When will missles work?

Wow. What a question. We've got lots of things we want to do from a design side. Obviously, the gameplay with them is very, involving is probably not the right word, but not just a spammy way of doing damage. We want people to think about what missiles they're going to use, what the differences between the three tracking types are, picking the right one for the right thing, and then obviously the receiving end of dealing with that incoming threat. That's where we want to go. That doesn't have a timeline associated with it.

Missiles have moved from the LA studio to Frankfurt on the weapons team. So they were responsible for doing all the conversion from weapons 1.0 to weapons 2.0. Missiles are in the list to be done next, along with the few bits that didn't make it.

As to what's wrong with them at the moment, they use a very sort of simplified, dialed-down version of IFCS called MGCS, Missile Guidance Control System. So if you think of all the little quirks that we have with IFCS at the moment, and tracking on something that's very small, moving three to four times the speed, going after something else that's moving, it all just sort of amplifies. If you have that 0.1% error on a ship, it gets wild on a missile. So we're aware of issues with their movement, their tracking. That really frustrating bug where they just hit stuff and bounce off and do a spiral around it, we seem to fix that every other week internally. And then so many things in the chain can break that. It can be ship specific. It can be shield specific. It could be missile specific. It could be networking. We've even had the planets break it. So if you're in the planetary zone, they go to it and then just go off somewhere. We've had it where it has actually been doing it, but the UI just carries on as though it was never there. So it's so far away, the missile explosion effect happens, you don't see it. All you see is the UI just carry on for kilometers in distance. So you think you've missed, but you've actually hit. But yeah, we know there's problems. We're looking at ways to fix it. I don't have a time for that.

I know talking with Todd, there are some fixes that we're going to try to get in for 3.3, but not the whole rigmarole.

Yeah, we want to hit the big offenders. Not being able to lock multiple targets frequently is a big problem, especially on things like the Retaliator or anything torpedo-based where you're stuck with one. That's a lot of your gameplay gone. And just the reliability of hitting and exploding stuff.