Yogi Klatt · Senior Gameplay Programmer, Vehicle Experience

Okay, so in general, from the feedback in our combat tests that we had before 3.14, the perceived time to kill was always too long for us. Because you could tape your fire button down and fire forever and eventually ships would explode, but it was not really meaningful. I think giving an exact time to kill is not really working because you cannot really measure it properly. Combat is very dynamic, and depending on how a pilot flies his ship, if he makes a left barrel roll or takes other maneuvers into use, the overall time to kill changes so much based on the individual pilot that it's not really useful for us. And also, the other thing with exact time to kills is that it kind of tells you, hey, you have an exact number you're aiming for. And I would say no. Because if you just look at numbers and then you have tools that data-mine the game data and try to draw strategies out of that, this is something we would like to avoid. We want to avoid the gameplay of building a meta build that will always be better than all other builds combined. So as such, for us it's not important to get an exact number, but rather to experience how these ships and fighters and shields feel, and if you as a player think they give you the advantage that you need. Because ultimately, we want to play a game and not read out an Excel sheet. So that's why we do not have a specific time to kill. We roughly know where we would want it to be, but this is some data we really don't want to give out, because we want people to enjoy it and tell us, hey, this is too long, this is too short, and then we adapt it accordingly.

David Colson · Lead Vehicle Programmer

I would add that as we improve the actual flight experience, as in moving your ship around in combat, we want to head toward a situation, which I think we've done a pretty good job of in this patch, where it's not a DPS race of just hold your gun down and then eventually the ship explodes. And so the result is that, particularly in this patch and going forward, combat is not about waiting for the health to go to zero or something. A simple naive way of doing it is, oh, you hold down your button, and then the ship blows up. And in the older patches, that was like two seconds. But the actual experience, like what Yogi is saying, when you actually have a fight with a real person, it doesn't feel like two seconds. And that issue is much more magnified in this patch, which is why this is the way we plan to do it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And of course, we're using the phrase time to kill, but with physicalized damage and armor and stuff, at some point it's going to morph into a time to disable, I suppose, would be a more appropriate term.

Mark Abent · Lead Vehicle Engineer

It also depends what you're targeting, too, because now you have sub-targeting and more items are getting physicalized. If you want to kill the ship, maybe you aim at the power plant and it blows up. If you want to disable it, you shoot out the thrusters. If you want to just disable the guns, maybe shoot up the guns. The definition of a win is different.

David Colson · Lead Vehicle Programmer

It can be different.