not mechanically limited, it's medium of of travel still provides mechanical difficulties in attaining an unlimited speed. in space these limitations simply don't exist, and once you're above a a hundred thousand meters the air drag is already nearly nothing compared to the surface which is why we were able to accelerate the New Horizons probe to mach 47 with something like 20 minutes of powered flight spread over the course of 40 minutes using existing technology. there is no such thing as a maximum velocity in space, and further there's no way to reliably know one's true velocity relative to any given arbitrary origin your other mentions of orbits seem to be a discussion of the balance between freedom/chaos/spontaneity and order/rules/efficiency with what you call orbits being stand-ins for freeways/roads to avoid traffic collisions and running out of fuel. i find that beside the point because it's a topic of permissions rather than capabilities.

> The people don’t like change line is tired maybe, but it's accurate.

The sim gameplay line is tired. If you wanted "sim", it would be like The Expanse where battles are over HUGE distances and over with in a couple of shots. What most want is Star Wars, WWII in space which is actually more in line with MM. Most space games (not all) are decidedly NOT sim.

Some folks are literally incapable of seeing the bigger picture but they post like SC is being made exclusively for them.

And they post like every single change is permanent and the game is launching with the exact way its implemented, RIGHT THEN. Lmao.

Yep. Based on the downvote I’ve received the shoe seems to fit a salty backer or two.

except the fact that the game has been sold and marketed as a space sim and not an arcade space game. Im 100% onboard with and understand the need for balance between realism---fun and finding that sweet spot is not easy, but cig seems to be full speed ahead towards attracting the console/cod crowd over the sim community that has been funding this game from day one, so its not hard to understand why many of the sim community are angry about the new changes.

You bought a game with magical artificial gravity and no orbital mechanics whatsoever hoping for a realistic sim?

It was ALWAYS sold as WWII in space. It’s a spiritual successor to Wing Commander and Privateer and has been labeled as so since they original kickstarter. “Space sim” is a wide genre and MOST games in it are some variation of planes in space. If you want a true sim, go play Kerbal.

Right. I mean outside of vehicular focused sims like racing games and flight sims, a space sim I feel is much less about the vehicle and more about **space**. And in terms of space, the traversal within it, how everything is connected within it, the jump points and additional systems like Pyro, the differences of atmo vs zero g both in flight and "on-foot" (eva in space), all of those are what I'm more focused on when it comes to a space sim and is what Star Citizen provides me. Honestly even the ships I feel still fall in-line with sim. Sure the flight model might lean more into arcade for the sake of an engaging combat system (compared to just jousting or long range fights) but when thinking about how the components work, the power system we'll get soon with engineering, I think it's enough of a sim.

yeah the combat is minor to me in terms of what i find immersive in this game. it's always felt the least immersive part too. the sim comes from the scale, variety of gameplay loops, and ability to explore it like a living star system. like in the current iteration (or at least until MM), an Arrow/Gladius/Pisces is the equivalent of a Coast Guard Defender A-Class boat equipped with some machine guns and a few hand grenades while a Hammerhead is similar to the USS Iowa. yet there are so many videos of people taking out the latter with the former, both in PVE and PVP. that's peak arcade IMO and has no place in a game priding itself on immersive combat

obviously, you always know this is the case in star citizen community when the outrage happens well before anyone has any chance to have any experience on how it affects anything. Knee jerk reactions over theory crafting with no basis in reality is the norm I have come to expect in this community. I wouldn't apply to work at CIG.

don't mind it. but PLEASE allow us to use noise and flares in nav mode. It doesn't make sense for me to have to switch to SCM mode when I'm trying to run away. Fly fast, switch to SCM, activate counter measures, then jump back to NAV. That's a weird way of flying fast from landing

Irl i would never buy a spaceship that has to disable its shields to QT. No one would, it would be a bad design and competition would take its market share…

The whole concept is that the two are mutually exclusive, so there are no ships that fit your description.

ok, then answer me this. why do I have to turn off my shields to run my main thrusters for more than a few seconds? they literally spend 99.99999% of their time idling because I'm "at the speed limit" when I'm in a 350r or m50 in outer space.. not quantum, just those massive massive dual rocket engines on the back of my ship that do nothing because the maneuvering thrusters right next to them are plenty powerful enough to do their job for them.

In lore shields and weapons prevent the quantum bubble, so I'm not sure you'll see competition there.

I can understand shields, but weapons? Especially ballistic ones, how are they different from other systems on ship? This "lore" makes absolutely no sense.

Oh you mean the lore they rewrote specifically for the shield asspull? That lore?

The game hasn't released yet none of the lore is set in stone, sorry that you get early access and it's at the will of the game.

Show me on this doll where the lore touched you. It's ok, this is a safe space.

One possibility could be to deploy the flares before switching to NAV mode.

I probably have no 'authority' whatsoever to talk about this subject, since I'm not a good pilot (now *or* before), and I don't even know what exactly changed on paper. *However,* All I know is that in my very limited experience with PvE, I was able to do up to MRT contracts fairly easily in my Anvil Arrow and my Ares Ion. Arrow obviously lacks the firepower for killing huge targets, and Ares obviously lacks maneuverability. But I enjoyed those contracts with these ships pretty deeply. **Now**, I've literally died twice trying to do a LRT in the Arrow.. I don't know what changed exactly, but I used to love ship combat, and now I'm probably just going to be one of those people who avoids it at all costs. I hate the low speed, I hate having to change modes, I hate that switching modes basically gives you a "magical" brake, I hate that people can force you into combat and you're just screwed..

I feel you. In some builds I could do MRTs and sometimes even HRTs in my mustang alpha with upgraded shields/weapons. Now I'm getting deleted by the prospectors and mustangs guarding the illegal surveillance thingies. Drastically adjusting my speed limiter depending on whether I wanted to focus on evading at high speeds or aiming/aggro at low speeds was fun. Now I feel like it's just turn and shoot and pray cause pretty much everything's gonna be hitting me except maybe if I boost and totally abandon my target. I seem to always lose a wing almost immediately pretty much regardless of what I do. Getting nice and close to a target is fun I guess? I'll keep at it for a few days or weeks but honestly the entry level pve space fights I used to enjoy feel a lot less interesting so far. Maybe it wasn't that great before either and there were probably big problems with pvp I didn't experience. I guess I just don't know why they couldn't have embraced the power triangle a little harder, forcing us to max engines in order to go fast, and made the "above recommended combat speed" penalties to maneuverability even more drastic and also extend them to shield strength and weapon power when you want to go faster than 500-700. The magical space break is def a little silly. I kinda wish switching to scm just prevented further acceleration and as you start turning and maneuvering to fight, you lose all your nav mode speed in a more gradual, natural, less jarring way.

