I'll try to explain:

"Realistic" movement in open space + slow projectile / slow firing weapons + long distances / small ship sizes = no feel of combat.

I like the movement, quite familiar with it's concepts from Terminus (3D) and Subspace (2D). Both of these had similar velocity/vector based combat and movement, but had a much better feel to the combat due to several design decisions.

Terminus just had more and faster firing projectiles, they also had higher velocity. Turning the ship to aim was much faster even in the beginner ship, while changing the velocity was probably somewhat more difficult, and the reverse engines were weaker then thrusters.

The result? You could chase and hit more consistently, I remember it was fun against AI, but more importantly, against other players.

Subspace solved the issue differently, you could use disposable thrusters to close in (3 per loadout, single activation with a fixed duration). It also had Proximity bombs alongside bullets. These were larger projectiles that Armed when within proximity range of an enemy, and detonated the moment and enemy ship moves away (setup to allow the bomb to close in). The closer it got, the more damage was dealth.

(Subspace balanced damage, ammo and health by tying them all to one rechargable value: energy. Energy rapidly recharged, and was used to both absorb damage and fire weaponry.)

Suggestion:
1. Make most weapons in VO proximity detonated, like FLAK with proximity triggers.

2. Reduce the power of reverse thrusters. Make rear thruster stopping and maneuvering more powerful, even just slightly.

(3. Energized hull plating with weapon fire absorbtion using generated energy? That would be too perfect...)

I'm not saying this is the only or best solution, but I do not see you attract many more players without radical changes to the combat system, and I don't mean dumbing it down. Even people who like simulators will have trouble with the feel of your game.

Hope this feedback helps.
Comments / Flames welcome.

I love you!

Most rockets and missiles work like your subspace weapons. You'd just have to rearm from time to time.

Also the later guns are a bit faster I dunno how many you tried.

I've played Terminus a while back but its flight system went a bit over my head.

You love everyone! :)

Most rockets and missiles are an afterthought, or so it seems, and not the primary mode of dueling. They are not availiable to be equipped by a new player in the first hour of play - when opinion about the game is formed.

The later weapons are faster, and ships are bigger, but the improvement, based on the numbers, is marginal. I tried a faster weapon, combat vs an actively dodging foe (my friend in a duel) still seemed quite random for both. I had experience with 3D movement games from Terminus. He didn't. We finished fights within 5% of each other, with much boredom from the process.

Before posting, I scouted your forums and noticed people had similar complaints.

The concept of the game and development style looks amazing, but the combat being so disappointing I won't be able to recommend it to others or play myself.

Rockets are anything but an afterthought i'd say.

I think, play a bit more, and see how it goes.

While I agree with the changes you'd make to combat, I disagree that combat as it is now isn't fun. :)

I'll add one thing: In addition to weapons in general being faster, we need some good beam weapons. For serious.

It's up to you.

Maybe they should give every new player one decent gun as part of the tutorial or something. The basic equipment really sucks bad.

Also, i don't think making radical changes to vo's flight/physics model is not very easy now for many reasons.
Limited developement time being just one.

To expand on missiles and rockets. Former are indeed not very useful or used much (besides swarms).
Latter are used quite a lot, almost all heavy ship pilots usually have one or two launchers, and some light pilots too.

Fights in vo aren't random either.
And they most likely aren't like the ones you are used to from other games. If that's a good or bad thing depends on what you like i guess.

If fights in vo are randombased, how come that evena after ie 10 fight i've lost/win all of them (vs same opponent). If they're random based i should've won at least some right ?

You should try combat with somebody who knows VO combat - it might change some of your perceptions.

I was the one dueling him and the early fights just wern't fun, projectile speed was a major pain. If the combat gets better later on then why not have that combat early to attract customers?

What Tenet describes as random is we were both actively dodging everything and it was always a fluke when one of us got hit unless we tried something except for actively dodging.

The combat doesn't get better, the pilot does.

Seriously, try combat with an experienced player using the same gear you had. I think your re-education will be brief. You might still not like it, but you will at least see that some of your statements are a bit premature.

Tenet_GWP I know exactly what you mean, but all is not lost! First off here are a few things to try...

When ingame type
/set fov 60
/bind i ""

For whatever reason the fov in vendetta is set too high by default, which makes judging distances really really really difficult. This will help IMMENSELY.

Secondly, the default key setup is miserable. Here is a nice layout (thanks denji) and a few tips to help things make a lot more sense.

first, go into the controls setup

bind strafe up to "r"
bind strafe down to "f"
bind strafe left to "d"
bind strafe right to "g"
bind roll left to "e"
bind roll right to "t"
bind turbo to "w"
bind accelerate to "z"
bind decelerate to "spacebar"

You will notice that this overwrites some other bindings for chat and such so you will need to figure out what different keys to set them to.

Furthermore, when in space, turn flight assist mode off by pressing the " ' " key. Additionally turn off mouselook with the ";" key. This will cause your ship to drift much like newtonian physics dictate that it should. At first it will be really disorienting, but don't get disheartened! Here is where you learn the really neat secrets.

