Finally got exactly an hour to play today, the third time since 3.0 launched, didn't feel like the PU considering my limited time frame, so took my 350R "Zero Hour" into AC multiplayer - The ship was near uncontrollable and for some reason I automatically became the target for every Saber and Hornet pilot in the match, so decided to take my Saber "Lopeta Tama" into single player Vanduul Swarm to polish up on my obviously very rusty skills....
Remember, I had an hour.
37 minutes in, I was just nearing the end of Wave 4 and getting VERY bored. I should have realized with my first target of the match, a Scavenger. Chipping through the shields with a pair of Panthers and a pair of Badgers took about 20 seconds... Longer than I had experienced previously in 2.5 and 2.6 but I thought I must have been rusty. finally though the shields 12 damage, 4 damage, 16 damage chip chip chip, I launched a missile, 522 damage and the enemy ship was still intact... wait what 522 damage? With my guns damage rate of 12 it was going to take forever to just shoot one down, and I'll tell you what, it really did.
The game became an experiment in frustration on top of frustration. Enemy shields that respawned in the time it took me to turn around and line my guns back up on them, getting to the edge of the map after 5 minutes chipping away at a target and having all that work void as they suicide on the boundary... Yeah I may have got points but I didn't get pickups to replenish my supplies.
But my biggest problem by far was this: with stock loadout I have 2 panthers and 2 badgers on gimbals. Mixing fixed with gimbaled is shite unless one of the two is an Area of Effect weapon which doesn't matter if you hit square on with. So I locked the gimbals and the biggest issue presented itself - I lost any way of telling where I was pointing my ship as the mouse reticule locked in the center and the little blue dot you had in 2.6 was not present.
Would you remove the springs to deactivate auto-centering on a joystick and just let it flop about allover the place requiring the joystick user to have to try to hold it dead center just to go in a straight line? well thats what Mouse players have by default, and if you don't have a visual prompt for where the cursor is: you're buggered. You can function but delicate maneuvering is pretty much off the table and in a game mode that needs exact aim, thats annoying, frustrating and no fun at all.
After 37 minutes, one kill away from wave 5, I quit because it was dull and that is the FIRST time i've had a "Well, i'm bored now time to go do something else" moment with Star Citizen.
What did I do with the 23 minutes I had left over? Feedback left, but I could not get close to explaining all the above in that questionnaire so I wrote this post as well.
Thanks for reading.
