Hi everyone, just a few points I've been thinking of about the consequences of having an experience points system etc, please feel free to comment and shoot them down at your leisure:

Any pilot skills will tend to make the stronger players even stronger

Imagine a new player to the site with a novice pilot (if we have Aces we would probably have novices too with penalties to dice rolls), facing someone like ksnake or pokerguy (no offence guys your both just bloody good ) with a triple ace pilot the chances for the novice are basicly zero and death would probably happen rather swiftly.

When would the skills apply?

Most players tend to have a number of games underway at the same time, are we advocating using a seperate pilot in each of these games? In which case the stronger/more active players would tend to rapidly build up a huge roster of Aces and even for the average player keeping track of 40 or 50 seperate pilots wouldn't allow much sense of character development and just add an extra level of complexity as you have to pick which of your stable of pilots you want to use in each game. The alternative would get even more confusing if you had just one current pilot to use in all games, he could get a kill in one game die in the next etc and keeping track of skill levels earned in this way would be a nightmare I'm sure.

Why risk your star pilot when facing somebody better than you?

This is related to the first two points, if you get to choose which pilot to use for each individual game, surely it makes sense to save your best pilot to use against oppenents you feel you have a better than 50% chance of beating and not risk him in huge scenarios where extended combat or a combination of multi plane shots is likely to take him down. I feel that this could again lead to beating up on the new kid as people rush to improve their abilities at the expense of players they view as easy kills.

Please let me know what you think and of possible solutions

BladeRunner