Concerning normal matches, and I am saying this again just to make sure, we have to rely on the tutorials teaching new players what to do in case of fire.
No offense but this is a really terrible philosophy
Any game developer can tell you that 90% of users will never read the manual/play the tutorial, let alone pay attention and remember everything it teaches you. Tutorials are just not a very effective method of instruction. Relying on a tutorial to teach new players a relatively complicated strategy isn't going to work, and if failure to understand/deploy this strategy results in the ultimate frustration of your entire ship being on fire, a lot of new players are going to prematurely pass on this incredible game.
To put things in perspective, and since the 'greenhorn' perspective is definitely needed
Here's a little tangential tale: I'm a relative noob; my crew (all friends who got in on the 4-pack sale) and I have been playing fairly often for the couple months since the sale. We have a pretty good understanding of the mechanics, and can almost always go 5-0 against teams of randos. We, like almost everyone ever, didn't bother with the tutorial; just jumped in, excited to explore this game, and had no issue with that. This game is a great example of "simple to understand, hard to master" and we picked up on all the important mechanics within the first few games. Sure we had some frustration the first time we ran into a blimp popper, but it wasn't game-breaking; there were clearly things we could do to counter it (better communication with teammate-ship, keeping distance, clinging to every meter of altitude like its divine). That kind of introduction allowed us to fall in love with the game, and binge on it for hours whenever we get the chance.
The very first night the 1.3.6 flamer hit, we played 3 games and quit in frustration, and have only bothered assembling to play once since then. We did better in that second time, but only because we equipped every single crewperson to counter the flamethrower, and planned against it every second of every match. The
presence of 1 single gun on the enemy ship dictated every aspect of our strategy. Now maybe our relative lack of experience played into this; maybe the elite players don't have to work so hard to deal with it. But I would guess that the majority of players are closer to our skill level than to the elite players' (who seem to be the biggest contributors in this discussion). And again, we are fairly decent-- couple months worth of experience, and a much stronger crew than most of the people we face in the game. How can you honestly expect any real noobs, let alone (and god forbid) first-timers, to figure out enough of how the game / metagame works to deal with the flamethrower? For such a frustrating weapon to be so easy and effective is just going to be a major deterrent to a growing community.
TLDR; The flamethower is just way too easy to use and hard to counter for anyone but the most coordinated and elite players. You can't count on a tutorial to fix that. If my team of relatively experienced friends was frustrated out of the game in 30 minutes, new players are in for a very rough time.
Does this end the discussion? Please let us be more professional and refrain from moving in circles or does somebody have something to say that hasn't been stated before?
I haven't seen anyone concretely respond to Sammy B.T.'s mathematical breakdown of why requiring engineers to chemspray + repair is an alarmingly huge efficiency slowdown. Maybe I've missed it; there are a few comments anecdotally suggesting otherwise, but this looks to me like an unexpected side effect of the new flamethrower that makes it even more powerful than intended... I don't think the discussion can be wrapped up until that's actually answered (and Sammy has numbers backing up his argument so any counter-argument should have them too
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