L2P. :<

Seriously, you're insulting the second best thing to happen to the online shooter genre in years. The best one being PlanetSide 2.

VGN
CGTG

Unfortunately playing on a US server would be as impractical for me as playing on an EU server would be for you. :(

I would totally destroy you, though. What classes do you generally play and what is your role during a match? :)
I had a similar experience. Turned out that my CPU's radiator was so caked with dirt it was all essentually blended into one surface. :P Cleaning out all the dust helped, then I developed high cooling awareness, Thiev suggested a great cooler and then I bought a proper PC case and shoved 4 fans in there. No more performance dops. :P

I wonder if your experience is just Tribes being borked in Steam. I use the standalone client and ever since they patched it like 2 months ago, it's ridiculously fluid at high detail levels on my 2 year old PC.

Probably HiPatchService issue. Unfortunately it runs all the time after installation, regardless if you play the actual game or not.
You can safely stop it if you are actually not playing Tribes and usually that fixes it.

OTOH, I don't use Steam version so I'm unaware if there are any problems related specifically to that.

I keep it running and experience no problems, but it may be an intermittent issue on certain systems... I strongly suggest trying the non-Steam version. Perhaps the Steam Overlay borks the game's performance?

Bring it. :P

No quarter given. No mercy this day :P

Apparently Tribes: Ascend is quite playable with 120-ish ms pings. ;) Considering I played the original (demo) on a 33.6k modem, and the sequel on a "broadband" 115.2kbps connection, I guess I was somehow used to worse at the back of my head... :P

Thanks for the fun guys, GG. :) Fuzzy, I never got a chance to check your traits - did you use Reach to get the flag from _under_ the Tartatus flag stand? :O And Vagabond - you're definitely a force to be reckoned with. :) That weas a nice setup when you waited for me to jetpack up the hill and stabbed me with a melee attack... :3

Also, the Raider assault rifle is so user-friendly it hurts... Literally.

Not that I know of. Overall, Tribes: Ascend doesn't do a very good job of preparing the player for its complexity. It is the game's only major flaw. As far as gameplay is concerned, bots are generally predictable and playing against them would probably be dull, when compared to playing against real people.

You are incorrect. Class upgrades cost laughably low amounts of XP and they will typically give you a minor energy recharge and hit point boost. At the end of the day, a Light will still die to one direct Spinfusor hit, a Medium will be able to take one and survive, and Heavies will still survive two. The only difference is those that aren't upgraded yet (but will be in 5 days max, with no XP boosters) will be left with 50 HP and not 150. That's the difference between one bullet or two. Trivial, and upgrading costs trivial amounts of XP.

Weapons cost a lot of XP and are more convenient to buy with real monies, but you don't really need them - they're sidegrades, not direct upgrades. I use a Nova Colt on my Brute, because I cover a variety of roles, including being a chaser. The six-shooter lets me finish off a wounded capper. The Brute is mostly a close-combat skirmisher and gen camper, though, and is better off at what it's _supposed_ to do with the standard weapons.

Overall, you don't need to pay a dime to have access to gear you actually _need_ to play effectively. The Soldier's Spinfusor can be acquired via a free promo code. All the other classes' primary weapons are perfectly effective, and aren't changed too often. I find it puzzling that Doombringer isn't unlocked by default (it's the primary defensive class, dammit!), but, like any other class, it costs trivial amounts of XP (18k).
The only exception here is the Pathfinder's Thrust pack, but it costs 42k XP, which isn't a whole lot, and most people don't know how to use it properly anyway.
And even then, you can buy a couple of guns and packs for 10 bucks. That's buttons!

Practice shows that hardly anyone buys skins in T:A, so if Hi-Rez only sold that, they would have to pull the plug on the game. I don't want that to happen. It's too bloody awesome.
Maybe if there were more customization options, like in Unreal Tournament 3 or something, it would have been different. I don't find most skins interesting, but if I could put some cosmetic junk on my Brute, I would probably drop some monies into Hi-Rez's bank account.
I spent around $30 on the game, almost solely on stuff I was curious about and hardly ever used, and I've played it since Closed Beta. That's well under $5 a month. I'm obviously one of the rich kids who shoot monies from their in-game credit card launchers. :P

People who whine about Tribes: Ascend being pay-to-win are those that don't know how to play it and can't be bothered to learn. No exceptions. And no offense. ;)
World of Tanks is, from what I hear, true pay-to-win, but its players seem to like it that way. APB is a bit p2w. Tribes is the most skill-heavy shooter EVER. No amount of money will help those that can't be arsed to L2P.

That's exactly what I did when I played Soldier, and I really enjoyed the running part. I later decided to play a class I found more challenging, and switched to Brute. It's basically a more unforgiving Soldier - unforgiving because you're fat, have got very limited and slowly recharging energy reserves, and are expected to move and fight at short-to-mid ranges, where you don't want to touch the ground so much.
Movement isn't a problem for mortar-spamming Juggernauts or Heavy-on-Flag Doombringers (which are never on my team, of course:P), but you really need to think on your feet and plan ahead if you want to be an outdoor Brute. And with my setup I can chase down Pathfinders given enough disc jumps. ;)
Most Brutes just spam Disco Nades and camp generators, and I tend to look upon them with justified disdain. :P

Not useless - they're different but they don't make you win more than the original ones.