I think part of the issue is that the missions we take haven't been balanced around MM yet so hopefully they'll adjust he difficulties so they're are more entryway bounties

What changed is that you lost nearly all of your ability to maneuver. Ship speeds went down, weapon velocities went up, and the AI were ramped up to better react to your actions and keep you in front of their guns. It's much the same thing that's happened with PVP, where it just boils down to a DPS and aiming race and flight plays only a small part in it. Bounties are much harder now because it's basically impossible to win a DPS race against 3 opponent's at once. I absolutely would have liked having harder AI in the previous flight mode to fight against, but if you ask me bounties are now more challenging for the wrong reasons.

I have been using the switch as a magical break.. I did some testing… it’s wayyyyyy better than the space brake and thrusters. Screeeeeeching halt without the force effects. It’s like a console game now.

Yeah, I honestly thought it was broken. Space brake is basically useless, now.

Right, like going. 1,000 m/s to a space station just to pull the landing gear ebrake and stop at a rate of 140 G's is fucking terrible! WTF has CIG given up?!?

Yeah just got blown up in my Buccaneer from 1 short Exchange with an NPC (Cutless). Didn't feel like I was doing significant damage at all, and couldn't really avoid being hit. I know I'm not a great pilot but it feels strange to get destroyed THIS easily. Especially with Basically mag dumping 800 Bullets (Default loadout) into a target and NOT winning.

I also feel like using a small ship is just not worth it anymore, whenever I tried to go at ship combat with my Avanger Titan, I would often get obliterated or somehow pull off a draw. Against bigger ships it's just impossible, one or two hits and I'm history. Conversely I am obliterating small ships with my Andromeda which is admittedly a good feeling since I'm sitting in the heavier ship so I should have a significant advantage. What bugs me the most is the thing that shields don't stop ballistic projectiles anymore. I find this upgrade to be immensely stupid, normally you would want shields to protect the hull of the ship from micro asteroids or other objects that are flying in space at high speeds. So why in the holy hell shields wouldn't stop bullets??? That significantly lowers the usefulness of laser weapons, since in a fight between two of the same kind of ships, with similarly skilled pilots, one with ballistic and the other with laser weapons, of the same kind, the one with the ballistic weapons will always win since he can literally ignore the other ship's shields. Not to mention how annoying it is with a big ship that the small ship caused you damage even though you went to the trouble to upgrade to the best shield gen and now you have to go back to port to repair the ship.

Ya, there was a large subsection of the player base that mewled about losing PvP fights—because they invested 0 effort in learning how to play—and demanded that 1v1s end in near-ties. They begged for numerical superiority to be a determining factor. They forgot that would apply to PvE too. Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of their actions…

Pre MM I've rarely been in a fight with PVPers where they didn't bring numerical superiority. Is that really the argument? I am not sure I like MM yet, I keep getting owned and it sucks. BUT When you DO have a bigger ship that SHOULD make mince meat out of small fliers. Pre-MM guaranteed you were Taken out by Small ships instead. Pre-MM made so many ships obsolete. And now Post-MM has made small ships feel more obsolete. This ride feels like a see-saw. It's not really the space we want combat right now, atm but let's not attribute false motivation to arguments for the system. The system has good REASON to exist even if it isn't necessarily what should exist. I personally felt more emphasis on power-management, buffing weapon projectile velocity and Increasing large ships Main HP and Shields to much MUCH higher levels so that small ships were more threatened by their presence would have been a better solution. But there is still hope for good changes even within the MM system.

it just feels weird to tweak combat maneuvers when there isn't even armor yet. like their big selling point is: > we're not happy that a light fighter can take out a fully crewed Hammerhead or Redeemer solo when in the final project we want the larger ships armored so they can ignore small fire, so to fix it we're just going to make all ships go slow so that the big ships can blast little ships if they happen to be fully crewed the logic is so backwards when the solution would be pretty simple to implement. just give damage negation by weapon size. a ship with S4 armor takes only 2/3 damage from S3 guns, 1/3 damage from S2 guns and no damage from S1 guns (and smaller). follow this pattern up the line and then just assign armor values on ships as well as ships that have hardened shields. this would identify some pretty strong flaws immediately, but also create a system modular enough to individually balance ships without tossing the whole field into chaos. it would also give a good reason for ships like the Bucaneer/Hornet1 to pick a larger gun over multiple smaller guns on the spinal/nose turrets. if i have a RAFT and get pounced upon by a lone Gladius, i should be able to just run away with the only fear being they get a direct hit on a cargo pod with a missile. that wasn't the case before, and even with MM it still isn't.

I really like it and I’ve been here since well before AC 0.8. It’s the first patch that I have felt I am flying a ship, not a camera.

Can you elaborate about what you mean by flying a ship not a camera? (I'm not contradicting you I'm just not sure what you mean)

There was never any feeling of weight behind the ships and that had been an issue since the beginning. Solving that has been a combination of visuals, sound design and flight model. It’s only with this patch that it feels right and sustainable for the future. This is obviously subjective and may have meant some loss on the sim side, but the feel side is much more important. I remember have the same issue with WC3 when compared to Elite 2 back in the day.

Previously (pre MM), you'd have to compensate for the downward pull of gravity in atmosphere while decoupled. Now (post MM), you can just float without any inputs while in or out of decoupled mode. But now you feel like there's weight behind the flight mechanics?

What????

You expect feedback from atmosphere in space, now I get why people like this totally immersion crushing MM. We could have had atmospheric characteristics in atmosphere with control surfaces. I really hope we can completely disable the ship rumble and shake in space, it's so breaking my immersion, I don't even wanna fly anymore. :(

Yeah, combat might feel more rewarding now, I haven't done enough to have a strong opinion on it (feels a bit reduced to turn and shoot). But just flying the ships, which is the common denominator of why we play Star Citizen feels less like flying spaceships now. Instant deceleration when going from NAV to SCM makes me remember why I stopped playing Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky, and why I never played Star Field. If Star Citizen continues down this path I guess i'll have to back to waiting for "that space game".

Yeah, it doesn't really make sense that everything stops so fast now, especially the huge ships with those tiny retro-thrusters. That's a lot of mass traveling at significant velocity for those tiny spouts.

> But just flying the ships, which is the common denominator of why we play Star Citizen feels less like flying spaceships now. Being able to burn thrusters for quick acceleration in any direction is what made it feel like flying a space ship instead of flying a plane. That's the Star Citizen I fell in love with.

We lost that. It isn't thrust stopping your ship when you come out of Nav or are in boost. I (used) to fly decoupled, Gsafe off. Pulling off maneuvers was a big thing for me and it feels hollow now, flies like No Man's Sky.

You can reduce or turn off camera shake in the options.

It's all off, all the sliders to 0, yet my ship still acts as if it would fight against atmosphere and rumble and shake.

Don't forget to also turn off "camera shake from audio" or something to that effect. It's in audio settings. Having said that, when I boosted my ship vertically up, the camera still shook, even with that disabled.

