Yogi Klatt · Principal Vehicle Programmer

At the moment, not. Honestly, the team, we don't know yet if we're keeping this or not. At the moment, we don't see any reason to actually allow that, because we're really fast and we would like at least the opportunity that the counter gameplay against missiles in NAV mode has more to do with your maneuvering than just putting out some countermeasures. Actually, maybe Brent and Bayor, could you talk about how this is currently being used in the Arena Commander modes?

Michael "Bayor" · Director of Player Experience

Sure. What we see is that people are using missiles to counter someone moving into NAV mode. Typically, when somebody is moving into NAV mode, there's a spool-up period. If you're paying attention to the signature, you can actually see an EM spike on the ship when they go into NAV mode. And so people who are skilled and understand what that looks like can already start to spool up their missiles to counter that. Or they can watch the speeds. They can watch the rate of closure or the rate of separation that they're seeing, which is available on the UI. And they can start to lock on a missile and launch one to counter that and force them either to drop out of NAV mode to launch countermeasures, or to figure out a manual way of evading, or take a hit from a missile. There are some balance things I think we can probably talk about in the future to figure out how to get that to work a little bit better, but it is interesting gameplay and it does add a little more spice to the use of missiles than we had before.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And some of the behavior I've seen is folks dropping chaff and then switching into NAV mode, which is a tactic that's viable because the chaff can't be fired in NAV mode. And I want to be clear, you're saying that right now the thought is that it's not usable in NAV mode. That doesn't mean that some very compelling argument can't be made and change our minds.

Rich · Lead Game Designer, Vehicle Experience Team

Yeah, and that's a really good point. This is about the now. When we talk, we're talking about the now. We don't sit here and go, we're never going to do this or we're never going to do that. We've made certain decisions based upon things we've learned and things we've seen along the way, but those things change. So we're definitely not afraid of changing that rule in that circumstance. It's one of the things that's open. We thought it might work that way, but if it doesn't work that way in game and the feedback says otherwise, we can change it.