What is the current direction you're looking to go for both the Ares models?
TL;DRThe Ares changes were a balance fix for the current game, not final; they'll revisit the ship once weapon tech changes allow a more impactful Ion, without committing to where it goes.
It's presumably to do with the weapons. I would imagine this is a 'why did you break my Ion' question in disguise.
Well, the reason why I did it, it's just a case of balance. It was a case of where it fitted in the game with the current energy weapons we have. We basically had to fit it within what works for the game now. And as I said earlier, the game now is different to what the game is going to be in the future. And we've been prototyping different weapon solutions, especially for the Ion, where we want to make that weapon feel much more impactful, because it's a big weapon; it's got that purpose to it. And we can't quite deliver that with the current weapon system, because it requires some changes to the core tech behind the weapons for it to work properly. So once we have that figured out, we'll definitely be revisiting that ship. And then on the ballistic side, again, it depends where we go with the ballistics. But also we see that ship benefiting from the ability to restock much more easily than it can now.
We tried a few things in PTU and Evocati. Some worked, some didn't work, but a lot of people only really saw the PTU changes, and a lot of the 'hey, why don't they do X and why don't they do Y, it would make it so much better', we'd already tried even before Evocati, and it wasn't working. So what we have now is, like Rich says, what works for the game right now. It's not going to stay like that. It will change, but where it's going to change to, we don't really want to commit to. A lot of people said, oh, it's a big gun, if people stand in front of it, they deserve to die in one shot. And yes, that is true to an extent, but a lot of what we saw in feedback, watching people play internally and externally, and the analytics, was not people standing in front of it and getting one-shot. It was almost being abusive in how it was being used in combat. So we had to do something quite radical to nerf that, to give us the time to look at other things. And there was quite a big uproar about it. It is still a pretty good combat ship. It's just been slightly hammered by various factors.