SMDs have never shot down novaxes. Likewise adding this cost to novax with nothing else immediately puts it into unviable territory. It would make zero sense to be making it over a nuke in nearly all use cases.

@magge OK so....after a lot of testing I think I have narrowed the issue down to 2 mods. "Rings For All" and "UI mod tools"

The random freezing while zooming in and out would almost happen many times during an average game (even if it didnt completely freeze and crash) and that effect is nowhere present when those two mods are disabled and zero crashes now or anything for many dozens of games.

For my part I have no skills to investigate this further but it does seem like there are a lot of people complaining about mid game crashing so maybe this is related.

I am able to use my favorite icon packs again with zero issue, the only bummer for me is not having Rings For All active because that is an amazing mod but build range preview has been working fine so everything is back to normal in FAF world for me.

Thanks for steering me in the right direction.

If anyone else is crashing mid game and you have either of these 2 mods enabled try disabling them and reassessing.

Good to hear that it's working now!

Thank you very much!

I would say the biggest hurdles would be the technical issues. If it were easy to detect laggers and prevent them from playing matchmaker I think we’d be happy to add that. There are some GPGNet messages called Bottleneck and BottleneckCleared that the server can see. I don’t know what they do but judging by their names they sound like they could possibly be used to detect at least when a game is lagging, and maybe that could be correlated to a particular player? I don’t really have the time to investigate that sort of thing at the moment though.