I must say I'm dissappointed with this for a few reasons.

I'll bite.

1) If the Phantom was fundamentally unbalanced, then why are we not all flying phantoms?

The Phantom caused a Meta shift in competitive play that was above and beyond what any other ship has managed. A lot of players, and apparently the developers too, believe it was negatively affecting the game.

2) If the Phantom was fundementally unbalanced, then why did last year's "World" go to a fat Han, which would have also had to beat a bunch of squadrons that did not include Phantoms. So will the next FAQ include a rule to neutralise the fat Han?

Fat Han has been so prevalent because it is a reliable Phantom counter. Also X wing is balanced enough that even an unbalanced ship isn't an I win button, skill and dice will always be a factor. The phantom pushed a bunch of lists out of the competitive arena; but Fat Han was not one of them.

3) This rule change has come out after the community has already found a number of counters for Phantoms, such as fat Han and high Pilot Skill turretted ships, making the Phantom a priority target, Heavy Laser Cannons, Nera with Adv Prot Torp + Recon Spec + Deadeye, Ten Numb with Mangler, etc, all of which have worked for me in the past.

One of the issues with the Phantom is that one was forced into having a counter for this one ship specifically. Naturally with x wing's creative player base many counters were developed, the unfortunate part is that it is that a counter for this one ship had to be included to have a chance in tournaments.

4) No corresponding reduction to the Phantom's cost for what is a pretty serious loss in capability.

An 84 (86?) point 2 phantom list won a tournament. It is pretty obvious to most people that the Phantom was seriously under costed compared to other ships.

This isn't much of a nerf to the ship's maneuverability, it just requires more skill to get the same performance out of it. Now one has to actually guess where your opponent is going rather than always being able to make his or her decision the wrong one.

5) but I think the biggest factor is that: if this was so fundamentally broken, as the need for this rule suggests it is, then why has it taken so long for something to be done about it? Instead, we have all had to learn and start playing it one way, and now we all have to learn a new way, which will only lead to confusion. It's like some drunk at the wheel that has let the car drift too far one way, and now they have tried to correct it, but instead, over-steared back the other way, with obvious consequences.

I feel this is an elegant solution to a problem in the game, I for one am glad they didn't rush into a "fix" that would do more harm than good. What they did is not cripple a ship but instead get it to break less fundamental mechanics of the system.

I believe the FFG designers did err, but have shown that they are willing an able to correct their mistakes with well thought out and balanced changes.

At least the owner of this rule change will get exactly what they want, there will be far less phantoms out there from now on. I hope they are happy with this. I'm not.

The phantoms you do see will be scary because the folks flying them will be the one's who have compensated for the change and know how to be successful with it. It's still an extremely good ship. Players who needed it's ability to always make their opponents dial choices retroactively wrong in order to win will certainly be more challenged with the rule change, but it hardly makes the phantom a poor choice.

I must say I'm dissappointed with this for a few reasons.

1) If the Phantom was fundamentally unbalanced, then why are we not all flying phantoms?

2) If the Phantom was fundementally unbalanced, then why did last year's "World" go to a fat Han, which would have also had to beat a bunch of squadrons that did not include Phantoms. So will the next FAQ include a rule to neutralise the fat Han?

The Phantom wasn't unbalanced, exactly, but it was like a landmine buried in your front yard. If you know it's there, it won't really affect you. But if you don't anticipate it--if you don't prepare for that particular threat--you're going to get hurt.

3) This rule change has come out after the community has already found a number of counters for Phantoms, such as fat Han and high Pilot Skill turretted ships, making the Phantom a priority target, Heavy Laser Cannons, Nera with Adv Prot Torp + Recon Spec + Deadeye, Ten Numb with Mangler, etc, all of which have worked for me in the past.

Again, the problem isn't that no counters exist. (Some of the ones you listed are better than others.) It's that a list that doesn't include a hard counter for PS9 Whisper is disproportionately likely to lose a match against it--not an automatic loss, but maybe a 70/30 proposition.

4) No corresponding reduction to the Phantom's cost for what is a pretty serious loss in capability.

Have you played the Phantom with the new rules?

5) but I think the biggest factor is that: if this was so fundamentally broken, as the need for this rule suggests it is, then why has it taken so long for something to be done about it?

How long should it have taken, instead? You need enough time to figure out how the metagame is reacting, to formulate a fix, playtest it, get it approved, and release it.

Whether the rule has changed for better or worse seems heavily dependant on the players perspective, that is, whether they fly phantoms or not.

