Is Jester still being worked on?

Everyone I fly with literally HATES Jester because he's apparently too dumb.

I didn't get into the F14 until it had been out a year, but I was told by those that flew with Jester from day one, that Jester was a lot smarter, but people (in these forums) complained and HB dumbed him down.

But now he's kinda useless.

In a dogfight he regularly miss calls where the bandit is, he won't lock a target that's right there, etc... and the menu never being in the right state when you bring it up is REALLY annoying.

So HB - are you still working on Jester or is this as good as it's going to get?

Thanks.

I don't think Jester got Dumber, I think people got better with the F-14 so they noticed the shortcomings with Jester more over time.

Jester is definitely still under development as there are WIP features that have been announced that aren't yet in the game.

WRT the his use of the AWG-9 however, I haven't seen any specific plans to change or enhance him - there may still be a non-specific plan to improve this over time.

I think RustBelt is right with the perception. Certainly in my experience learning to be the pilot along with a buddy learning to be the RIO in the early days we both knew so little that Jester was better than either of us and if i just followed his lead we'd get 4 TWS tracks and ripple off a load of AIM-54s and slap ourselves on the back

As you learn / get used to having a human RIO his abilities can be limited to the point of infuriating. Mostly im thinking of IFF and what tracks he decides to hook at any given time. In busy MP servers with a mixture of friendlies / bogies / hostiles in TWS he can be very slow to IFF them and then once the AWG-9 has allocated your track priorities he can get quite fixated with hooking friendlies rather than focussing in on track #1 so you can lose awareness of altitude / exact ranging while hes futzing about.

Again when you're new to it all your attention is fully taken up interpreting the mass of data on the TID repeater and just trying to get them to flash so you can shoot. Once you're more experienced and have time left over to wonder what the target is doing....then you get frustrated.

All of this is not to belittle whats been accomplished with Jester - its still the very best implementation of a copilot AI I've ever seen, but there will always be shortfalls compared to a high tier human, the realities of time and cost unfortunately make it so.