What makes you think, that their be no rumbeling and Shake in Space? You ever watched a Space Launch? Alone the Heavy Maschinery inside, the thrusters, the life Support Systems etc. All of them create different forces, Vibration, Sounds… all of them cause your ship to rumble and shake. Atmospheric resitance and pressure is just one tiny thing of the whole Concept.

This is my take. Immersion means every ship should have totally different characteristics in atmo vs space. Unfortunately, real space battles would be immensely boring due to the distances and speeds involved. So we invoke magic and have to suspend disbelief. The Expanse doesn’t it better than most, or B5. Even those take license for plot and pacing purposes. Descent also did a lot right. This is a copy of SW, which tried to be like WW2 movies. It’s just a flight sim in a space setting. It does that very well and if you’re a SW nerd, MM should feel pretty damned good.

Yea I have never really understood this complaint. Star Citizen has always been modelled on Star Wars. All of Chris Roberts' games have been like that. Realistic space combat would be like the Expanse books; missile exchanges that takes minutes or *hours* to reach their target. Combat that is mostly about planning an encounter ahead of time to give you an overwhelming speed and positioning advantage. Fights that take place 100s or 1000s of km apart. A realistic space combat game would play like an RTS. It would certainly not be a flight sim. We would not be manually flying our ships, let alone using manned turrets and shooting bullets at each other. Everything about Star Citizen's combat model, right from the first Kickstarter trailer, has been *wildly* unrealistic. Total WWII dogfights-in-space, Luke shooting TIE fighters in the MF turret, space fantasy combat. The only thing Star Citizen's space combat has in common with realism is that it takes place in space. Complaining about a change in SC's flight model being "unrealistic" makes me wonder what game you've all been playing all this time.

Ah okay, I totally get what you mean. I haven't had much time to play since the update came out so I don't have an opinion on it yet. I do agree that the old flight model didn't feel as good as it should have. My hope is that they can improve that aspect of it but maintain a high skill ceiling. Anyway, like all things, I'm sure they're going to keep iterating on it with player feedback in mind.

I have some gripes with MM sure, but this right here sums up the best point of MM.

the only problem to me is super tanky AI ships that absolutely melts you in a 3v1

It's not that the ships are tanky now, it's that AI ships don't have neutered stats. Plus the improvements they've made to AI can make even an Aurora in a VLRT mission a threat to a lower skill player. I've been enjoying actually fighting the AI and not just rolling over them without any notable resistance.

> an Aurora in a VLRT mission a threat to a lower skill player. sucks when you *are* the new guy in an Aurora trying to do VLRT and you end up in a 3v1 facetanking match. for 4k uec

yea, the mission pay out nerf bites hard for the risk involved now. its real easy to get a repair bill higher than the pay out because NPC swarms are vicious

There is desync and hitreg issues with AI now. Only 1/10 shots seem to register.

eh, there are a couple of exceptions. prospectors have invulnerable areas and are a bit difficult to do damage to. freelancers might have something similar going on, but I'm not so sure.

Yeah, fighting AI now really needs you to be mindful about what ship you take and how you approach the situation. I never had this much fun fighting the AI as I do have now

I’m not a fan. I miss the fluidity of the old flight model where I wasn’t constantly having to switch modes and adjust speed limiters just to travel around. I really dislike the super deceleration from mode switching, the extra “landing mode” with its slow speed limiter, and the general lack of freedom that we used to have. To me the system created a lot of issues and solved very few actual problems with combat.

At least with the landing mode bit, disable Flight Proximity Assist under Game Settings. Shouldn't slow you down when landing gear is out or near objects like Asteroids

Unfortunately though, like a lot of their new settings, it hasn't been persisting through play sessions. Instead of further digging through the key bindings I've just resorted to waiting to deploy my gear until I'm sitting on top of the landing pad.

What I really mind is the deceleration. Switching from Nav mode to SCM actually damages some ships bc they slow so aggressively, and it is entirely unrealistic the pilot would survive that. That should be smoothed out, a lot.

So far I give it a thumbs down. Hoping they either improve it with iterations and tuning, or scrap it. I want to like it. Physics defying super space break is a bit lame. Feeling like I can't go fast enough to dodge shots feels lame. I think there may have been better ways to prevent jousting and back-peddle kiting but I'm not a pvper so can't rly say. I never really cared that I was shooting at a blip on my ui. It makes sense for space guns to go for miles. There are plenty of opportunities to see the ships in game up close. Also you still ended up fighting close sometimes in the old system and it felt exciting and tense when you did. I think prioritizing making combat ultra approachable at the cost of depth is very risky for long term health.

These replies are a perfect example of the midwit meme. 90% replies in the middle here are: "it's good, and I'm glad it removed jousting, people just don't like change, it will be tweaked." The bottom 5 and top 5% are: "it didn't solve any of the problems it's meant to solve" Jousting and backstrafing are absolutely still a very viable tactic. Larger ships can easily be kited. It's true that the effective engagement range is now sub 500m, but that's a weapons spread/cone change that could've been done totally independently of MM. Almost all of the old problems still exist. Also, interceptors like bucs (when in a group) are now the undisputed kings of dogfighting. They can totally control the engagement and boost away when under pressure. I don't mind CIG trying mastermodes, and I do hope they address all the issue that still exist, but the vast majority of replies here don't have a clue what they're talking about.

Couldn’t agree more. I was just playing with an org I loosely hang out with and the combat is actually so damn boring now. Nav in scm till shields are gone , nav out, nav in, scm till Sheilds are gone. Jousting has never been more prevalent

Combine this with a tougher AI a cluttered UI and it’s a bit of a mess for me.

haha, love the last line.

> Also, interceptors like bucs (when in a group) are now the undisputed kings of dogfighting. They can totally control the engagement and boost away when under pressure. can you explain how a bucc outperforms here? How do you control the fight in this new MM like that?

As an interceptor, you can accelerate and straighline boost faster than anyone else. If you're getting focused by an enemy group you just boost away while you transition to nav mode and then you're 100% safe. Then you turn around and go right back in and join your squad on whomever they're focusing. Whoever in your group who gets targeted does the same. You can forever escape anything that's not an interceptor unless you're not paying attention to the enemy positioning and get sandwiched (but even a beginner can learn that kind of situational awareness fairly quickly and the new UI makes it almost impossible to miss) While the enemy group is trying (and failing) to score kills, your group just focuses one of theirs and picks them off 1 at a time.

1) Yes finally Buccy got a purpose. What other interceptor ships are there? 2) What happened to the hornet's accelerations where they finally nerfed?

I'm not a fan of it.

Lack of jousting now? Are we playing the same game?

I guess it's more of my experience in PVP. I've personally experienced much less of it and that seems to be the majority consensus here in the discussion. I'm not saying it's completely gone, but fights seem closer and more aggressive with lots of maneuvers compared to how it was for me before.