I'd say it depends on player skill and critical thinking abilities, but that's me.

Personally there is more stuff introduced by Scum that is of concern to me than Phantoms ever were.

I'm trying to figure out what you could possibly be talking about, here, but I'm drawing a blank.

5) but I think the biggest factor is that: if this was so fundamentally broken, as the need for this rule suggests it is, then why has it taken so long for something to be done about it? Instead, we have all had to learn and start playing it one way, and now we all have to learn a new way, which will only lead to confusion. It's like some drunk at the wheel that has let the car drift too far one way, and now they have tried to correct it, but instead, over-steared back the other way, with obvious consequences.

Because maybe FFG thought such an important change needed to be thoroughly play-tested before rushing it out, so that they didn't do what you described and make a knee-jerk reaction?

Yeah, I suspect the 80pt dual Phantom build is what really got them thinking "something needs to be done".

Yeah, I suspect the 80pt dual Phantom build is what really got them thinking "something needs to be done".

They must be packing sth huge for double yt builds than.

1) If the Phantom was fundamentally unbalanced, then why are we not all flying phantoms?

To add my $0.02:

This one specifically has to do with game theory. In a game of paper-rock-scissors, the mathematically optimal strategy is to choose each 1/3 the time. If you do anything other than the optimal strategy, then someone doing the optimal strategy will gain an advantage over you.

Now, lets pretend that Rock only loses to paper 75% of the time, and the other 25% of the time it wins. The optimal strategy will no longer be to be to go 1/3 1/3 1/3, it will be to favor rock more heavily. But you can't choose rock 100% of the time, otherwise someone else could just always choose paper and win 75% of the time. So the optimal strategy will be lots of rock, some paper, and not much scissors. The exact ratios get into a lot of math, but you get the idea.

ACD Phantoms are extremely powerful, unless they are fighting something that is higher PS than it. The Phantom has extremely HARD counters in pilot skill. If it fights against something higher pilot skill, it is completely countered. Eventually the system will reach an equilibrium state where the PS bid naturally cancels the effectiveness of Phantoms, such that Phantoms are an exactly "average" ship in terms of how likely you are to win with them. The feedback systems in the competitive meta game ensure this: if the Phantom does well, then more people will bring it. This will force more people to bring higher PS, which will make Phantoms perform less well. Eventually it has to stabilize.

If you look at the conditional effectiveness of TIE Phantoms in List Juggler (how often they make Final Cut vs how often they are represented overall), it is nearly dead even. The Phantom has been out long enough that people have adapted by bringing higher PS lists to counter it.

And that is the problem: the PS bid has been distorted because of the Phantom. Originally the developers intended to encourage a higher PS bid by introducing the Phantom. At the time the PS bid was basically completely flat from PS3 to PS9, and then PS1/2 had twice as much as everything else. They got more than they bargained for. PS3-8 overnight suddenly became very unattractive, and most of that PS bid instead shifted up to PS9+.

Yeah, I suspect the 80pt dual Phantom build is what really got them thinking "something needs to be done".

They must be packing sth huge for double yt builds than.

The Whisper / Echo build was 86/87 points. The 80 point bid was Whisper / Fel.

Nerfed and loving it. I hated that phantoms could see where everybody has chosen to move and then decide if it wanted to decloak. That's like under the new decloak rule getting to look at everyone's dials before decloaking. Tell me that's not cheating. So glad for this

5) but I think the biggest factor is that: if this was so fundamentally broken, as the need for this rule suggests it is, then why has it taken so long for something to be done about it? Instead, we have all had to learn and start playing it one way, and now we all have to learn a new way, which will only lead to confusion. It's like some drunk at the wheel that has let the car drift too far one way, and now they have tried to correct it, but instead, over-steared back the other way, with obvious consequences.

Because maybe FFG thought such an important change needed to be thoroughly play-tested before rushing it out, so that they didn't do what you described and make a knee-jerk reaction?

I would have preferred they did their extensive playtesting prior to release of the Phantom.

5) but I think the biggest factor is that: if this was so fundamentally broken, as the need for this rule suggests it is, then why has it taken so long for something to be done about it? Instead, we have all had to learn and start playing it one way, and now we all have to learn a new way, which will only lead to confusion. It's like some drunk at the wheel that has let the car drift too far one way, and now they have tried to correct it, but instead, over-steared back the other way, with obvious consequences.

