I do eat Madrugers; most of them are poorly equipped and many are driven by people who think "I'm in a tank, I'm invincible!" and haven't spent anything past the 400,000 SP to sit in them. I have spent a million SP on the Swarm launcher skills alone; the Weaponry, handheld weapon upgrades, and light weapon operation skills put me up to 1.8 million invested before I even get into the dropsuit command/upgrades skills to fit these swarm launchers on the suits, and all the other weapon skills I've invested into so I can fight my way to a position to get a lock on. When I've invested 2 or 3 times as much into killing tanks as the tanker has into surviving, yes I should come out on top.

A well fit Madruger can still get away from me; a poorly fit madruger with a good driver can still get away from me. These are standard tier, non-specialist HAVs; they are not the be-all, end-all of tanks. I can only ever kill a Falchion or Vayu with help from other AV players, and these are still standard tier tanks going up against proto AV.

This update will make swarms deal damage faster, but it will only increase our damage output in the sense that you will have less time for your shields/armor repairers to kick in between shots. That "Damage Taken" stat at the end of the match won't be going up, and it never will because the damage per shot of AV has already peaked; your tanks, on the other hand, WILL get better, and I will have a much harder time killing you. Your time is coming, be patient.

Also, I actually agree that the invisible missile thing is garbage and needs to be fixed; if you guys get a warning when you are close to a mine, you should get a warning that someone has locked onto you or that missiles are headed your way.

I never said they needed to be buffed, only that they aren't as OP as you guys are worrying. I also specifically mentioned that I agree invisible missiles need to be fixed, and that you are still using standard fit tanks against proto AV. Tough it out for 1.4, wait for 1.5 when you get your good toys.

If you are getting killed by teams of AV players, when you have no infantry support to back you up, don't complain when you get ganged up on. 1 on 1, yes a tank should win against a lone guy with a missile launcher. 1 tank against 3 or 4? Not so much.

I have a feeling the swarms got buffed now to help with vehicle balancing in the next patch. Basically it sounds like this is how they want the swarm launcher to work over all and instead of changing it when the redo vehicle they are doing it now. This gives them the advantage of see how much buff/debuff they need to do on the next patch for vehicles by watching all the data. If they waited for the next patch then it would be a reworking of av/vehicles without any control elements. The only information the could go on is internal play testing and "yeah it looks good on paper". So if this does become op till then I am sorry pilots but I think its for the better.

This topic really underscores the need for a Dust test server that players can use, not just devs. Something that is accessible to the entire community, and that does not affect your main characters stats. I know I'd be willing to spend a little time each gaming session playing with different fits, if it provided usable data for the devs in regards to balancing, and I'm sure many others would as well.

I don't know if it's ever been explicitly said by the devs or not, but after 6 months of playing and reading the forums, I get the idea that many of the non-sensical (from the player's perspective) nerfs and buffs have to do with providing devs with data to balance with... they need to see what a particular weapon/vehicle/fit looks like as both underpowered and overpowered, so that they can find the right balance to tweak it to. Basically, it seems like the devs are still testing in production, and just not telling us -- and it becomes irritating because it has an actual affect on the ISK and stats of our characters. What's worse, it leads to ill-will towards the devs and amongst different classes of players in the Dust community.

What would be ideal would be a small test bed that we could all log into from the main menu, and try different fittings out with. The devs could just come out and schedule testing for certain fittings -- just put up a post saying, "Hey guys, today on the test server we're gonna make Swarms OP, so all you AV and tankers jump in for a bit so we can get some data regarding all this". I know I'd be willing to participate.

It's the same reason we get free crap out of the blue every once in a while, or through "challenges". The free stuff I expect include items that the devs want to test. The other day I got 5 Caldari medium suits out of the blue (I guess everybody did), and I can guess it's because the devs want data on that suit for some specific reason.

Or why the Flaylock was released with the stats it was, which some mercs were saying was OP before it even came out. The devs probably knew it was OP, but that's not exactly what they needed to know to balance... they need to know, quantifiably, how OP it was. So they released it with OP stats, and measured since the start of Uprising how it performed, so they could see where they needed to tone it down. Same with the Tac, and probably every other weapon that gets QQ'd about around here.

We're truly still in beta, to a certain extent. I just wish CCP would move fitting testing off the production server, and somewhere controlled where it's known that you're playing with an under/overpowered fitting, and it doesn't affect your main alt. Make it invite only, if they want. They can create test alts for a pool of vets, and fiddle with the fittings they want us to play with, even SP amount and allocation if they want, according to the data they need to gather. I think most bittervets would be happy to participate. Nobody's gonna ragequit if they die 30 times in a test round playing with an underpowered fit, if they know upfront that it's to help create a better game.

To publish a client release it has to go thru Sony QA. It takes the same amount of time and money to publish a new version that attaches to TQ If they published a test client we would not see the changes in game for another month at the earliest.

Yeah, I would think more like compatibility issues. I won't get into specifics, but for the company I work for, whenever one of our clients submits software of some kind, our devs also check for malicious code. Not that CCP would do that, but Sony's SOP I'm sure is to screen every bit of code that is hosted on their servers for compatibility, bugs (in terms of operating on their console, not playability of the game itself), malicious code, etc.