Torpedoes and missiles sometimes have difficulty hitting targets. Their purpose remains unclear and the reliability is very worrying. Will there be improvements?

So we have a big missile rework planned at the moment, where the core aspect of what's wrong with missiles right now is just it's really hard to predict where they're going to land, because they're so quick. So we've got problems with networking. The missiles are very small and agile; they're way more agile than the ships. So the inaccuracies you see sometimes are just how they are predicted to hit at the moment, and that prediction isn't hitting the mark all the time. But also it's to do with countermeasures as well. So I would say we've got a linear relationship right now, which is either a countermeasure and the missile misses... But that's not the intended goal of how the missiles work. We want more clear readability of where the missile's coming from. Because at the moment, if you've got a missile coming at you and you don't countermeasure and you get hit, it's bad. And you don't know where it's coming from. So we want a much more clear readability of where the missile's coming from, but it means we've got to change the flight of the missiles themselves. Because at the moment the missiles fly in a fully decoupled way where they can change direction very, very quickly at the last minute as well. So again, it's that predictability at the end, where they do go suddenly like this to you. But we want that to be much more predictable. So we want to slow them down a little bit so you can actually evade them. But also that slowing down makes it easier to predict where they're going to hit as well. And then we've got systems. We want to do stealth gameplay, so you can do things on your ship yourself to make you less susceptible to missiles, but we need all these systems to come together as one big package of how missiles work. But that's where Torsten comes in as well.

Yeah, actually, we did some steps already to improve the missile gameplay. So not on the missiles themselves. There are issues that are even quite high on our immediate fix list for that. We don't have feedback right now, visual feedback, that the target lock is completely done. So this definitely needs fixing. So we already started working on the UI improvements. There are reasons why it's not in yet, so we are still actively working on that, getting all the changes across, but at least it will help for the initial missile gameplay that we currently have in the game. As Rich already said, the speeds of them, now with the updated bullet speeds for the normal weapons, are also disproportional again. So that means that this is definitely something we need to tackle afterwards. And for the stealth gameplay, actually we did some changes already around that. So engineering gameplay influences the EM signatures; IR signatures are also driven by the cooler functionality. So we already have player decisions impact the signatures. Also, actually a shout out to Michael Smith there, it's basically his doing that the cross-section is only detectable now by active ping. So it's actually something that was brought up in our vehicle leadership meeting and we just acted on it because it works out quite well. It has the downside, though, that the cross-section missiles now need an active ping, and there are also some visual indicators missing. So we have a list of things we need to improve even for the missile gameplay that we currently have in the game. But we also are very aware that the missile gameplay is the gameplay that we can improve a bit more even after these quality of life changes, because we have dedicated missile boats, we have dedicated ships with a lot of missiles on them, and we have to make it fun for missiles. It needs to be an exciting gameplay, and right now it's more like, and I'm very sorry to be that honest, but it's more like a side thing to do. The benefit though, and I have to advertise it, is missiles ignore the armor checks because they do so much damage. So if you have a small ship and you want to crack the armor, use a missile.

It seems like one of the more difficult tasks, because if you have a ship with missiles, you want them to be amazing, you want them to be effective, you want them to be devastating, because they cost a lot to reload. CR is always on about how replacing a missile or a giant S7 torpedo should cost you a lot, just like it does in the world. So if it costs you a lot, they have to be effective. But on the flip side, if you're on the other side of that missile or torpedo, you need to have options to defend yourself, to survive and whatnot. And no matter what you do, somebody is going to be like, 'yes, that's great,' and somebody is going to be like, 'that is the worst change ever.' It's very hard to find a middle ground there, because if you get killed by a missile, missiles are terrible; I should have had more things to do. There are a couple questions in here; we've sort of hit all of them, so I'm not going to ask why there's no lead pips on shooting down torpedoes and stuff. We wanted to make it easier to shoot down the torpedoes, but if you do that, then torpedoes become less effective. So this constant give and take...

Yeah, but even with the torpedoes, right now with the lead pips, it's basically impossible because they are traveling so fast. So we have to reduce the speed again so that they feel also correct for a torpedo, because a torpedo should not target a small fighter, because they are meant to...

Everything's interconnected. If you mess with one thing...

There's always got to be this element of chance. You can't make it so that you can always shoot them down, because then they're ineffective. And you can't make it so that they always hit and destroy their target. So there's always got to be this gray area of chance.

Yeah, and it's a really fine balance, because it's got to make sense for both parties that what happened happened. If it hit or missed, it's got to make sense to both people that are on either side of it, which is a really difficult thing, because it's a really hard thing to communicate. Because in real life, if you've got a missile coming at you, you have one option: press the button and go evade. But if you get hit by a missile in real life, that's it. You've got to go down, right? So it's just a question of balance, and it is really fine tuning because it requires so many systems to come together. It isn't just flight, it's the emissions and everything else. So it's just a really fine balance, which we get right sometimes and we get wrong other times.

But overall, I would really say, and it feels like I'm repeating myself, with the decision that we do smaller changes continuously, we are now way better suited for where we want to go, in comparison to where we threw in a lot of changes all at once, how we worked a couple of years ago.