Because maybe FFG thought such an important change needed to be thoroughly play-tested before rushing it out, so that they didn't do what you described and make a knee-jerk reaction?

I would have preferred they did their extensive playtesting prior to release of the Phantom.

It would be very hard to simulate what happened to the meta since last June with play-testing. There's a lot of psychology and differing player ability.

I'm glad that FFG has the courage to change the Phantom. Something needed to give.

My initial reaction was that the change was a pretty big nerf has tempered somewhat, especially after talking to a local who's won two store champs with deci-whisper. His claim is that any turn where he had his intended decloak blocked always went poorly anyway, and since that block can't happen now, not much has changed. I'm unconvinced that will remain true, once people learn how to fly against the new phantom (I think that mid-PS repositioning is going to be useful now, etc.), but I think that this penalizes poor phantom players even more harshly (I have played a lot of Echo, and losing the ability to adapt my plan to the changing board was a huge part of my playstyle). Now it's going to be this knife-edge thing, where the really good players remain really good, and everyone else just has their phantom die messily.

I think that the people claiming this is an outright buff are falling prey to ego ("my opponents are so easy for me to predict, etc."). My prediction is that by the time regionals roll around, the vast majority "it's a buff" crowd will be "bored" with phantoms and will be bringing something else. The few who do bring phantoms will do well enough (it's still a good ship), but not amazingly.

We'll see if I'm right!

5) but I think the biggest factor is that: if this was so fundamentally broken, as the need for this rule suggests it is, then why has it taken so long for something to be done about it? Instead, we have all had to learn and start playing it one way, and now we all have to learn a new way, which will only lead to confusion. It's like some drunk at the wheel that has let the car drift too far one way, and now they have tried to correct it, but instead, over-steared back the other way, with obvious consequences.

Because maybe FFG thought such an important change needed to be thoroughly play-tested before rushing it out, so that they didn't do what you described and make a knee-jerk reaction?

I would have preferred they did their extensive playtesting prior to release of the Phantom.

Playtesting can only go so far.

5) but I think the biggest factor is that: if this was so fundamentally broken, as the need for this rule suggests it is, then why has it taken so long for something to be done about it? Instead, we have all had to learn and start playing it one way, and now we all have to learn a new way, which will only lead to confusion. It's like some drunk at the wheel that has let the car drift too far one way, and now they have tried to correct it, but instead, over-steared back the other way, with obvious consequences.

Because maybe FFG thought such an important change needed to be thoroughly play-tested before rushing it out, so that they didn't do what you described and make a knee-jerk reaction?

I would have preferred they did their extensive playtesting prior to release of the Phantom.

Playtesting can only go so far.

Good playtesting can do a lot to get a game element right, and I think it did with the Phantom: it's a powerful ship, but it's also expensive, and it has a lot of hard counters.

What playtesting can't do is provide any evidence about the metagame. Metagame is all about feedback loops and group psychology, and you can't extrapolate very well from the interactions of 50 or 100 people over a short period of time to 10,000 people over months without losing validity.

What playtesting can't do is provide any evidence about the metagame. Metagame is all about feedback loops and group psychology, and you can't extrapolate very well from the interactions of 50 or 100 people over a short period of time to 10,000 people over months without losing validity.

Tue, but it was also a given that:

1. The Phantom was both very cost effective AND very maneuverable
2. Its main hard counter is higher PS, which will push the bid up to PS9

Once you are sure of #1, that it the best ship in the game until countered by higher PS (or wonky stress mechanics), I think the only question was to what extent #2 would happen. I was on record with #1 pretty strongly, since you can get that from math even without playtesting. Strictly speaking my prediction that the Phantom wouldn't outright dominate everything was true, because the feedback mechanisms prevented that from happening. Eventually its conditional success normalized. But I underestimated #2, partly I underestimated how effective it would be for a ship to be 2 out of 3 pillars simultaneously (cost effective, arc dodger, turret). That feedback mechanism needed to be very strong to overcome it. Hindsight is 20-20.

After the nerf, it's fundamentally still cost efficient unless out bid on PS, and it's maneuverability is better than average becuse of the extra decloak movement. So there will still be feedback against it, but it won't have to be as strong.

The flip side is that with Vader (post raider) and Soontir (autothrusters) becoming mainstays, PS9 is going to become normalized again anyway. So we may never get back to a "flat" PS curve as in wave 3.

But out beating Vader or Fel isn't nearly as important as it is with the Phantoms, or more correctly, the Advanced Cloaking Device.

