No tolerance for Deviation from Strategic norm

[Lord Dick Tim]

I like this topic, I mean I like it a lot.
I didn't want to post initially because I didn't know where the conversation was going.  But strategic norm, this I am not.

I love flaky, weird, nonsense builds, even ones that don't work.  I mean, that's pretty much how flare snuck its way into the meta right?  Being creative is incredibly important, a creative and aware crew can do some odd and amazing things with the apparently worse combinations.

And when an entire team can come together to execute some strange new idea?  It's glorious, just simply glorious.  Glorious like a pyramidion with a side harpoon nailing a goldfish in the tail, keeping it steady for my spire to blow it to hell with a hellhound/chaingun mix.  Retarded setup, spectacular kill.

[Squidslinger Gilder]

Flare is more or less in cause carronades take too long and flamers are blech since the nerf a few patches ago. I changed a lot of my carronade mounts to flare. Lot easier to flare a balloon and then keep dpsing than to sit there chewing on the balloon while another enemy gets a firing angle. Only problem is noobs don't understand it and waste flares till you tell them. Watch muse next nerfs flares.

[HamsterIV]

I blame the Artemis buff/nerf for the prevalence of flares. For a brief time we had an effective gun with a very wide maximum turn. People were getting trifecta's left and right and the main engie was able to get in on the glory. Then the turning rate stole its thunder but not the desire for the main engie to contribute some pain. So we give him a flare gun to play with. The Main engie gets to make hit boxes, and doesn't feel obligated to stick to the gun because specialty ammo is unnecessary on the flare.

[Moriarty]

I ran into this today.

Context:

When i achievement hunt i do it in low pop games, because less face it if you haven't got more than 2 people you haven't really got a tactic worth talking about, so there's nothing to ruin.

Anyway pretty simple cheevo just kill ships as a gunner, So i drop into a low pop game take the flak of a gat/flak pyra. Now i knew there was already a gunner on board, but we all know you cant trust the AI to fire the gat so logically the gunner was on that, so no real issue, you'd have to be slightly anal to take offense to someone who's going to help time the flak shots even if they are a second gunner.

This guy Rokt (or something) *EXPLODED* and proceeded to tell me from his moral high ground how rude i had been by being a second gunner and question why i would do such a thing.

 Partly to fuel his outrage i was honest and told him i was hunting achievements, but i offhandedly threw in he should be grateful that he now had timing. Despite running the build he didn't seem to understand the concept and railed on a bit more, and on lobby (which was a very short time later) he left.

I think its this sort of thing that the OP was getting at,  When the reactions are divorced from reality - I mean i've never even been to COD how can i go back

[Letus]

This guy Rokt (or something) *EXPLODED* and proceeded to tell me from his moral high ground how rude i had been by being a second gunner and question why i would do such a thing.

 Partly to fuel his outrage i was honest and told him i was hunting achievements, but i offhandedly threw in he should be grateful that he now had timing. Despite running the build he didn't seem to understand the concept and railed on a bit more, and on lobby (which was a very short time later) he left.

Had a few--mostly new--players get so angry that I timed my flak.  "Aim for the weapons or something!" they always shouted...and I kept explaining that "It's quicker to destroy their everything with timing  than random shooting."

Ever since the 1-stack fire doesn't disable weapons...flak isn't real good for that, and yeah you can destroy a gun after a while if nobody pays attention to it...