Heh if you think these remnants of PREY are bad, good thing you weren't around for the majority of QRY's bullshit and drama. We're not all toxic and elitist, but a lot of us are tired of trying to explain why lockons are a bad mechanic and hurts the airgame, and likewise we are tired of dealing with people who use them BECAUSE of their rage potential.

What actually did this to the air game IMO, and made many of the elite veterans toxic towards new players, was the new nanite resource system. Before the system, the air game was the one place in the game that could truly allow skill to shine through, because there was reduced availability of ESF's (and vehicles in general). The skies were dominated only by people who were willing to put up with the frustration of waiting for resources to slowly tick, or continent hop until you had better resource gain. If your faction was warpgated on a continent, you could end up waiting something like an hour before you had the resources to pull an ESF (or tank or whatever). So you would have to go to another continent where you hopefully had better resource gain to get enough to pull. Not only that, there were also timers, and even if your timer was fully certed, you would have to wait for your timer to count down before you could pull again. At best IIRC this meant you could pull every 5 minutes. So essentially it made ESF's a lot more precious per pull. Only the people who REALLY wanted to learn would put up with that restrictive frustration. A culture developed among pilots built around this understanding that investing your time meant a lot, and using lockons was tantamount to spitting in the face of everyone's hard work, and people were shunned and punished often for using them.

With the new resource system though, the commodity cost of an ESF dropped like a stone, so now there are MANY new pilots, who weren't forced to push through the frustration of trying to learn to fly with an ESF you desperately tried to keep alive. They are as disposable as tissues now, to the point where if you pull the wrong loadout you can just wait a minute and pull another and not be any worse off. Since survival no longer has a real tangible benefit, there is less of a barrier for new pilots, and less understanding of why a low skill, easy, and overpowered game mechanic hurts what used to be a high skill dance for the few. It has been a very tough change for pilots to adopt to, and one that DBG has been unwilling to address.

What the old guard is looking for, I think, is to have the system balanced around skill, rather than around numbers and lock-ons like it is. Of course that may impossible without introducing restrictions again. A reduction to lock-on effectiveness may be at least the compromise we are hoping for, and hopefully we can find a middle ground.

I still do not use lockons, because I hope more people follow my lead. It usually ends up with me frustrated, but I understand the allure of using them, and don't begrudge people (even though I might gank you later for it). I am not an ace, merely an above average pilot, but I still love the air game dance, and am more than willing to die for a good fight.