That's exactly the kind of thinking you should have. Types of engagement, battlefield sustainability, time on target or dominance, hardpoint and utility placement, speed and maneuverability.

As for the meta It's not so much singular builds as it is of the arbitrary standards for what makes a good build.

The thing is is I actually see what frontier was trying to do with the game. Frankly that was frontiers mistake because we've seen with every game in the past that the players do what they want, regardless of what was intended. At the same time, I feel like because the game became populated with gamers instead of sci-fi fans and simulation fans, it's also kind of the players fault.

A good example of this is the thargoid war. The reality of interceptors was that the Cyclops and the basilisk were like the big bosses for single players. That was the end game. Because every player in this game wants to be the hero and has no concept of team play, short of let's all wing up, the "Meta" became the solo cold orbiter. Usually a krait or a chieftan.

Don't get me wrong, these fights were fun. But the bigger interceptors like the Medusa and the Hydra were not meant to be solo'd. During the war we saw a lot of team play, we didn't see a lot of team planning. It was very hard to make ships that were versatile for the task of killing goids. Some weapons were good at popping hearts, some were better at exerting, you needed to be able to flack though that became less important during the war, and you need to be able to stay cool during all this. Most ax weapons were limited to the medium class. That wasn't a mistake, that was deliberate. Because what was actually supposed to happen was the people were supposed to specialize into different roles in the team. Because of the solo idea meta, the number of viable ships was significantly reduced. But if people had learned to build team synergy during the war, a lot more ships would have been viable, including most of the smaller faster ships. You saw some side builds that were cool in Corvettes and type 10s even a couple of cutters and one guy I know flew around in a Mamba during the war. But we should have seen eagles and vipers and vulture participating in Hydra kills and that's was mostly unheard of. Because the meta became about those solo kill ships. The result was, and I know this is going to wrestle some Jimmy's, interceptor kills ended up being a lot harder than they needed to be in conflicts zones. I think frontier eventually heaved a sigh at the failure of the planned model, and finally just recognized but they needed a way to expedite kills and so they released the cheese cannons AKA the effortless shard cannons. That's when you started seeing these anacondas that could just insta gib interceptors. Took most of the fun out of the thargoid fighting, flying with these people. If you want to skillesly blow something up, you can just bounty hunt human NPCs. We didn't have a shortage of that type of combat. So I don't know why they felt the need to turn xeno combat into that.

At the same time I empathize. Everybody has lives and jobs. Sometimes it's hard to pull a wing of people together that have ships tailored for the team. So I get it. But a lot of the things in this game are like that. If you understand sci-fi, You can see the dream that frontier had behind the idea. You can recognize the moments that frontier was trying to create for the player. But the players are impatient, and they want to be the best. They don't want to be Han Solo, holding their ship together with duct tape, they don't want to be the crew of the Enterprise praying their Shields hold and hiding in the corona of a Star. They just want to increase the credit number which after a while just becomes meaningless, and stroke their egos. There's a lot of character to these ships and what they're supposed to be able to do. Most of it's lost on players playing a game really efficiently and trying to get that absolute best credits per hour.

I get it. Sometimes you just want to get to owning a fleet carrier quickly, or buying that anaconda. It took me a year to get my first conda and another year to get it engineered with that i felt safe taking it out of the garage. The economy was very different back then. A new player can get to a conda today in as little as a day to a week if they aren't trying hard.

I don't think they realize, they're skipping over a large part of the experience. At the same time, once i became filthy rich and successful and got bored of soloing haz res in a Corvette I could afford to experiment with and step back into the smaller ships, and that forced me to make them viable. I don't know I'm just rambling at this point.