This is still happening. It'd be nice to get a fix on it.
Four months later...still not addressed. I mostly notice this on maps where there is a vehicle objective. If you aim the torpedo at an AAT, the torpedo locks onto the AAT, then is fired at the locked MTT objective, dealing no damage. I'm sure this is not working as intended ("Let's make a weapon that can't be fired at the target it is locked on to, players will really like that," said no one ever). If the ion torpedo is locked onto an MTT with shields down, then the torpedo often does NOT get fired at the MTT, especially if there is an AAT or ion turret in the proximity of the MTT. This makes no sense. And this has been happening for a long time and should have been fixed ages ago.
It's been over a year since this bug was first reported, in a number of threads, and it is still a problem. I would have hoped that this bug wouldn't appear in the new mode, but it does. For example, you can lock torpedo onto an enemy turret, but it fires off in a different direction at a dead AT-RT instead, even if the player never locked on to the AT-RT in the first place. Another place where this is problematic is on Crait, where torpedos fire onto the massive walkers after the first phase, when those walkers aren't even a possible target anymore. Carefully aiming the torpedos at an intended target, such as an AT-ST, does not help.
I envy you for your patience. They fail in respecting you (a Champion), yet you never fail in respecting them. Bravo. Fortunately for me, I rarely use these types of locking on attacks/abilities, so I don't get frustrated by this BUG. But I can confirm this has already happened to me, in the case of the Heavy's Ion Torpedo. I'll add that case to my testing cases for my next round of tests.
I suppose the locking-on is actually just an unrelated pre-req to fire homing weapons. As the AT-ST has a homing missile that doesn't need to lock-on first, it's clear this game does have homing weapons that don't require a lock-on. So I assume the lock-on serves as a pre-req to fire the guided projectile, but it's when it's launched that it selects the target, not during the lock-on moment. And if they have different ways to select a target, like the lock-on being more restrictive in angle and distance, while the homing projectile just choosing the closer target inside your LoS, this discrepancy is enough to cause the issue you described.
Anyway, these are just suppositions, I'll need time and many tests to try to reach any conclusion on this. As for DICE I hope it stops ignoring this report.
@RogueZeroRendar I was having trouble on Geonosis today, testing some of these ideas. The heavy's ion torpedo won't fire unless you have honed in to a target and locked on (unlike the starfighter one that can be fired with or without locking). Even if the lock on is precise, with no movement of the trooper before, during, and after the lock-on, the game is often selecting different targets. The game often chooses bad targets, such as already dead targets (i.e. a recently destroyed tank), or not available to be shot because they are behind a rock formation or something. It does not appear to necessarily be picking targets that a closer than the intended target, sometimes yes sometimes no. And the angle the torpedo goes at is often wildly different than the trajectory of your intended target, so I don't really think it is an "angle" issue (unless the angle is set so wildly wrong, and that seems like it would be an easy fix, just wiggle the angle numbers in the code).
My guess is that the game has a misguided "priority" code. That the devs somehow decided that in certain situations a certain vehicle is more important to shoot than others. So for example, the game might think it is more important to shoot at a tank on the move than on the MTT with shields down on Naboo or Kashyyyk. On Geonosis and Crait, the game priortizes the big tanks and walkers over the little ones (even if the big ones are already dead). It kind of gives you the feeling that the devs thought we as players were incapable of choosing the most appropriate targets, and did it for us.
There are other situations where this arises, where you as the player don't get to choose what you are shooting at. My biggest pet peeve in Starfighter Assault is the "aim assist" (which can NOT be shut off by turning off aim assist in the menus), which drags your shot away from the objectives if an enemy ship flies between you and the objective. Again, a feature like this implies that the devs didn't think we were capable of chasing our own targets, so they put in a feature to choose the targets for us.
Patience is a fickle thing. I quit BFII for a few months back when the matchmaking was horribly broken, and every "fix" made it worse. Not sure which straw will break the camel's back again, but I sense that day is coming...