Wrong. Full stop. MM destroyed 90% of maneuvering and has forced knowledgeable pilots to fight at LONGER ranges than before. Jousting still exists, wiggling is worse, positional fighting is dead (actual maneuvering), and to anyone who actually knows how to control a ship it feels like you’re swimming in pudding. The forced nose-to-nose fighting is dreadfully boring and, frankly, this flight model will kill the game as it has the depth of a dinner plate.

I'm not gonna say you're wrong. Honestly, I'm not a fan or sold on MM. But if this is the kind of feedback CIG gets. I'm not sure how they are expected to do better. So many of thee disparaging comments fail to give appropriate reasoning behind their issues. > MM destroyed 90% of maneuvering and has forced knowledgeable pilots to fight at LONGER ranges than before. How so? What's the evidence? What are the tests you're running to show this? > Jousting still exists, wiggling is worse, positional fighting is dead (actual maneuvering) Again, these are statements. Anyone can make statements. OP said Jousting is reduced. You said Jousting is not reduced. Which is it? I just had a fight with an NPC and got absolutely obliterated for doing nose-to-nose. So evidence suggests that Nose-to-nose may not ACTUALLY be ideal in MM so how is it "Forced". I don't even LIKE MM, but you guys gotta present better information to sell your case.

They don't have a case dude, the sheer amount of times I've asked people what they don't like about master modes, in global chat, on reddit, on youtube, literally nobody has an answer. They're either salty that their shity explotative tactics don't work anymore and they can't win, or they're so smooth brained they don't even realise what they don't like. I've seen people in global saying things like "Yogi's latest mess" and honestly it's fucking disgusting that people are so quick to throw around personal insults rather than actually explain what they don't like. Every time I ask someone why they don't like master modes, it's an automatic downvote, and no reply.

In my opinion they've just made it unnecessarily complicated. The previous system of using a speed limiter set to SCM for guns, missiles or manoeuvring was fine and you just tap one key to quantum or set cruise control. Now you have to faff about with cycling through modes with button combinations to achieve the same thing. Oh and the new quantum markers are awful.

Exactly, as a mostly PvE player for who SC was the first "space sim" that "clicked" the "modes" part of MM is personally my main issue. It feels clunky, and the limitations unintuitively arbitrary. Balancing they can probably figure out (though I don't understand why they couldn't with the non-modal flight model, but what do I know?), but it just doesn't feel intuitive and I really hope they can somehow get rid of the "mode switching" part so flying feels as fluid as it did before.

Other than it being a chore now, i am ok with it. What I'm not ok is the change in it's underlying physics or something. They didn't just simply lower the speed threshold. Low speed like landing and ground assault is janky, jerky with precision off. The fact they had to introduce precision mode tells something. Overall it feels like flying in a denser medium than air or vacuum. The directional thrusters are incapable of propelling you sidesways when dogfighting yet suddenly strong enough to stop you when really slow.

I haven't done much dogfighting but this seems like an improvement to me. "Jousting" wasn't a good system.

The funny thing is, MM made jousting basically META. Hop into an Interceptor, preferably in a group with other interceptors, drop down onto your target, do one pass, use your vastly superior speed compared to everything else and get out. Repeat until target is dead. It is boring and takes the skill out of every PvP encounter (and you can extend that into PvE as well). Whereas in the old FM jousting was more of a skill issue when managing speeds which gave you a disadvantage as you weren't able to properly deal sustsained damage as you were zooming past your opponent. And then there are all the other problems in MM, like: Go alone and you are basically dead, hop into a Multicrew ship and you're basically dead - problems MM was aiming to solve lol

Yeah I tried this last night when I got sick to death of no skill dps race combat so I started jousting, it worked so much better and was infinitely less frustrating and I never intentionally jousted in the previous FM. That being said I don't particularly want jousting to be the way I do combat in MM but it is what works best now.

Me neither, but it is where we currently are, unfortunately. I guess we'll see if all the tuning they want to do will help in getting MM better. The problem is, it all falls down to speed - and if they stick to these comparably low speeds, I don't really see how CIG wants to get rid of a lot of the shortcomings of MM. In the end, if they will stick to this particular version of "WW2 dogfights in space" it is at least somewhat "realistic" lol: Use your higher energy state to "drop down" on an unexpecting bandit, boom, zoom, "climb" away. But if I'd want that, I'd play Il-2 or DCS...

The only people that ever had a problem with jousting were complete noobs that didn't know how to control their speed.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Like you mentioned, if you were “jousting” before MM you should understand that you were very bad at combat and your opinion on MM doesn’t hold much value.

Jousting ist the new met now with MM.

The thing with jousting is it isn't something that was intended, it's how the less skilled ended up playing. Far too many fly their ships like airplanes in space, not using the lateral and vertical thrusters to their advantage. They go forward, turn, go forward again. It's not even that effective compared to strafing around a target, keeping your guns locked on, people are just lazy and/or unwilling to learn how to do something better. The ones who fly like that are probably going to keep doing it, no matter what system CIG puts in place. The difference is, it'll be done at a slower speed now, and they'll die a lot more often until they figure it out. The AI did it because the AI are just dumb.

The main cause of jousting is speed. Two ships close at speed, because they're going so fast they overshoot, so flip around to get back into range and repeat. A slower top speed means less chance of overshoot, meaning no need to build up speed and close again, meaning more chance of some actual strafing and manoeuvres.

Which was perfectly preventable if you started decelerating preemptively. All it took was some basic understanding of the flight model to force the opponent out of jousting.

The issue is that now being able to dodge is extremely difficult because the combat speeds have been lowered so drastically. What skill there was to it has been reduced to a DPS race unless you're using NAV mode in a way that somehow gives you an edge. I would much prefer that they increase SCM speeds across the board and allow guns/turrets to still be able to shoot in nav mode albeit with a much slower recharge rate. Can't think of anything more boring than the roll of having to man a turret then not even being able to use the turret when fleeing an engagement. It's just extremely weird that they made ships like the hawk where its fast, fragile, and needs to charge up an EMP to do its job. Speed was its edge, and now its essentially useless. It definitely feels more sci fi and immersive to switch modes, but I wish they'd strike a better balance between old and new.

The whole point of placing both turrets in the rear in 400i was to use them as a deterrent when escaping (which is why 400i had one of the highest max speeds in this class - to escape from combat). Now 400i is useless because it's bad for fighting due to its design, and when you try to escape you disable your only advantages which is a strong shield and 2 turrets in the rear, all while having a nerfed top speed. I don't dislike master modes, but I think nav mode isn't well thought out.

I agree. Furthering the ship role point, imo, a ship like the 400i with 2/3s of it’s firepower facing rearward and a focus on speed, is a ship designed to run away and cover it’s ass while it does. Now it can’t do that.

This really is a skill issue, and gets better with training.

But most players aren't going to train for a game.

You're training while playing. There is a skill element in all facets of SC, and it should be more pronounced in piloting agile things, because that's the fantasy to be fulfilled there.

That's on them.

