20 hours ago, KommanderKeldoth said:

An experienced player DOES have a chance of beating a less experienced player flying a higher pilot skill ship.

1) BLOCKING. Lower PS ships can force a bump which spells doom for arc dodgers.

2) Using arcs intelligently. If you are going up against Soontir and his ilk you cannot just fly right next to each other in formation with largely overlapping arcs. You need to think about area denial and setting up kill boxes. Ideally strive to force a bump inside of a 2+ arc kill box.

And if it has come down to 1 v 1. Say an academy pilot vs. Jake Farrel in the end game...

Well, Jake SHOULD win that match because he is way more expensive than an academy pilot points wise.

1) yes, I mentioned blocking. I enjoy it as part of the game because it requires you to accurately predict the opponent's maneuver, however I also mentioned that game-design wise it's not very thematic. For instance imagine that the reward for correctly guessing your opponents maneuver was that you got on your opponent's 'tail' and got a bonus as a result. Is there any part of a star wars space dogfight scene where the equivalent of BLOCKING occurs? I can't think of one.

2) Yes i understand the process whereby you combat an arc dodger with a swarm. I'm painting with a broad brush here, but there are certainly situations where the game shuts down, and many of the things they have needed to FAQ are related to this. You are describing a situation where there is still a game, and beyond that yes, a 1v1 matchup of an arc dodger v an ace is a situation where the ace ought to have an advantage, but it would be good for the game if a skilled player had more ability to leverage their skill, instead of being nearly automatically shut down. And it's not just arc-dodgers i'm referring to, it's maneuverable large base ships like Dash, for instance, that can maneuver so effectively that they always end up out of optimal range or out of arc of lower PS ships (and TLT is the exception here.... its one of the crude tools they used to attempt to rectify this stress point in the game)

Reconsider your idea of a 1v1 matchup. Instead consider a chess game, where you have a large disparity in skill, but the skilled player is lacking some good pieces (lets say a queen a knight and a bishop... or something like that. Now It's pretty easy to imagine that game still being won by the skilled player, and this is simply because there's so many ways to leverage skill in that chess game... a lot of interactions between the pieces.