Let's take my loadout, for instance.
I use the Devastator Spinfusor - it's the "sidegrade" Havy Spinfusor which does less splash damage overall, but with a bigger splash radius, and more damage on a direct hit.
If I played your typical indoor gen camping Brute, I would just use the standard Heavy Spinfusor, because I wouldn't be expected to hit fast targets at medium ranges. Outdoors, a hit is more valuable than the amount of damage that hit does, in my opinion. Indoors, targets are slow and you can get splash off walls, floors and ceilings all over the place.
It's one of the new "sidegrade" weapons, which are based off standard weapons and cost tiny amounts of XP.

As my secondary, I use the Nova Colt, because I chase down cappers with my Brute as well, and a Spinfusor's damage is just low enough to leave some health on a non-light target after a good hit. It's a good finisher weapon, plus I can poke targets at longer ranges with it.
I bought it for monies because I didn't want to grind XP, which I used for upgrades instead.
Your regular indoor Brute would keep the standard Automatic Shotgun, because indoors. ;)

And I should point out that nothing stops me from using that Nova Colt in six years, provided the game survives that long. It's hard to say with such a game, though - whether it will be replaced by Tribes: Ascend^2 (or something), or upgraded over time, keeping your original purchases. Probably the former, though, but that's what online gaming is like and I accept it for the service that it is. :)
Sounds about right, but you will be getting splash most of the time. Choosing between the D and the DX (which costs tiny amounts of XP, as a "sidegrade") is a choice between high alpha damage, or being able to correct a miss faster. Both are equally valuable, and it's up to a player to decide which fits their style and needs better.

I think you get more XP in TDM, yeah... It's less interesting than CTF, as there is no depth to it, but you get to shoot stuff more often. On the flipside, nothing you do in TDM matters, whereas in CTF, if you're good, you feel that you're making a huge difference.
Did everyone else just hear "MORTAR KOMBAAAT!" in their heads, or was it just me? :P

Unless the enemy capper is glitching, or managed to grab the flag in a straight line towards their base (which shouldn't happen if your team's HoF knows what he's doing), I can catch up to any PTH. I can do 200kph in my Brute (with the Potential Energy perk) and, since most cappers take the long route to trick the defenders, I always catch up with them half-way. I'm a really tenacious chaser. ;) Of course when I do reach 200kph, I'm anywhere between 10 and 600 HP due to all the disc jumps, but I usually start regenerating once I catch up. That's the price you pay when you choose GOTTA GO FAT over GOTTA GO FAST. ;)

Wasn't QuakeWorld broken, where your character would move faster if your CPU was really fast? It's hard to compare Quakes to Tribes, though.
Quakes are classic arena shooters, with relatively short-range and predictable combat. There's lots of surfaces to do reliable splash damage off when you're using a rocket launcher, and there's nothing tricky about any other weapon. The only complexity in arena shooters is map control. I always found it impressive how really pr0 players would have these little timers in their heads, and would know when item X would be spawned, and, based on that, would dominate the opponent's access to power upgrades, as well as know where they spawned based off item pickup sounds, timing and locations.

In Tribes, you've got lots of classes and loadouts, larger areas, three-dimensional combat (I don't consider jumping or bunny hopping 3D enough) and VERY tricky projectile weapons.
The tricky part comes from projectile momentum inheritance. If you fire a disc while standing still, it will go at, say, 250 kph straight ahead. If you fired it while skiing ahead at 200 kph, it would go straight ahead at... well, faster than 200 kph (I don't think vectors are added, exactly). If you were skiing downhill, falling down, or flying upwards at the same time, the projectile would inherit some of that vertical momentum as well. A Quake rocket launcher will always fire at a straight line, at wherever it's placed.
So if you're chasing an enemy over hills at medium range, you must predict not only where he will land or where he will ski in 2 seconds, and not only how far ahead you need to "lead" him with your crosshair (like in Quake), but also how fast, and in which direction, your disc will actually fly. Real tricky if you ask me.
Plus, there's the complexity and diversity behind playing CTF, which can't really be compared to any game that I know.

Skiing itself is not so hard to grasp, but being aware of what's going on, while skiing properly and shooting stuff, isn't easy. Of course you're an old Quake guy, not unlike myself, so the mechanics make MUCH more sense to us thatn people more used to Counter-Strike, Battlefield or Call of Duty-style games. Team Fortress 2 has projectile weapons, but, on the flipside, it is really slow.

Also, Q2 was pretty slow, and Q3 wasn't much faster, even with ProMod. Q1 was a monster, though. ;)

Yeah, the Jug isn't perfect for movement, although its faster health regen could be useful for disc jumps... I think I'll check it out in Training later on. :)

The only thing a Jug is useful for is, unfortunately, spamming the flag stand from far away (and high, if possible), until someone flies there and the Jug dies.
In the field, a Jug is turned into paste really quickly. Much like the Doombringer, it doesn't have the energy reserves to develop and maintain both speed and air-time. Any mobile class will typically make short work of a Juggernaut at short-to-mid range.

By the way, me and Thiev (well, Thiev, as I've been at zero gold since ages and she still has some) will set up a GOG clan tag later today. If anyone's interested, drop your char name here and we'll add you. Tribes is very lag-friendly so you can play from the wrong side of the Atlantic together with us, without any real issues. ;)