Can you define what the high-speed combat changes in 3.10 are, and why?

Yep. So the two features of high-speed combat that we're releasing in 3.10 are the increase in lock-on time for missiles when you're above SCM, and that scales depending on how far above your SCM speed you are. So if you're one meter a second over it, you're probably not going to notice the slowdown in your lock time for missiles. If you're doing 2,000 meters a second, it's going to be minutes to lock. And all of these ideas and implementations were there to disincentivize players from fighting at high speeds, because at higher speeds the combat range just got bigger and bigger and bigger and you just ended up pixel hunting, and we really wanted to bring those fights back in. And we've got some mid and long term plans that we'll go over in the future about bringing that in more, which sort of superseded some of our plans for high speed combat, which is why it's perhaps not quite as big as people were expecting for 3.10. The other thing that it does is it changes the auto gimbal slew rate when you're above SCM, so the speed it takes for your auto gimbal cursor to track over the target in the cone is slowed down. Again, it scales: the faster you go, the harder that is. We had some other things that we tried, which was just a flat out weapon spread increase, but it felt very artificial and weird to play with. We tried reducing the shield face strength. And that was sort of cool. It worked, but we didn't really have the UI reinforcement to explain what was going on there. So we didn't enable that in the patch because it ultimately just became confusing. And a lot of it was tied into the state of missiles and countermeasures. When your shields became weaker at speed and you were trying to run away, for example, without a way to effectively countermeasure missiles, missiles just became a one-click win for the person who wasn't running away. And we wanted there to be a lot more counterplay there. So for 3.10, it's just those first two bits. For 3.11 or later, we might do some more, but we have some other ideas that we want to try first. High-speed combat is sort of the wrong term for it. It's more getting closer combat at lower speeds versus high-speed combat.

Close combat improvements or something like that might have been a better term. And then, of course, I know we're talking about 3.10 here, but part of that continuing work that will continue beyond 3.10 is revisiting missiles and how they work.

Yeah, flares should work again in 3.10 now. We're looking at chaff. Chaff is a curious one. It's quite hard to use anyway, but we're going to try and squeeze a temporary fix in there so at least those two work for 3.10.