New Players: You are almost certainly not probing enough

One thing I don't see talked about enough is the importance of probing. Probing is SUPER IMPORTANT, for a bunch of subtle reasons

- It guards against early game "cheese" stuff like scouts rushing you down. Are you tired of shotgun mines in your face, or endless spawncamp boarding? If you'd probed five minutes earlier, you could have prevented the situation in the first place. - the heavy boarding meta common among new players may make you think battles start at, like, 300m. But the reality is that they start at about *1000*m or even a little further. That distance can be closed *fast* with boosts, clamp jets, and scouts. - Piloting is simply too big a job to be done by one person. One of the most frustrating things when piloting is when you have to be on the helm to stop the ship from running into things, but you have *no idea what's out on the map*. But you can't fix this by getting on the probe, b/c otherwise the ship will crash - *pinging* on the map is borderline useless. It communicates no information, and will disappear as soon as you ping something else. *Scanning* with a probe puts it on everyone else's map so they can see it, and it *stays* there - scanning an enemy ship lets your team see it through the hull of your ship, which is incredibly helpful for the pilot and gunners. *But the tag can run out*. So even *mid-battle*, probing is a necessity. It takes like three seconds---do it! - Also mid-battle---you don't want to get third-partied! - The most useful place to probe is ahead of where your ship is going. Getting surprised is a quick way to get into queue for the next match.

I don't really have a great way to end this, but basically: probe more