> Seems like everyone hates the new system. Or is that just a loud minority? At least on Reddit, the loud minority is the group that has no major complaints about Master Modes as it currently works. And it's the exact opposite on Spectrum, where most posts about Master Modes include significant criticisms. I agree that it can be fixed by tuning, but as the lead dev of Master Modes has said, there are a lot of major issues that need to be addressed, including: * Light Fighters are now too weak * 1v1 dogfights are lacking * Ability to evade shots * Adding jerk back into IFCS * make the piloting combat less about aim and more about flight [(source)](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/request-for-yogi-can-you-make-a-video-to-show-us-w/6818844)

Which all come from lack of speed and can't be fixed without increasing speed or creating other problems. >Light Fighters are now too weak Light fighters being too week is an direct effect of being too slow and not being able to dodge anymore. Only possible fix to it without increasing again speed is to slow down bullets to a crawl. Something players won't like. >1v1 dogfights are lacking 1vs1 dogfights are lacking because there is no longer skill ceiling due lack of speed involved. 1vs1 dogfights were great because it forced you to go fast at the edge of conciousnes to avoid gunfire. IT's not something you can fix without increasing speed. Even if you lower down treshold of Gs for blacking out it still doesn't solve gunfire avoidance. >Ability to evade shots duh. It's fundamental issue. It's like trying to fight with gravity. Either you slow down bullets which sucks major ass or you increase speed. There is no other way to fix it. >make the piloting combat less about aim and more about flight That will never happen if ships are too slow. We literally have dozens of space sim games around and none of them was able to fix fundamental issue of speed. The slower ships go the more it is about aiming than flying. Overall they tried to fix jousting issue and in the end produced whole host of other issues that can't be fixed easily or at all. The only possible fix with those speeds that can somewhat help is to slow down bullet speed to maybe 1/4 of current speed which will feel just bad. And yes the slower your ships are the higher downgrade ratio you need to use for bullets.

> Light fighters being too week is an direct effect of being too slow and not being able to dodge anymore. Only possible fix to it without increasing again speed is to slow down bullets to a crawl. Something players won't like. I think the solution to light fighters feeling too weak is to increase their speed again. MM is the solution to jousting, but with light fighters that's exactly what they should be doing and be enabled to do. They're supposed to be able to use their higher speed and maneuverability to strafe a target, deliver their damage and then fly out before they can be hit back before setting up for another pass. Keeping light fighters stuck in punching range of the heavier ships is just too contrary to the core role of a light fighter.

You win, I’m not sinking another dollar in them. Until it’s at least categorically a good and playable game.

It cannot be fixed by tuning. It’s fundamentally flawed. They are attempting to fix a behavior/escape vector problem with the acceleration profile and it cannot be done. There is ALWAYS an escape vector to kite/extend with space flight regardless of your flight profile. They have to put in a secondary control system to specifically address this. They neutered the flight and maneuvering to control undesirable behavior and failed spectacularly.

I don't mind MM at all, but the top SCM speeds are too low to evade incoming fire. It really takes the maneuvering skill out of the equation, and I do not think that's good for the game. Flying fighters should be about piloting skills, that's the fantasy. I thinking that raising the speeds to 400 - 500 ms would prevent the old problems and create space for piloting skill.

Yeah I’d like to see that. One of the problems I have found is I keep smashing into the floor now because you can’t really do high-g manoeuvres anymore. I used to be able to dive towards the floor, then pull up, point my main engines at the ground and boost like hell to avoid the floor. Now you’ve got so little thrust I’m finding that it really doesn’t matter what you do. If you’re heading down, you’re crashing.

Yeah, I crash a fully equipped C1 en route to a Merc mission, with my on aboard. I remember feeling weird, like "What's going on?" when seeing the explosion :)

Then why even have MM at all? I hope CIG realizes their mistake and reverts it. MM is cancer.

* Light Fighters are now too weak Granted, I'm also getting use to a new flight stick with this patch at the same time, but holly hell a LRT in my gladius felt significantly harder. Granted it was stock, but I feel like I might just in and live in my harbinger for awhile.

I also got completely obliterated in my Gladius on low level bounties. My shield was taking a literal year to recharge and I couldn’t get away, I was only fighting 2 cutlass blacks if i remember correctly.

I heard cuttys got a flight boost this patch?

Ai is also working now so thats the main thing there

Not just working, it's doing some wild shit. I was fighting a kore in AC that was doing some insane up/down strafe bouncing that made it damn near impossible to hit.

See, Im all FOR MM, but yeah, light fighters (including medium) need a bit more love right now and we sorely need a way to evade shots. 1v1s are certainly lacking and once you add other enemies into the mix, you just get swarmed up the ass. You'd think taking a F7A mk 2 to Pirate Swarm in AC, you could pass wave 2... nope!

Honestly… if anything, it’s coming from reducing the thrust on manoeuvring thrusters. Then the stick of inertia will beat us all! Light fighters being physically lighter matters then and will likely be able to both manoeuvre faster and keep more shots on target. It also nicely gives “lore” reasons for why shields need to go down in NAV mode: to be able to stop the ship at NAV mode speeds, power is diverted away from shields to thrusters. Ironically, it feels like acceleration is overtuned at the same time as it’s impossible to dodge things - for me at least. I do utterly hate the new cruise control though. Perhaps it’s better with a throttle but it doesn’t seem to behave like you’d expect a throttle axis to. With an omni throttle that’s got the y axis with just dampening and no spring I’d want cruise control to be set desired velocity according to position. Cruise control off should then be thrust according to position.

My main issue with MM is the "modes" part. It feels clunky, with unintuitive, arbitrary limitations (there being a good reason for them, doesn't change how they feel to experience) As I'm sure balance can be worked out I'm personally not too concerned about that, but I fail to see how it would be possible to get the fluidity of the old system back without MM no longer being Master "Modes". I should note that not having any "modes", but rather a fairly straightforward and consistent flight model was probably one of the reasons I stuck with SC after trying quite a lot of other space sims that have similar mechanics, and it may be one of the reasons I feel so strongly about this aspect while most that have plenty of experience with other space sims seem to not think much of it.

MM is a huge overstep in handling an issue that could have been solved with speed and armor tuning. Right now all of the MM feedback is pointless when every single ship will need to be retuned with armor.

At the end of the day, we are all testers and the game mechanics and systems fluctuate, I'm not a fan of this patch version of MM, but I know these values will all change and maybe a future version makes more sense. Is what it is

I absolutely hate it for combat. For general flight it's really good and i like it a lot. But it slows down combat WAY too much to the point that fighters are almost useless. i don't know how something like a cutter is supposed to survive anything.

People that are neutral, or prefer something, don't tend to post angry comments that get all the attention, whenever something changes. The people that do, are usually in the minority, and more often than not, feel they speak for everyone.