And Juggler, what you didn't account for is the psychology. You cannot mathematically predict an emotional response.

But out beating Vader or Fel isn't nearly as important as it is with the Phantoms, or more correctly, the Advanced Cloaking Device.

Yes very true. Those ships don't like PS10, but its not nearly as bad for them as Whisper. Whisper loses half the durability @ 2AGI. Ouch.

But out beating Vader or Fel isn't nearly as important as it is with the Phantoms, or more correctly, the Advanced Cloaking Device.

aye, I'm of the same opinion

ACD has one very sharp hard counter (higher PS) and very few general counters (Stacked stress), while Soontir and Vader have a bevy of counters any list can implement (obstructions and blocking) on top of those hard counters (higher ps affects them less because their defenses are unaffected, but it mitigates their arc dodging...stacked stress just straight wrecks them, though)

None of that TL + Re-cloak + focus non-sense, Soontir and Vader expect to be flown well or they won't give you any actions

Whisper loses half the durability @ 2AGI. Ouch.

Slight digression here; is a decrease from 4 to 2 Agility actually a 50% decrease in durability?

Whisper loses half the durability @ 2AGI. Ouch.

Slight digression here; is a decrease from 4 to 2 Agility actually a 50% decrease in durability?

It's close but not exactly, from a strictly statline point of view it decreases the normalized durability from ~1.8 to 1.0.

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/128417-mathwing-comprehensive-ship-jousting-values-and-more/?p=1356092

So that's technically a 45% reduction - pretty close to half. Of course Whisper's action economy changes the equation, but it should still be around half.

What playtesting can't do is provide any evidence about the metagame. Metagame is all about feedback loops and group psychology, and you can't extrapolate very well from the interactions of 50 or 100 people over a short period of time to 10,000 people over months without losing validity.

Tue, but it was also a given that:

• The Phantom was both very cost effective AND very maneuverable
• Its main hard counter is higher PS, which will push the bid up to PS9

Once you are sure of #1, that it the best ship in the game until countered by higher PS (or wonky stress mechanics), I think the only question was to what extent #2 would happen. I was on record with #1 pretty strongly, since you can get that from math even without playtesting. Strictly speaking my prediction that the Phantom wouldn't outright dominate everything was true, because the feedback mechanisms prevented that from happening. Eventually its conditional success normalized. But I underestimated #2, partly I underestimated how effective it would be for a ship to be 2 out of 3 pillars simultaneously (cost effective, arc dodger, turret). That feedback mechanism needed to be very strong to overcome it. Hindsight is 20-20.

There's evidence from an interview, somewhere, that both #1 and #2 were intended: FFG wanted to break away from the metagame where generic pilots were overwhelmingly powerful, so they introduced a ship that brought PS bidding strongly into the game's core mechanic.

And again, the problem isn't that the Phantom is over-represented in the metagame, although it is strongly represented--as you've said, its normalized tournament effectiveness hovers right around 1. The problem is that they underestimated the strength of the reaction, and that's a psychological factor.

Back of the envelope says that if Phantoms are about 8% of all points spent, and a typical Phantom is 40% of a list, then Phantoms appeared in about 20% of all lists. Players looked at that 20% risk of encountering a Phantom in any given game (keeping in mind that also wasn't quantitatively estimable a priori ) and said, almost universally, that it was high enough to require an explicit response.

It's possible that FFG could have anticipated that effect--or, at least, that individual designers or playtesters could have put it forward as a hypothesis. But I'm not sure how you'd go about collecting evidence either for or against it, in the format of a playtest.

And again, the problem isn't that the Phantom is over-represented in the metagame, although it is strongly represented--as you've said, its normalized tournament effectiveness hovers right around 1. The problem is that they underestimated the strength of the reaction, and that's a psychological factor.

The rise of PS9+ bids can be modeled mathematically as the system reaching its Nash Equilibrium. The system has to equalize with the Phantom's normalized performance being near 1. The underlying mechanic is mathematical, not psychological. If it were only psychological feedback, then the Phantom's conditional effectiveness would not necessarily converge to unity.

The designer intent may have been to push for a psychological shift towards higher PS, but the resulting meta shift is driven by the underlying mathematical fundamentals. Once the game is released, designer "intent" kind of goes out the window, and they recognize this. As Alex said in reply to autothrusters, even they don't know how a card will change the meta.

Edit / P.S.

Yes, that's the secret sauce of a very high quality playtesting process. It's obviously not trivial but there are methods.

