It was fine as it was.
Sniping was a greatly exaggerated problem, you only need a working brain to deal with it. But no. Whiners win.
You know, I would agree with you here. To be blatantly honest, the Field Gun has been the bane of my existence since this game went into beta. It's had so many problems. It's been literally on the razor's edge since it's inception. Even without any changes for the past 3 months (let's not count penetration testing since it never made it to production) there's another sudden outburst where there was not a day that went by where we had tons of emails complaining specifically about this gun. That doesn't even include the banter that goes on here on the forum.
Still, I ignored it also because I thought it was totally fine.
However, during a pickup match with devs my team was completely disabled and kept at bay. Granted my team didn't have the best overall loadout to deal with the situation, we knew what we had to do and it was very very difficult doing it. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't have cared because we might have been playing against an organized team. However, we release passwords to our locked pickup games on global chat and it fills up very very quickly. I don't believe the enemy ships played together much, if at all, previously.
What this shows that is it's possible for relatively new players to get on a dbl Field Gun Pyramidion and completely suck the fun out for the opposing team. For us devs, knowing exactly what was happening, it was pretty aggravating. Imagine how that would feel for an average player or a newbie? I bet they'd feel helpless and that's not the kind of game I want to make. I want to have it so with a little planning, you'll a variety of options available to you to deal with the situation.
Veteran players will always expose the nastiest of metas and give me a big headache. That's fine, though. Most of the time these strategies do require a lot of work and coordination, but they are evidence that smaller work can be done to mitigate them if they're being pulled off that consistently (by no means am I not recognizing the skill and coordination that veterans have, I just want to give them something fresh to work with). However, once the metas start trickling down to new players and they can pull them off relatively easily too then that's a good indication of something being unbalanced. This past few weeks we had TGS/Polaris videos go up and a ton of people in the game. Even anecdotal evidence from our Teachers claimed that Field Gun was a go to meta and was extremely deadly as soon as had the right loadout and minor coordination. Not good.
So that's what happened. Whiners only give me part of the equation and without trickle down confirmation whiners rarely win.