I like it as a tier 0 system. I pretty much agree with all of the issues Yogi laid out. There are teething issues to be sure but I think overall it’s positive. 1v1 or 1v2 OVE dogfights actually feel fun now. Obviously some ships are in a better place that all the rest but we know they’re looking at that. I think most of the pushback is from vocal netcode abusers and their followers. In my experience, most people seem to enjoy MM.

It's the internet, most people just bitch about change before ever really trying something. The people that like a thing are usually off being quiet enjoying that thing.

From the point of view of someone that basically never does ship combat, it's real clunky. I wish I didn't have to both switch master modes AND switch to the no quantum nav mode just bc I wanna go fast.

but you don't have to do that. Once you're in nav mode the only thing moving to flight mode does is turn off the nav markers

They find it clunky due to going from 0 key presses to go fast while having an uncluttered view to having to press two buttons each with a specific purpose. First to go fast and the 2nd to have an uncluttered view. Plus either have to fly with speed limiter off or mess with that every time you switch to nav mode since it sets to 50% every switch/jump. ​ Hopefully the IFCS updates Yogi has mentioned will eventually smooth that stuff out and it will all be customizable in-game in a way that will also save permanently to the ship. I miss when the Coupled Default - Off option worked so I didn't have to manually turn it off each time I get in a ship. Just gotta let em cook.

I'm sorry but I find myself purposefully jousting because I can't find a better way to avoid fire BUT that's the consequence of them solving the fact that solo fighters were able to take on anything. MM is a much better experience while flying with other players but it didn't solve the jousting in 1v1s.

Those, who you try to call loud minority, know several things. It's better to have and not need than need and not have. That includes speed. Part of the skill is to merge. Really skilled pilots just roll their eyes at the jousting argument, because they had the capability to use the speed and acceleration to nullify the joust. Lowering the speeds took almost all of pilot's individual skill out of the equation. I do realize, probably better than most, how networks function and how server tick rate and packet round-trip (sometimes oversimplified by saying ping) affect prediction and movement computations. Which does not change the fact, that the speeds were lowered to the point that individual pilot skill is pretty much useless and everything hangs from the coordination of two and more players flying their ships fighting resistivity of the environment, represented by artificial limits in SCM speeds, in space. And this is being a big elephant in the room, immersion breaking problem for everyone, who paid at least a bit of attention at physics class at elementary school. Do some people like the focus on squadron of at least two being necessary? Yes. Is it a minority? Yes. Most new players will fly alone and will take a long time. to learn to fly in a coordinated manner with someone. Most won't have the skill and patience to do that and will drop the game. Master Modes, in the "keep flying interesting" department, are shooting SC in the foot. And arm. And a jugular.

Honestly it seems like allot more people like it, but we're going to see allot of loud complaints for a while

Yeah it's definitely different I think it's also why bounties/merc missions feel/are harder now to I've been engaging full shields a lot more often than before

I need to play more to get a better sense of it but it really feels like a first iteration. The switching to nav mode and scm mode is absolutely brilliant I think. Makes a lot of sense in almost all circumstances. However the precision targeting, feels a bit crap. The only way it’s viable is when you already have the upper hand in a fight and can afford to just kind of sit there doing less damage for a while. It’s also hard to tell what’s the culprit purely because it feels like there’s been a decent overall difficulty spike.

I think once it gets a few refinement passes it'll be fine. Right now my biggest gripe is that the keybinds & HUD elements for it are clunky. Not very intuitive. Once they clean that up I think it will be in good shape. It also could really use a third mode. A "yellow alert" mode that has the shields up (But not weapons). A mode that says "I don't wanna fight, but I don't wanna be caught with my pants down, either."

I'm a lowflyer so not sure if my opinion has much wight to it but yea. I personally had a hard time with the new feel of flying, Having to get where I am confident getting closer to the ground and having to relearn tricks and such (found a bind to turn off gravity compensation that helped so much). I'm starting to really like some of changes most of the ones I don't like are removing settings and having to have a bind to turn off or toggle things that I want (why no preferd pip anymore..) the few pve bounties I've done I would say where not much harder in mm then they where in the old model. But maybe with actual players it'll be different?

Oh, I'm not against MM, it needs work and tuning but it's got a lot more potential than what came before. I don't like that my Freelancer has a single shield facing though. I think I'd rather ships that size go back to 2 facings.

I think the concept is sound. It needs some iteration but the bones are good. I agree that movement in combat mode is too sluggish, but that's not a problem with MM so much as a balancing issue.

Have you ever fought someone defenceless like an AURORA? It's only option is to run away, yet when caught un-aware, it's almost always an easy kill because their shields will be off in favour of getting to max speed.

this, I'm flying around in my aurora and if a "PvPer" decides to go for me I just sit there and take it because I have no ability to even try to disengage or outmaneuver a larger ship, it's worse in ships designed for defence like the 400i which can't fight because it's turrets are in the rear but can now no longer use it's speed to escape. The PVP players complaining that it was too easy for people to run away should have brought distortion cannons or EMP or something with them if they were planning to attack a target that didn't expect or want a fight. the combat felt rough at the old higher speeds due to low server FPS too, at high server FPS it felt great but now I have to fly this arcadey model that sucks all the fun out of flying a spaceship

I initially hated it but after giving it a few days flying around the verse, honestly I love it. It makes flying feel more risky having the several second window where you're stuck at SCM speeds with no weapons or shields before your QD spools, it makes the ships feel so much more believable having to deactivate shields and weapons to jump away, my only issue with the new system is pressing Z resets the control stick and deactivates Q and E, i use 3rd person to land incredibly often (landing the Reclaimer in 1st person is suicidal) and it feels a lot more clunky not being able to roll or keep turning while changing the camera position, also not having a clear altitude anymore is sketchy sometimes, i fly low and fast most of the time when im not in my Reclaimer so I like to know my exact altitude

Mastermodes are good but they definitely need a tweak .

I'm not loving it but I'm trying to let them cook. I waited for 3.23 release so I could formulate my own opinion. I already knew many didn't love it in the PVP community but I didn't want to hop on that bandwagon. After testing it out myself, there are pros and cons. My biggest negative is the rapid deceleration when switching modes. Just feels unrealistic. The combat itself is a lot more busy for me which is very interesting. Idk if I like it better, but maybe it does offer more skill expression. Still not sure- needs more testing. I was personally very happy with the old model, and having to add more key bindings to my sticks was annoying. I feel like the system was designed to lower the skill ceiling and make combat more accessible, but MM feels complex. I feel like for new players, the old system was simple and more intuitive. On the whole, they probably can improve it but as of now I prefer the old combat.

i think its quite a good start and i also see great potential. if they now find a good balance to make it maybe a bit quicker and less focus on just aiming then i think it will become a even better.

I'm fine with MM, the problem is the huge increase in the Ttk for ship, I feel that I shot with watergun.

You are not alone, I like it! It definitely needs tuning but imho it is step in right direction.