First off now you have full and total control over your ships motion and the ability to strafe in 2 directions as well as roll and accelerate/decelerate at your whim. Now, one thing to realize with 3d flight is the fact that given acceleration, if you stay pointed at one point and accelerate, no matter how many different directions your ship is moving, they will get canceled out by your acceleration towards that one point.

In a dogfight this matters muchly because now you have full control over ship movement and can measure your target however you like. Try to keep him roughly at 150m, this gives you plenty of dodging room, also if he fires a rocket or at you, don't panic! Just back off to about 200-250m, this will allow you to keep him at a range where his rockets are incredibly hard to aim and gives you plenty of room to dodge. Due to this, essentially it makes one of his weapons nearly useless, which is a HUGE advantage on your side, while you can pelt away at him. Also if he's in a bigger ship, you can make some fast strafing and rolling moves and cosy up to him and pelt him a few times before he gets his ship orientated, then back up.

The worst part for him (if he's in a large ship) is that he can't run (not very well anyway) and has no choice but to stand there and try to fight you. Either way, you have the advantage.

Now keep in mind, this is not always true, there are always multiple variables to a fight, but what I've written can give you some neato ideas on how to handle a fight properly.

For most of the duels the gear was Free/Beginner, and we tried different modes of control - both ended up using manual fire and manual flight controls as the auto was too easily fooled by rapid vector changes. (Which was quite immersion breaking - you can code better targeting software today in 2008! Either storyline it out of the universe, or make it count.)

The challenge to duel in basic gear sounds interesting, I'll get my stop watch and see how long I can passive dodge without routing from an area. It's NOT an issue of default controls or FA. We played with MANUAL controls, no FA, and tried both Auto Aim and Fully Manual (didn't find a hotkey to toggle that..!?)

The problem is actually landing a hit when someone is randomly dodging. Weapon fire is not dense enough to compensate for the high-acceleration and small ship size - random press of a thruster button results in a perfect dodge. There is also no mechanism for catching a runner, and burning thrusters into someone backtracking makes your velocity/vector very easy to predict.

Please spare examples that don't involve equal equipment, and focus on the starter gear because that is how people EXPERIENCE your game during their TRIAL!
P.S. Pardon the dismissive comment on missiles/rockets, it was uneducated. Still, the primary weaponry in the game seems to be the Guns.

If you will only run and not try to fight back, you can run away from energy based ships but not rly vs flares :>.
And i do agree with others, try some pvp with experienced guy, since you couldn't hit at all i guess you were all just sitting at 300+ distance which is long range in vo (altho there are weapons that work on that distance, ie. rails).

Mwahahahaha, my nonstandard keybindings will reign supreme!

But on a more pertinent note, flares (rockets) are pretty fantastic. If you know what you're doing, you can destroy almost anything in a very short period of time (unless your opponent also knows what they're doing, in which case it might take a bit longer :P). I will agree that VO combat takes some getting used to, but, at least in my opinion, it's absolutely worth it. It's also starting to seem like part of the tutorials should say something to the effect of "Find a more experienced player to show you the ropes of PvP, cos you aren't going to get a good feel just fighting other newbies." It's intuitive to some people, and not to others, but there are a lot of people out there who would be happy to show you how it's supposed to happen. :)

flares (sunflare rockets, or starflare for earlier use) have the proximity detonation, and spin an enemy about. Which can be used to make an opening to nail with energy weapons. Plus, depending on your loadout, they can be the bigger damage dealer.

Unless a projectile can change course during flight or you can predict the targets next movement, I don't get how the targeting system can work any better than pinpointing where to fire in order to hit them based on their current vector. And the auto aim simply makes it far easier to aim at that exact location. I might be missing something though; I'm not calling myself an expert on targeting systems.

and go for the experienced players to learn PvP from as others have said.

We did not sit at 300. We were often very close. We were both rotating and strafing using manual flight, and avoiding predictable patterns.

Targeting system can't be based on vector, as it seems to be, it should be based on velocity. One can keep minimal velocity but rapidly change vector, making the Auto-Aim miss all around me from very close distance. If I'm mistaken and it's already velocity based, I can imagine an average velocity based algorithm to reduce sensitivity as distance decreases.

Flares are not available in the first ships we could buy during the tutorial and right after it.

Uh, the point of autoaim isn't to be perfect. That would be excruciatingly boring. "Improving" it would be time well wasted.

Correct, but then why is it only offered from the options menu? Why can't it be at least toggled on and off? (did I miss a hotkey listing?!)The Free Gear can't be that bad, 130m/s projective velocity and 0.3s fire rate. The best weapon we bought after tutorial was 170ms and 0.2s. Still, the feeling of the game didn't change much.
It's impossible to change your opinion - the hardcore members of what seems to be a niche game with relatively low population. That's understandable and expected (been there myself).

One more question:
Do you feel your game will survive considering the other space flight twitch-based MMO games that are in development?

Yes you can toggle it, press ":". Also i challenge you for newebie ship duel with newbie guns, iw ill show you how is it done :D

Also this game is not scared of other mmos that are in developmetn in same manner that muds are not. It's different kind of game.