no text.

[edit : yeah, a hemisphere centered at the flare, facing the direction of travel.]

[edit2 : the idea is to close the loop hole known as "flare exploding behind you" in a close up fight with flarethrowers.]

Could you explain that a bit?

Like a hemisphere from the front of the rocket?

O I C.
Reasoning?
Usually you don't move fast enough into the backside of the hemisphere for the flare to trigger.

It already behaves as a hemisphere, since the prox algorithm is predicative and gets confused with high velocities (hence, you can be flying towards a flare with a relative velocity of 500m/s and the flare will explode behind you...)

Actually the flare won't explode at all rogue.
Well not at 500 m/s anyways.
Maybe 400 m/s but 500 its too late and the flare is VOID!

Kix : So that fighting ships with flares is not a matter of sitting at 150m and waiting for your opponent to run out of flares. It encourages people to try to take advantage of the "prox fuse". So once you dodge the flare up close, you don't have to worry about it exploding behind you.

Rogue : you don't normally fight at relative speeds of 500m/s. And besides, even if this is true, it won't make it look like a hemisphere : it'll make it look like an ellipsoid.

err, if you're going full turbo

and they're going full turbo in the opposite direction and release a flare.

~560 m/s is roughly correct.

more realistic is probably 65+65+85=215 m/s

I think he's right about the hemisphere shape though, to a good approximation, players have no probability of triggering the back half, unless they're approaching from behind.

G0D : if two ships are flying at each other around full cruise speed, then the flare-ship is usually dead. However, a good flare pilot realizes that the trick to killing an up-close energy user is to backoff and try to match velocities instead. So normal engagement speeds are probably around 100m/s.

I like this. You shouldn't have to worry about flares after they're behind you, unless you back up in front of them...or something odd like that.

In fact, I don't think flares need to be nerfed at all, but something like this needs to be implemented instead.

G0D,
Your not counting the latency of each player into your equation.
The server doesn't process that fast.

And yea I guess I agree.

I vote for removing flares alltogether. Then I'd die LOTS less. LOTS less. Ane the devs would not have to worry about silly prox hemispheres etc.

Getting back to reality...

Any reduction in the effectiveness of flares can be considered to have my full support.

actually i'm against removing the "back" half of a flares prox sphere.

I've backed into them a few times, and i've backed opponents into them on occasion,

It usually goes like this:

player A is pursuing player B,
player B, backing up at full speed, releases a set of flares which player A dodges.
Player B then charges at player A, and player A reverses thrust and backpedals just a bit and catches up to the flare.

BOOM

since the flare is traveling at around 10m/s (it was fired from a ship traveling 60m/s in reverse) they can be caught.

I'm against this too. It takes a bit of skill and luck to make your opponent back into a flare that just missed, it's not a guaranteed thing, so it balances out. Just learn to fight better!

This wouldn't really change the whole backing-up-into-flares thing as much as you might think. You can still make people back into them, you just have to get them to back up more than before.

Oh, and just fyi, I entirely disagree with this idea. If you back up into a flare, it's your own fault. Don't ask to change the game because you lack situational awareness.

I've chased down stray flares before, and they wouldn't explode until I touched them. Or maybe they were UIT flares.

I'm against this because of lack of reason

Realistically: Against the idea. Why would you program a flare not to explode b/c the enemy was behind it?

Game-play: Against the idea. The prospect of pushing people into flares creates cool tactics.

Rogue and Spell : Ah, your comments about "backing up into flares" demonstrate both of you are not reading this into this carefully enough :).

Now, here is a nice one sentence recap :

It's to prevent flares from exploding BEHIND you, even if you are within "the safety fuse".

If you think a bit carefully (drawing a diagram might help!), there is no backing up required for that to happen. Or perhaps, you have not been trying to fight flare-users up close with an energy-equiped light fighter often enough ;) (that's especially for you Rogue :D).

fooz : "I'm against this because of lack of reason" is itself, ironically, not even a right way to be "against this", since there *is* a reason which I stated. However, if you are "against this because I disagree with the reason", then that's fine!

If they asplode, you're not really inside the "safety fuze" are you?

Anyway, here's a quicker recap of the thread:

Heh, I skimmed over the thread and I didn't recognize the reason b/c it wasn't in the OP and the post's wording had confused me. /me apologizes

Over reading it over about 10 more times, I (think I) finally got what you said, so now I'll disagree with it.

What's the problem with staying 150m away? Everyone does it aginst GT and they (usually) win anyways. And personally, when fighting monk, I always try to get in close where it's harder to aim flares (and the saftey fuse hinders them) and blast away with GT or MP. Although he has been getting better at killing me before I can do so...

Avalon mines, anyone? :D

but, yeah some stuff on flares does need to be fixed, if you turbo into flares/missles you wont take damage. when fighting a light craft (like a cent) I've had people do it meaningly...