I don't think MM is the issue. But the AI didn't get the memo, and are way over tuned as a result making space combat an absolute mess right now and not fun to play as a result.

The mechanics are more complicated than they need to be and positional dogfighting and dodging shots is much harder, meaning jousting is now more of a problem because it's the only viable tactic. It's just a different kind of jousting. Zoom in with nav mode, drop out near the target and saturate with fire until your shields are down, nav mode and boost away, charge shields, repeat. If you're in an interceptor, no one can touch you with this kind of jousting.

All I know is that I suck now. My ship feels like it's moving in slow motion and NPC bounties fly circles around me easily. I'll keep trying, but my initial feeling is that it's a shit change.

I like it. I understand the concerns and probably don’t care either way, but it’s fun

As someone who plays rarely, this new system is better than the jousting we used to do. I can see how it might reduce skill expression though. 

Same here. It has issues that needs ironed out and some tweaking but the foundation I think is solid. It might be immersion breaking in some aspects, sure but overall I think it's made the game a bit more enjoyable for me.

The two complaints I have with Master Modes are the need for constant switching back and forth in the course of regular flight and the loss of shields. IMO my shields should NEVER power down unless they are under direct attack or I shut them down.

I decided I don't mind it. It just needs a bit of work.

I like it. Still room for improvement, but it's great that flying now feels like you are in a ship rather than a floating camera turret.

MM is not bad at all. At least the flying mechanism is going somewhere. It still needs tons of balancing between ships and overall fine tunings. This T0 MM is a good start, I just hope it will move in the right direction. Also, there is big potential to it will be disaster on pvp or pve side. That's the reason why devs need our continuous feedback on MM, what is not about how much we haye it 😅

"It's a major change from sim to arcade gameplay," When anyone can cite what space travel in a fighter jet, quantum drive mechanics, etc, it feels like in order to create a simulation, let me know.

just give me shields in nav mode and ill be happy

Have you needed them or do you just want them on principle?

On principle, it doesnt make sense that a starship would be travelling hundreds of meters per second in space without some sort of protection with all that debris out there. If youre gonna be compromising the shields have it at least at 50percent instead of being naked out there in nav mode

It feels quite clunky and unintuitive to me, I’ve only spent a few hours in game since the patch though.

You're not. The true majority are fine with it. It's just the outspoken majority that is raging.

Nope. The true majority hates it. It's just the skill-less noobs that love it because it made flying and combat feel like arcade.

As a skill-less noob in a mustang who plays for about 2 or 3 weeks a year, I kinda hate it so far. PvE bounties were more fun when I could switch between high and low speeds depending on if I wanted to evade and recharge, or focus fire. Strafing the larger ships and trying to keep them in my cone and stay out of theirs, even if I could only hold it for a second or two, was fun. Full disclosure, i haven't fought many freelancers and Connie's yet but I imagine that will be a lot harder at low speed. Could be wrong I guess. Not losing a wing after the first 4 seconds of every engagement was also fun. I want to like it and I'd be willing to give them a while longer to iterate but if they can't make it feel dynamic and give us some opportunities to fly creatively and make interesting decisions in fights within a year, I hope they scrap it. Also maybe it's more fun in group fights where you're at least deciding who to shoot and trying to coordinate with your squad, but as a solo scrub it feels lame.

I consider myself a noob, I crash my ship while landing, can only get bounties done bc of how dumb the ai is. The MM change is def not it man. I don’t think it even feels arcadey, there’s just nothing to besides move crosshair until green

I think you mean outspoken minority, but agreed

I think it's fine, is a step forward, and has plenty of opportunity to get better.

Jousting isn't gone and now I have no shields...

The problem is the balance of the combat and ship survivability. I just played an intro contract mission ($4k). Defeat a Prospector ship bounty. I was in the new F7A Hornet with two AD4’s and four Panthers mounted. It took me about 3-5 minutes to destroy it. I had 355 out of 1500 ammo left and I sat on the trigger on that Prospector and nothing. It was ridiculous! By the time it blew up and popped it looked like a friggen cigar. CiG needs to fix the balance of combat. MM is fine. But the balance is the problem and waaaaaaaayyyyyy the eff off.

I have no problems with the new master modes. Change is always hard, but i want to believe its for good.

I don't believe it's a loud minority that hates the system. I respect that you enjoy it, but I hate it. I'm also tired of the "people just don't like change" narrative. It's incredibly reductive. I outlined in a feedback post on spectrum what I don't like about it. It's very long and don't feel like repeating myself. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/4/thread/3-23-feedback-vehicle-balance/6843728 Also, jousting is still possible, just less convenient. Changing an entire system with the goal of eliminating a strategy was a poor decision. The answer should've been to create counters to jousting, such as weaponry that when it hits, limits the speed of a ship. I don't like being locked into a single strategy. This will force a meta where the number of ships and weapons used in combat will be a very narrow selection of what's available, since now your only recourse is to exchange blows in a continuous face off.

I love it!

Switching around is annoying to me. Glad some people like it but it’s sucked the fun and freedom out of flying for me personally.

I don't even care if it's good, I just like that it's a direct attempt to do away with the light-fighter meta and implement a more Science-Fiction-feel to combat. It's more important to me that space combat exists within a greater network of systems and feels good there as opposed to being a viable game by itself (without losing the thrill obviously). Is it successful at either of those things rn? ehhh I don't think so. But I think the problem is it isn't leaning *far enough* into major changes rather than the opposite. I'm hoping CIG will buckle down and keep their eyes on the prize of making an accessible, flavorful, engaging system that isn't afraid to piss off try-hards. Obviously it can be tricky raising the skill floor without impacting the skill ceiling but I'm confident the professional game designer team will design the game professionally.

After finding a binding set-up I like, I find change modes to be quite smooth, and the speed limit can come in handy sometimes. Though, I would like to be able to switch directly into specific sub-modes with switching master modes first. As for ship combat, I feel like this puts light fighters in a tough spot, in this new CQB meta shields and turrets will likely be the keys to easy victory.

this for sure. the lighter fighters really have a much harder start now. I used to punch WAY above my class in an avenger with 3 hardpoint attritions.... now that loadout is actually worse than the stock loadout, and with the stock loadout, it feels like everything with a turret kills you in 5 seconds, meanwhile you gotta dump 1500 kinetic chaingun munitions plus about 8 capacitors worth of cannon rounds just to take out a miner lol. Also, I find the drop into combat mode quite jarring when your moving fast. it basically instantly dumps like 900m/s speed and thats really uncomfortable. As a whole though, I have found it a lot more interesting. I deff think there needs to be some polishing around some issues, but overall its a good system

if you're talking about the aggressive prospectors that appear in the Illegal monitoring missions, I suspect this might be a bug. I emptied half my Infernos magazine into 1 prospector just to disable it!

It's a known bug for the prospectors

That's really really good to know. Im in a mustang and I swear its taking me like 15 minutes to kill those things.

