Tried it in PTS, don't know how to comment it, just tell you what I feel. Description: Sidewinder: Increases strafing speed at the cost of lower strafing acceleration and deceleration. Tried level 5 implant in the VR, the speed is kind of crazy, almost like running but not as fast. if you want to move quickly but you don't want to sprint, just move like a crab : p The lowered acceleration and deceleration can be felt, when you start strafing, you'd slightly slip to the other side for half a step or so. To explain: before you start strafing left, you'll "prepare" for a split second, and slip to the right for a little bit, then you'll move to the right at a high speed. Also when you constantly strafing left and right, you won't feel the "slip" but you'll feel a very short pause when you change direction. My feeling is, this implant may be situational but can be very powerful from time to time. It may have limited use in cramped rooms but when the space gets larger, it'll make you very hard to be "locked on", especially for low mouse sensibility users. However, I'm not sure if the penalty on acceleration and deceleration makes a difference, maybe you'll be more vulnerable when you change strafing direction, and if you change direction too frequently in a small room, you'll eat more bullets? or maybe the short pause is nothing at all? I'm not sure about this. If you have PTS, just go test it and tell me what you feel ; ) I'll also wait for people to test it on the battlefield.
After trying it out, the "floating" effect of the ac/deceleration seems to make it kind of useless. I don't know about the rest of you, but I use strafing primarily to throw an enemy's aim with small side-to-side movements. This implant ends up making strafing feel more sluggish instead of faster. Really counterintuitive.
Just a few people are that bad at the game, but if the speed is actually high, and you don't decelerate by changing direction during the side movement, it might actually enable a high skilled yet cheap viable style of gameplay.
Standard infantry move speed (in meter per sec) : Sprint : 6.5 Run forward : 4 Run backward : 3 Strafing : 3 Crouching : x0.5 Sidewinder rank 4 increase strafing max speed to 4.005 m/s.
Can't see how this will be popular. Anything that gets in the way of the ADADCrouch spamming to dodge shots (oh sorry - skillz) isn't going to be that useful. Interesting that they could lower the acceleration of strafing and changing direction - something a fair few people have been requesting for a while. What with this and suggestions to reduce headshot multipliers, it might change the emphasis to situational awareness, planning and tactics rather than just charging in and rely on finger gymnastics, overshield and twitch headshots. Hmm.
