Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Imagine you're in an interceptor in a fleet, and you go out to tackle some guy in a Sabre burning towards your fleet. The enemy fleet in the back is sniping at you, so you approach at an angle and do everything right so they can't land shots on you. As any decent interceptor pilot should do.

Then you hit that magical Orbit key. And you then go from "good" interceptor to "bad" interceptor because there is a very good chance you are going to get hit and die because your set-in-stone orbit will take you directly in-line with the angry enemy fleet's big guns.

Now, what you want to do is Orbit in a plane parallel to the enemy fleet. This keeps your transversal as high as possible, and thus keeps the big angry turrets from hitting you. If you get something that isn't perfectly parallel, but close enough, that's fine too.

However you have like, what, a 30% chance that the orbit is going to be that.

The remaining 70% chance is all the orbits that have you, at some point or another, flying directly in-line with the enemy fleet, and thus flying straight into your next lossmail.

You can't fudge anything to change your orbit trajectory either, it is set in stone by the game and it seems like the game does absolutely everything in its power to prevent you from changing it. if you are dealt a bad orbit trajectory, get used to manually orbiting because you will be doing a lot of it.

At least now the overlay actually tells us what our Orbit trajectory is. I like knowing about the possibility of dying horribly seconds before I actually die horribly, so I can then save myself by manually piloting my ship and never touching the Orbit key again.

But with all this in mind, why would you use Orbit in any serious setting unless it's for anchoring on someone or spinning around something in a PVE setting? It is just going to get you killed in any other scenario.

CCP, just let us change our orbit trajectory already. I don't even care if it's still totally random but at least no longer set in stone, like I could just press and cancel Orbit over and over until I get a good one. Just give us something to work with already.

Is there literally any viable way to implement this? Just manually pilot...

how is what he said "if it ain't fixed, don't fix it"

what he asked what "can this even be fixed"

ccp have talked about it would be extremely hard of not impossible to do this because of how the engine works

No decent pilot even hits orbit @ xxx until they're absolutely sure they are safe

It's not broken, you're just trying to turn it into something it's not designed for

They should make something that works like the Approach button on the Tactical Overlay

Press Orbit then:

- First click determine the distance you like to orbit

- Second click determine the angles

- Third last click left or right ( You will need to move your mouse just a littel bit left or right in the direction you like)

This way it will be very easy too calculate and change your orbit distance and direction according to your target. Or orbit the first target and go behind enemy lines not orbit and go behind the target itself to get shoot from the targets behind it because you and up in front of them.