Put a nebula cloud that turns off all your powers and drops your shields at the perimeters. You can call it solar wind where you are now outside the planets/moons/etc magnetosphere. I am thinking Wrath of Khan movie fight scene once you get too far away from the center of the battlefield. You can still be in it but good luck surviving if someone shooting you outside of the nebula. Also add some random damage clouds to kill you if you are in it too long. (Bye bye runners). Also make the edges random.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeyOnNple4M

"He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking ..."
- Spock

I absolutely wouldn't want full 360 degree movement, but I completely agree with others here that an increase of a few degrees to the z-axis would help things a lot. Currently it's far too easy for a ship to spiral upwards and completely mitigate the offensive capability of a cannon-escort, thus the propensity of many matches is to float upwards to exploit this disadvantage. Considering the huge size of the maps themselves, it's depressing how often you can find a furball hitting the upper map edge.

Also Snix's idea for a true king-of-the-hill type minigame is win.

I don't know if snix's idea is win or not. I'm too dumb to figure that one out, but I'm sharp enough to realize one thing though.

Implemented or not. It's good to see a (former) developer at least chime in on ideas and suggestions with the community. Rock on, y'all.

Yeah, they should hire that guy. :p

I and many others have asked for a King of the Hill type of match since beta.

Another one that could be fun is a capture the flag match. Put the flag in the center of the map and both teams have to go get it and take it back to their base. The bases could be the respawn points or form a baseball diamond with the 2 respawn points. Some interesting things could be down with the map's geography to prevent direct flight paths between all the key locations. To show which player has the flag, a big icon could float above them and cloak disabled while carrying the flag, to help ensure the rest of your team focuses more on keeping the flag barer alive and so the enemy can find them to try to stop them.

I agree that the spiraling is annoying. I think it happens largely because people preempt it by flying up at maximum angle at the start of the match.

I try to force the combat down in the roids whenever I play Badlands in particular. But all it takes is once persistent jerkwad constantly zooming upwards to force the whole furball up vertically all game.

Comes down how to complex and differentiated the cone design is, if its just a one factor cone design agreed. If the design already allows elliptical cones i.e. with a horizontal and a vertical factor (angle). But honestly i don't know how Cryptic set up the firing arcs, so its up to them.

What puzzles me with the discussion is that prior to the 60° flight angle the issue was even worse with a much larger "dead zone" for DC/DHC users above and below. But i don't remember such a heated discussion.

There were always "flame wars" about the flight angles and 360° flight. This one is a little more specific.

I also think the problem didn't use to be quite as noticeable. And that might frankly be fault of the 60° angles. It takes longer to reach the edge of space if you have only 45° flight angles.