It makes sense. Rey can do anything without training or experience.

She's PS8 for two reasons.

First, she's shown as a good pilot in the movie. No-brainer there.

Second, her ability works best with a higher PS, especially when combined with the new Falcon title. It means you are both more likely to actually get ships in arc and you are taking less risk by putting ships in arc because you often shoot first.

A lot of people forget how much game mechanics can affect PS. Hera from Star Wars Rebels is a crazy good pilot to the point she could basically punk Darth Vader, but she's PS7 because her ability becomes absurd at anything higher in a way that's unhealthy to the game experience. Similarly, Dengar's never been shown as a particularly amazing pilot in the EU (Beyond LOL Corellians), but he's PS9 because Scum needed another PS9 ship and like Rey there's more incentive to actually use his ability when you can move last.

Hera was a good pilot, but I don't remember her being as good as everyone on the boards here seems to say she is. When did she punk Vader? And I distinctly remember her getting shot down (essentially, even if she escaped into hyperspace) by Fenn Rau (who I'd love to see in game as a high PS ace for a mandalorian fang fighter in the scum faction).

Leading Vader into the tractor beam trap.

Obviously she's not as good as Vader, but it's just an example of how good a pilot she is. Another example was when she flew the B-Wing prototype and managed to get it doing all sort of ridiculous agile stuff.

You are right that she got shot up by Fenn Rau's forces, though that seems to be the inevitable result of piloting an A-Wing in Rebels. And she was intentionally making herself a target to help Phoenix Squadron escape.

I'm not sure that leading Vader into the tractor beam trap makes her as good or better a pilot than he is. All that required was for him to follow her, not for her to outfly him.

I'm thinking about doing a walk about in the Sahara desert for the next 15 years and see if I come out an ACE fighter pilot.

I'm thinking about doing a walk about in the Sahara desert for the next 15 years and see if I come out an ACE fighter pilot.

Depends. Will you spend your resting times in a professional flight sim?

Don't forget to collect some scrap to level up your mechanical skills!

Make sure you have a Mysterious BackgroundTM and insane amounts of magic mitochondria.

Alright, I skipped the last few pages.

I think this gif pretty much sums it up:

Yes, Rey is amazing at stuff. So what? Why is that such an issue?

It's not like it would be IMPOSSIBLE to explain how Rey got her abilities - certainly, there are better pilots/force users/mechanics/etc than her in the series, already. It's just that the movie makes no attempt to do so at all. It doesn't even hint that there IS an explanation, just...*pow*...she's immediately perfect at everything she tries.

At least little Annie in the prequels had an "unusually high midichlorian count", which everyone groaned at, and didn't really get elaborated on...but it meant there was a reason he was closest-character-to-Rey's-level-of-unnaturally-good-at-everything.

The most common anti-midichlorian complaint is "WE DON'T NEED AN ANSWER TO EVERYTHING"

It's a crazy day when people start citing "Midichlorians" as good writing.

I didn't say it was good writing - indeed, it was pretty hacky writing. But at least it indicated there was an explanation. We got more of them in the OT - Luke's father was the 'greatest star pilot in the galaxy'...and he was pretty good flying, himself. So it would follow he could probably handle an X-Wing with some training (even though he still almost got shot down twice and had to be saved by Wedge then Han). Han Solo, himself, was a decent pilot - but had a long history as a smuggler, trained at the Imperial Academy, and even then screwed up pretty regularly. They didn't (at the time) go into detail what those things MEANT...but clearly indicated 'hey this character is pretty good, and there is a reason for it, we'll get to that later'.

Rey didn't even get anything as half-explained as 'unusually high midichlorians'.

It's obvious that she's strong in the Force. There are six previous movies that show how the Force makes someone really badass. What more explanation do you need?

Part of what's throwing people off - I speculate - is part of the intention. I don't think that we were meant to realize that Rey was the main character, until she started doing the really amazing stuff in the movie. In the trailers and looking at the toys that came out, and the available imagery, you would have thought that Rey was supporting cast. In the trailer you saw Finn with the lightsaber, not Rey.

I think they wanted to surprise us with Rey. The fact that she was good at stuff was supposed to be explained after-the-fact with the revelation that she's the force-sensitive one; not Finn or anyone else.

We have as well 6 movies establishing that you need TRAINING to become badass even with the force. Even little Anakin had training. We have as well about 48 hours of clone wars that make this point very clear, training, discipline/passion and lots of dedication. Luke was spending his teenage years flying speeders, Anakin was spending all his work and free time on flying and mechanics, his abilities were enhanced by the force, but he was actually training this stuff all the time.

And now comes the interesting stuff, we see something similar with Rey, she was a scavenger with a self-build swoop. So she had mechanics and flying experience, though giving her 8 right now is a stretch, BUT she will have even more training in the next two movies, so 8 might be actually fine.

Still …