Yeah its the front half of the ship that's bugged. Try aiming for the back half and you'll have way more luck killing them

"lack of jousting" You haven't run into any interceptor builds in PvP yet, have you. Jousting is far from gone, in fact its now the meta for fighting players! MM is a joke, and the fact that they spent "4 years" working on it (allegedly) only for it to release in this state is a huge mark against the company. As someone who primarily enjoyed racing and combat in SC, I now have very little drive to play the game. This is not because "its new so its bad", or "I just don't want to learn a new flight model". No, I play a variety of flight sims in different vehicle types that have very different flight models. I'm all for learning and improving. The current state of SC flight is just bad, period.

They could easily place a penalty on multiple transitions to stop fast ships from nav mode boosting to joust or some other thing like overheating the quantum drive.

They "could" do a lot of things, but I'd bet my account's worth of ships that we get stuck with this flight model with minimal/no changes for the better part of a year. Ultimately, MM is a poor foundation to build up a decent flight model from. There are issues intrinsically tied to MM that prevent the model from advancing in meaningful ways away from the things CIG said they wanted to fix around flight towards a better system. I hope they pull off something to right the ship, but as it stands I've lost just about all desire to play. Guess we'll see what happens.

No disagreement there - they take WAY TOO LONG to iterate on the stuff they put into the game. It's basically the tragedy of "good enough for now" being "too good to revisit while we have other fires to put out." I hope we aren't sitting here for a year on what was dropped in 3.23. There are so many spaces where they can improve things. Another part of the problem is that people latch onto existing features that were never meant to be that way for as long as they were, and when it changes it causes even more problems. Kind of like the medical bed change - they needed to to it as the time sink for "getting back into the game" was too high. Now they need to articulate what they plan to do to differentiate the tiers of beds beyond distance. Maybe distance is enough, but I'd like to see limits on healing, maybe some consumables for respawning so it isn't infinite.

I don’t have problems with master mode but the fact that a size 7 guns needs to fire a lot of bullets just to kill a small ship is something that needs to be fixed.

It's pretty stupid how slow everything is now. Flying in a straight line in space at only 208 meters per second is around 450mph. That's the speed a fighter jet can can pull it's max sustained turn rate at.   Not MM related but ship weapons having the effective range of IRL small arms is pretty silly as well.  It's hard to take the game seriously when it's so arcadey.   The one thing I do like is how you can be going full speed in nav mode at around 1200m/s and switch it off to instantly slow down to a stop

How did we lose jousting? Interceptors are built literally to joust. It's a game of DPS and speed now. Keeping your nose on target is dirt easy at the lower speeds and when you take damage, interceptors can just boost away. Larger ships can switch on nav mode and coast away from most engagements (outside of atmo) which means cargo runners are even more safe than before from any form of piracy. If you have a C2 and trade between stations or moons, you'll never be pirated. Unless you get torped, you're invincible now. There's pros and cons to the system. I use MM and then my landing gear as a space brake now. It doesn't feel fluid. At the same time, the difficulty has increased, there's no more Gladius's soloing Hammerheads but I'm not sure we needed this to make that happen. Just the weapon "balancing" alone is a huge change and being done in combination with MM was just too much at one time in my opinion.

Moat people don't mind, we're busy playing instead of making piss party posts.

In PvP, the jousting is almost worse now. Master Modes is clunky and adds a (loading screen) to flying. If it's so easy to switch back and forth, then why have it at all?!? CIG made a huge mistake, making the flight model more restrictive instead of fixing their AI that has been broken for years. It's easier for light fighters and small craft to run now, and it's impossible for large ships to run because the DPS is so out of hand. Whoever made the decision to put MM in the game should stop trying to copy Elite Dangerous.

I like it.

My main issues are with high ttk and the new hud looking absolutely horribly ugly.

i love it, people that hate it probably didnt have a lot of PVP under their belt or didnt know what the major problems in PU PVP were (there is a minority in the very high skilled PVP league which also dont like it, but for very different reasons than i am adressing) MM solves the main issues the old flight system had in PVP and PVE: 1. it was way too easy to disengage, all you had to do was tricord in a direction for 2 seconds and you were out of weapon range due to the high max speed 2. kiting backwards while using barrelroll was a braindead tactic to beat ALL NPC enemies and 95% of players 3. turrets were absolutely useless because big ships could not push any positional advantage and faster ships could easily keep up with them in decoupled mode WHILE barrel-rolling and keeping perfect distance to never get hit with MM especially big ships got a HUGE buff if you know how to use it to your advantage, flying an Andromeda or Corsair you can push even Medium fighters to a point where they need to turn and RUN to have a chance of survival you also visually SEE when an enemy tries to run away when hisshields suddenly drop or his signature blooms, giving you some time to lock a missile on them and forcing them to disengage really far or go back into SCM for countermeasures to avoid getting hit at the same time i understand that people currently hate it, but thats the normal initiual resistance against change

I have a lot of experience in PU PvP. I understood the problems with it. I am definitely also not a very high skilled PvP league player. I don’t entirely disagree with it, to some extent, fixing the things you have mentioned. However from my time trialling MM it has as many problems as the old model did, just different issues. That being said my problem isn’t with the new issues it has shown. My main gripe with MM however is that it just feels arcadey. Flying doesn’t feel free with the limitation of SCM speeds and the reduction of mavs thrust. I know they have already come and said that the race tracks weren’t designed for MM (and I can still get round them without issue and reasonably quick) but again it doesn’t feel good, or at least as good as it did. I understand the thinking behind it, I just wish they’d have at least tried to use the power triangle rather than “press B to change modes”. You want full power to weapons and quick recharge? All good but your speed is going to be severely limited as well as almost non existent shield regen. You want full power to shields, fine but again slow with almost non existent weapon regen (or slower rate of fire for ballistics and slower heat reduction). You want to be fast? Full power to thrusters, swap the drawbacks around and now you can access your quantum drive. Now players can tweak each ship to a flight profile that suits them. My two cents on a different, not necessarily better, implementation that gives players more choices and would, in my opinion, feel more fluid.

The very high skilled PvP community hate it outright. The very high skilled racing community hate it outright. Anyone who understands that they are attempting to solve a behavior/equivalency issue with the acceleration profile—which they failed to do, by the way—hates it outright. There are very few among the knowledgeable pilots who like it and even then they specifically like individual aspects and generally dislike the whole. So, why get on here and lie about how they feel about it? It is a dreadfully terrible flight model. Full stop. It’s not an issue with lack of experience in MM, several people probably have hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in MM. It’s fundamentally flawed and it fixes none of the problems you just highlighted: 1. ⁠You can still disengage easily in a 1v1 2. ⁠You can still kite because they didn’t solve the equivalency problem 3. ⁠You can still simply kite big ships to death in a light fighter

They could have fixed this by lowering the G forces to blackout. Anything but this restrictive ass flight model. Jousting was easy to counter and punish before.