This question continues to bother me because I can never understand the logic behind this. So I will just ask plainly:

@YogiKlatt-CIG why is it that the combat team is so adamant about removing shields (not just shutting off regen but removing) during quantum mode? What problems does this solve?

Because we want to put the players into a position where they have to make tough choices that cannot easily be reverted by the press of a button. That was an ongoing pattern in past SC versions, a prominent example being how easy it is to escape a fight which neglects piracy gameplay. In the PU you just throttle forward, disable the speed limiter and off you go, it is almost impossible for an attacker to catch up. That is not an interesting setup, that’s is just giving an insanely strong advantage to the defending party.

So a lot of our past and upcoming changes resolve around trying to give the player meaningful and equally valid choices, but that means that you as a player cannot do everything at once … things have to have pros and cons. So stripping the shields as debuff to become very fast is a valid option and doesn’t change much outside of the non-combat gameplay.

So for now we’ll to that plan and you can play it once we enabled MM in the PU. If the gameplay dynamics do not pan out (e.g. in the previous example by giving attackers too much of an advantage), this will become very obvious in the feedback and gameplay stats … so in that case we will reserve the right to change things around again, either by tuning or functionality changes. Literally nothing is off the table in that case … but we’ll not do it before we reach that bridge if that makes sense.