I must say I'm dissappointed with this for a few reasons.

1) If the Phantom was fundamentally unbalanced, then why are we not all flying phantoms?

2) If the Phantom was fundementally unbalanced, then why did last year's "World" go to a fat Han, which would have also had to beat a bunch of squadrons that did not include Phantoms. So will the next FAQ include a rule to neutralise the fat Han?

3) This rule change has come out after the community has already found a number of counters for Phantoms, such as fat Han and high Pilot Skill turretted ships, making the Phantom a priority target, Heavy Laser Cannons, Nera with Adv Prot Torp + Recon Spec + Deadeye, Ten Numb with Mangler, etc, all of which have worked for me in the past.

4) No corresponding reduction to the Phantom's cost for what is a pretty serious loss in capability.

5) but I think the biggest factor is that: if this was so fundamentally broken, as the need for this rule suggests it is, then why has it taken so long for something to be done about it? Instead, we have all had to learn and start playing it one way, and now we all have to learn a new way, which will only lead to confusion. It's like some drunk at the wheel that has let the car drift too far one way, and now they have tried to correct it, but instead, over-steared back the other way, with obvious consequences.

Whether the rule has changed for better or worse seems heavily dependant on the players perspective, that is, whether they fly phantoms or not. Personally there is more stuff introduced by Scum that is of concern to me than Phantoms ever were.

At least the owner of this rule change will get exactly what they want, there will be far less phantoms out there from now on. I hope they are happy with this. I'm not.

"I must say I'm dissappointed with this for a few reasons.

1) If the Phantom was fundamentally unbalanced, then why are we not all flying phantoms?"

Firstly, a lot of people were, secondly, because we're not all hardcore spikes only interested in winning. Some of us play this game because, you know, it's fun, rather than meaningless bragging rights.

"2) If the Phantom was fundementally unbalanced, then why did last year's "World" go to a fat Han, which would have also had to beat a bunch of squadrons that did not include Phantoms. So will the next FAQ include a rule to neutralise the fat Han?"

Last year's Worlds went to Paul Heaver because he's a goddamn incredible player of the game. You're aware there's a thing called player skill, right? Winning because you're the better player? It's not one of those games that's won in the list building phase.

"3) This rule change has come out after the community has already found a number of counters for Phantoms, such as fat Han and high Pilot Skill turretted ships, making the Phantom a priority target, Heavy Laser Cannons, Nera with Adv Prot Torp + Recon Spec + Deadeye, Ten Numb with Mangler, etc, all of which have worked for me in the past."

But you had to bring a specific counter, which warped the metagame significantly. You no longer have to.

"4) No corresponding reduction to the Phantom's cost for what is a pretty serious loss in capability. "

If after going to all the effort to power it down they then powered it back up with a discount it would be something of a pointless exercise, no?

"5) but I think the biggest factor is that: if this was so fundamentally broken, as the need for this rule suggests it is, then why has it taken so long for something to be done about it? Instead, we have all had to learn and start playing it one way, and now we all have to learn a new way, which will only lead to confusion. It's like some drunk at the wheel that has let the car drift too far one way, and now they have tried to correct it, but instead, over-steared back the other way, with obvious consequences. "

Because they have to assess if they feel it's necessary, design a new rule, throughly playtest it, refine it based on that, throughly playtest it again...

But by all means, call the FFG designers drunk drivers of design. I'm sure you could sooooo much better.

"Whether the rule has changed for better or worse seems heavily dependant on the players perspective, that is, whether they fly phantoms or not. Personally there is more stuff introduced by Scum that is of concern to me than Phantoms ever were."

You're generalising the entire community into possessing your victory-over-gameplay mindset. The vast majority of players, regardless of what they fly most, are very happy about this rule change. It's both a more interesting mechanic, a more thematic mechanic (cloak is now "it is in one of these three (or six) places rather than a super barrel roll). If anything, it's an improvement in all respects except "competitive power," but based on what you've said it's fairly clear that's all you care about.

"At least the owner of this rule change will get exactly what they want, there will be far less phantoms out there from now on. I hope they are happy with this. I'm not."

We don't care. You can go sit with the other players distraught at losing their ostenisible win button, assuming you can find more than one. The overwhelming majority'll be busy enjoying the improved TIE phantom redesign.

And again, the problem isn't that the Phantom is over-represented in the metagame, although it is strongly represented--as you've said, its normalized tournament effectiveness hovers right around 1. The problem is that they underestimated the strength of the reaction, and that's a psychological factor.

