My question is about how shields currently work in AC, and in particular on the Hornet. Right now, if you fire your weapons, or even maneuver very much, it drains your shields. Is that intended operation? If so, do you anticipate modifying this design so that shield levels can be maintained during routine ship ops?asked by Vila Devere

A couple of answers to this question. First off, the shields, to maintain their shield level need a certain amount of energy. So if a ship is unbalance, i.e. you have too many items pulling too energy, like your thrusters, your shields, general standard operation stuff, then your shields will not be able to hold their top level. Right now we have a problem on our ships in Arena Commander because we haven't really done a very good job of balancing the items on the first three ships you have. So there's some out of skew like the 300i with way too much power coming from its power plant, there's some issues with the Hornet because there's not enough power... so there's gonna be a balancing pass that goes into the 12.5 patch, and then longer-term more balancing that goes into 13. But the way the shields are meant to work is that they need to maintain their level, but there will be some level of capacitor in the shields so it doesn't mean as soon as there's a spike in energy use it doesn't mean the shields necessarily go down. It's just that if you're overall energy output is lower than what you need to maintain the shields then over time the shields will drop down to whatever the equilibrium level is, based on the energy output. So this is actually one of the aspects that we're still tweaking and turning, but long term what will actually make for really interesting game play is how you set up your ship. So you know you have to balance your energy, like "I know what my power plant is and what weapons I've got," so you make sure that your entire set up isn't going to be compromising your ship. The example would be, "okay, well I've got too many things pulling too much power so I can't maintain my shields." Well at that point you may not need the shield generator that can have, you know, 200-level shields vs 100-level shields.So I guess the answer is, yes, it's kind of intended. There is going to be some level of capacitor on the shields so it doesn't instantly drop down or up, it will just over time drop down to equilibrium, so when you have a power spike it won't be fluctuating your shields as much. But if you aren't supplying enough energy over time to keep the shield up at its level then it will not be able to hold that level.One of the longer-term things is energy balancing on your ship. We're working on the HUD interface. It won't be in 12.5 but probably in 13 there's gonna be a much cleaner way of accessing an interface and all that stuff, so you control it and move between different profiles. But you know I kinda like in longer term combat, especially when we're gonna roll out some of the later stuff where you actually have to work as teams together, you're going to see a lot more smart use of weapons - when they're off, when they're on, when we're using them, you know, putting all our power into our shields, or putting our power into the thrusters... and that's kind of the idea of the combat system design of the ships. It's still very early days, that's why we're still balancing and we've still got some things that are broken in the system that don't let you get to appreciate that as much, but once everybody can play multiplayer, and also multiplayer in something that isn't like a free-for-all death match, because that really doesn't give you an opportunity to show off combat, because basically what happens is everyone spawns and someone is shooting at someone else and they're not looking at you and you shoot them in the back - it's madness basically. When you're playing team vs. team it's a lot different and some of the other game modes we're gonna have will be different, and then allowing people to alter and change their settings... "ok, this is my one power configuration in this battle mode, and I'll have this other power profile when I'm doing this," or "I'm running away from someone so I'm going to put all my power to my back shields." So we're going to allow you to have all that. There's already the infrastructure there in the systems. The interface is broken in some ways to let you do that, but that's what we're working on, and when we get all that balanced and you're doing all that, I actually think there's going to be a lot of interest and depth to combat. Especially when you don't have people spawn on top of each other, so you know, there'll definitely be cases where you can go sort of silent or dark and maybe surprise someone or hide against someone, or sneak up on someone. So there's a lot of possibilities.I know that answered a lot more than the question about the shields, but it sort of gives the idea of why all of these things are interconnected.