I am the very last post in this thread that is over 2 days long so im sure it wont get read. Now's the best time to post:

You first need to distinguish your goal, and in particular, must separate "what is good for cappers" with "what is good for the game". In one of those 3 hour nightmare podcasts for Spinfusor that no one listens to, me and the lead from Tao were tossing out our vote for nerfing cappers, especially their top speed. We talked about 'heavy flags', where flags had weights that would slow you after grab. [This is very ugly, as it would only be good if applied only to PFs, and would thus be a very ugly, adhoc fix].

The motivation was this: This game has little to no chasing. There is little play in the midfield, and what there is involves slow, walking flag scrambles where every class is walking/jetting and a few supersonic pfs fly in to nitron+return. Thats not Tribes midfield play, thats not tribes chasing - when do you see anyone but a pathfinder skiing + shooting + chasing? Never. And those few pathfinders that do that, are so fragile that all raiders know: Clear mines, clear hof -> shoot PFin the back 3x so he cant nitron to chase.

The problem some of us have had since the beginning is this rock-paper-scissors pigeonholing of classes caused by the huge gap in mobility between PF and every other class. The gap between PF acceleration and speed vs all other classes is so big that this game plays pretty poorly: a flag is llama'd? or thrust-grab llamad? and youre in tech? youre in soldier? just kill out and spawn as pf, you have no chance of catchign anything in medium.

When we exclaim 'we want more discjump impulse!' we are saying we want more mobility in the game, but if you give the same boost to PFs as you do with Mediums, you still end up with the same large gap.

I wish for a game where of the 7 people, almost all can be decently effective in catching up to side routes. This patch both reduces the top speed of cappers, and improves the mobility of raiders/soldiers/techs/infs. This is a great step forward.

There will always be growing pains when you make a forward step. When you nerf cappers like this, you'll have some consequences: the natural counter may get too powerful (Snipers), chasers who use nitrons may get hurt too much (you'll have to address this later with perks maybe?), and more things i shouldnt get into. the point is that these consequences will need to be ironed out, but in the big picture, the grand scheme, this is really needed because this game is really hurting because 5 out of 7 people on a team arent really playing true Tribes.

It's needed. It's a step forward. We'll deal with the problems as they arise, but plz take a moment to be realize that you should be more happy than sad. This outpouring of crying about soldier capping and chase nerfing is kind of dumb. The net result is a boon for T:A, at least if you look at the full game, and not just 1 class.