The rise of PS9+ bids can be modeled mathematically as the system reaching its Nash Equilibrium.

Sure, but--and we might take this conversation offline before anyone without the same interests dies of boredom--determining the position of a Nash equilibrium requires a relatively detailed game-theoretic model. But the parameters for the model depend on a lot of factors, and while we could probably take a decent shot at deriving such a model for the Wave 5 metagame based on tournament data, it would be difficult to develop such a result in playtesting.

In particular, the lack of determinism in X-wing hurts the applicability of Nash equilibrium in playtesting. With enough testing, the law of large numbers will wash out noise from the dice, and in fact that seems to happen pretty quickly in the wild. But if your playtesters can only get in tens of games per week, rather than thousands, the error bars carry through worryingly to your model.

And then there's the problem of multiple Nash equilibria for a given game. If each Nash equilibrium is a different metagame, how do you determine a priori which will be adopted? If there are three stable equilibria, and one represents a "bad" metagame but the other two are desirable, what do you do?

And even if you are able to model the game with sufficient accuracy and specificity to determine the Nash equilibrium, and there's only one stable metagame to worry about, you've spent a lot of time and effort to get there--and even relatively small changes could have large downstream impacts. ("Hey, what if we just moved decloaking to the beginning of the combat phase, instead of when dials are revelead?") Do you start playtesting over, and over, and over, until it's right?

None of those challenges are necessarily insuperable, but real-world constraints loom pretty large when you're looking at processes like this.

--and we might take this conversation offline before anyone without the same interests dies of boredom--

Please don't. It's more interesting than the majority of the thread thus far.

The rise of PS9+ bids can be modeled mathematically as the system reaching its Nash Equilibrium.

Sure, but--and we might take this conversation offline before anyone without the same interests dies of boredom--determining the position of a Nash equilibrium requires a relatively detailed game-theoretic model. But the parameters for the model depend on a lot of factors, and while we could probably take a decent shot at deriving such a model for the Wave 5 metagame based on tournament data, it would be difficult to develop such a result in playtesting.

In particular, the lack of determinism in X-wing hurts the applicability of Nash equilibrium in playtesting. With enough testing, the law of large numbers will wash out noise from the dice, and in fact that seems to happen pretty quickly in the wild. But if your playtesters can only get in tens of games per week, rather than thousands, the error bars carry through worryingly to your model.

Yes, it is a difficult problem to solve. If you can figure out a generalized solution to that problem then that would be extremely useful for a variety of game systems.

--and we might take this conversation offline before anyone without the same interests dies of boredom--

Please don't. It's more interesting than the majority of the thread thus far.

I have made MathWing 1.0 and 2.0 public, but I'll likely keep MathWing 3.0 and especially playtesting processes in my back pocket (proprietary) in case I want to use them for my myself someday. Feel free to carry on, but I'm keeping quiet on my end...

I'm obviously living in a different galaxy to most of the people here.

Sure Phantoms were scary the first time I flew against them, but only for a while. And there have always been complaints about one type of ship or the other. Anyone remember the "What are we going to do about Tie Swarms?"

And Phantoms were popular when they came out. But none of the competitions and other games I've been to this year (2015) had that many phantoms, certainly no where near enough to suggest there was any automatic win button painted on them.

If there has been one predominate element this year it has been big ships with 360 fire. And no, this was not just to counter phantoms, if at all. The complaint I heard pretty well though all of January from lots of different squadrons was "What are we going to do about Big Ships?" (well that and When are the Scum coming?).

And I am convinced that we were going to see a radically different mix of craft in the upcoming competitions even if this rule hadn't been changed.

At the moment, for competitions, I fly 2 x YT2400s with possibly a third weaker ship depending on how I mix it up. I consider myself an average player at best but I am winning way more often with these than I loose with these guys. And I've heard people complain that they are too strong, but at the same time I'm not going to fly a squadron I think is weak if I want to have a chance at winning.

I certainly don't think Phantoms are the best because otherwise I would be flying them instead (again before this rule came in). I think Interceptors are more fun, and YT2400s are are tougher and just as deadly. But Whisper and Echo had a unique flying signature, completely different to that of the cheaper Phantoms. And this rule change, which in my opinion, tried to fix something that wasn't even broken, has changed them now to work just like the cheap phantoms. And in that respect the game has lost something, and again in my opinion, gained nothing.