Pilot Archive

Okay, so I admit a very good post by leaph called "A few more thoughts on Pilot 'stuff'" inspired me to write this post.

I think of it as my history in JTL so far, I'm also bored at work and can only stare at lines of vb.net code for so long while pretending to work without looking like I'm typing anything .

I've been playing this game since beta 3 back in early 2003, this is my first MMO of any kind from being a FPS fanatic previously and despite's it's bugs has got me completely hooked on the persistent world genre.

I was so looking forward to JTL coming out, I enjoyed the ground game immensely but a lot of what makes star wars, for me, are 2 key scenes:-

1. Han solo piloting the millennium falcon through the asteroid field in empire strikes back, weaving in an out and proving that imperial pilots fly ships about as well as storm troopers fire rifles.

and

2. The scene directly following "it's a trap!" in return of the Jedi when the swarm of tie fighters flies at screen then breaks off to engage the fleet.

The trouble is, I have ALWAYS been rubbish at space sims, even back as far as elite on the c64 and colony wars on the playstation I have had great difficulty flying and fighting and dodging effectively and usually ended up un-installing the game or selling the cd in frustration.

But I put that at the back of my mind as I got accepted into the beta, I thought to myself; This is a star wars space game and it's going to have 100s of other pilots all flying in space at the same time I have to get over my flying skill "disability" and give it a go.

Being a long time rebel on the ground I'd never experienced the imperial side so I created an imperial pilot on the beta server and set about learning how to fly, I got myself a top of the range Logitech cordless joystick with more buttons than my keyboard and gave up on it after a week, going back to mouse and keyboard. I managed to get the hang of the controls and started flying reasonably well, I got blown up quite a lot but I didn’t care, it was only beta.

So when launch time came about I decided I was going to be freelance so I could fly the yt-1300 and hopefully a firespray, I happened to be in coronet at the time so I signed up to corsec, all was going swimmingly until I hit tier 3. I just could not get the hang of multiple swarms of furballs of ships, I would die every time, I once completely black-barred myself from so many deaths and it took a doc a good hour to get my wounds fixed up. I tried to quit corsec, assuming I'd picked a hard squadron (don’t laugh ), I couldn’t figure out how to do it. While everyone else seemed to be doing okay I was struggling and it was beginning to get me down. I helped the first ace in our guild do his corvette mission and I got wiped out in dathomir space before we even got to last nav station. I used to have real fear about having to do that corvette mission myself, in short, I gave up on the pilot profession as a bad idea for about a month. My old guild disbanded, a bunch of idiots moved in on the island we were calling home and created a city in the middle of it, I joined another guild and was more concerned with getting all that sorted out than grinding a profession that I was rubbish at.

Then about a month or so later another ace pilot in the guild told me I was being stupid, he took me up and covered my a$$ in an x-wing and helped me through tier 3, I got through it but couldn’t shake the feeling that the profession had beaten me, I explained this to the ace, he asked me "what droid commands are you running?" I replied "Droid commands?", "OMFG!" he replied, and took me round the vendors telling me what droids to get, what chips to buy and how droid commands worked. Oh my god, It was like a completely new profession, I died less and less, started to get into component stats more, tried different ways of flying, I started to go into kessel more and more, getting the hang of taking out gunboats, in next to no time I was 4444 and flying a pretty well kitted out (for a novice at ship stats that is) rihk. I tried and failed to take down the vette several times, I still couldn’t get over my "fear" of it for some reason, I always fumbled it or did something stupid. I was close to giving up again until another of the guilds aces took me up in his yt-1300 and took out the vette with me running between the turrets and the operations chair, I finally got my ace medal, spent 8 million on a firespray and I was hooked on space after that.

I never actually felt like a master though, I found out that corsec is the easiest pilot squad and I had considered it hard, I also felt like I'd cheesed my way through master so I made it my mission to prove I was worthy of the ace title, I took my wife under my wing (she was struggling through tier 3 rebel) and helped her master, took out the vette solo in my KSE and started to feel like I knew what I was doing. Then ROTW came out and I'm ashamed to say I got caught up in the JSF bandwagon, I dropped all rebel faction on my alt char and grinded through storm squadron up to 4333 (I didn’t know it was the hardest squad at the time) and got the JSF deed, I intended to master but I felt, as a rebel char in a rebel guild, that I should become rebel again. So I dropped imperial pilot and grinded rebel pilot to master in a week, only needing help from 1 wingman on 1 mission. I found I was too reliant on the JSF a lot though, I defended it on the forums religiously because I loved the ship so much, I just couldn’t get away with the low mass on an a-wing. I got over my fear of the ISD and PVP in deep space by drinking heavily one night with some friends and deciding in a drunken stupor "im gonna kill shum impsssh!" Took the ISD down pretty easy, got killed twice in deep space, sobered up, got my act together, kitted out my ship a lot better and went back with a vengeance, I now hardly ever get killed in PVP battles, I'm not a fantastic PVP'er yet but I'm working on it.

Then I decided, much like most of the pilots on this forum, that I was going to go for the 9 ace milestone, trouble is I really like my characters the way they were setup and didn’t want to have to sacrifice everything so my solution, get another account, I also decided that it was time to get a shipwright so this new char was going to be my 9 ace character and a shipwright, I immediately started on both.

I approached my rebel guild saying I was going to be an imperial pilot to star with, they said fair enough and told me I was stupid to not finish storm squadron in the first place (doh!) so I proceed to try inquisition first, initially I was disappointed with the imperial ships and I'm ashamed to say did most of it in a heavy tie. I posted on the forums that imperials got bad ship selection and got flamed pretty bad, I learned that being an imperial pilot teaches you more about mass management and ship handling than any other pilot profession, I ditched the heavy tie and moved to a tie-bomber then upgraded to a tie advanced at the end. I then learned a LOT about mass management because I fell in love with the tie-advanced, with 65k mass the same as an a-wing but 2 hard points I managed to get it set up really nicely with a mix of crafted and re-components. I realized that if I can do this with a tie advanced I should be able to setup an a-wing in the same manner and start to move away from my reliance on the JSF. I mastered on Monday morning (I posted the story on the forums earlier, it was a crazy vette mission) and didn't need help from a single wingman through the entire squadron.

I know spend 75% of my time in the air, my guild mates all think I'm crazy and have a corvette killing addiction, even the ace pilots that I relied on for help in the early days now recommend me to others as a wingman and pilot helper, I've come from never playing a space sim in my life to loving every minute of my time in space. The community, also, rocks, with some really hardcore players who know what they are doing always ready to give advice, we all have ego's because we know that the space game is all reflexes and no random number generator affects the outcome of our actions, only ourselves.

In short, I love JTL, it's the best part about this game and this community has helped a lot to keep it that way, I'll keep inquisition for a week or 2 while I master shipwright then it's on to the other eight.

/salute and thanks for reading.

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Isamu-alva wrote:

In short, I love JTL, it's the best part about this game and this community has helped a lot to keep it that way, I'll keep inquisition for a week or 2 while I master shipwright then it's on to the other eight.

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Another great post. Its few and far between I find a post of that length that I enjoy (and acually make it) to the end, let alone 2 in one day!!

glad you stuck with it