Please Devs, try to fly.

Luperza, you seem to be only Dev who actually responds on the forums so I am talking to you personally: I dare you to fly as VS/NC (TR is a little less awful) on indar at primetime while actually killing stuff and being of any usefulness to your team.
This also applies to every other devs and and air-haters.
You are going to witness that air can not do anything meaningfull (except farming bases that are already won). You are probably going to think "well, that's because I am a terrible pilot, it doesn't mean anything is broken". No you are not, you are an average pilot. I am being denied while having spent 100 hours in a reaver, I can only imagine how hard it is to do anything when you are average or a newbie.
Air has been broken for a while and GU09 is just adding to the issue:
-Dual bursters lockdown
-250 certs anti-air launchers (This is probably going to hurt the air a lot more than you think)
-Lattice: Basically suppressing all small scale fights: the only place where air was actually usefull.

I understand why you made AA so strong, people simply keep hating on libs and ESFs from an earlier time. Also, being killed by air as a footman is very frustrating since you have the feeling you couldn't do anything about it and can not respond.

A lot have changed since: you guys stated the hard-counter to air should be air. Nowadays, it simply isn't.
One of the major change overall is the raised XP for killing an ESF/LIB: it isn't a direct gameplay change so it isn't as blatant as ,for example, the striker introduction. But it modified the players behaviors a lot: getting an assist on an ESF is worth as much as killing 2 people, lock on missile launchers are therefore far more valuable (especially since they now cost 250certs).
The average player mentality has changed, vehicles are not to be feared anymore, they are a huge source of xp.

At the current state of the game this is a bad thing, but I think it could be made into a good thing by introducing a few tweaks:
At the time of the OP lib/ESF, infantry farming was the major source of income, that is why ESFs were killing players instead of focusing each other. Nowadays air to air is, in theory, a lot more rewarding than A2G is: The afterburner tank cert tree that will be added in GU10 is a step in the right direction. The problem is, you can not do proper A2A when there is flak and lock ons in the general area: Dogfights require to switch to hover mode which basically makes you a target to any ground unit in the general area.
The solution is simple: Keep the current G2A TTK while reducing their range very consequently. Ground should be able to attack their direct threats only, this way they wouldn't get farmed by air squads and wouldn't complain. On the other hand, A2A dedicated pilots (what I consider myself) would become the real air hardcounter, please allow us to do our job.

Remove rocketpods and then tone down AA.

Have you ever read any of the post?

And do you want to remove libs at the same time?
A2G is part of the game, that's what the DEVs want, Pods have already been nerfed repeatedly and just aren't powerful anymore (but I'd still be ok with nerfing them even more if it makes you guys happy).

In the grand scheme of things, we're better off with AA being too strong as opposed to the opposite. This is an incredibly hard thing to balance...how many people will buy that 2nd burster arm/g2a launchers, how dedicated will people be to clearing the skies, etc. There's no question the scale is tipped towards AA right now (pretty significantly), but as someone who lived through lolpod hell in beta when AA was virtually nonexistent, as I said, it's better than the alternative.

You are definitely right, but as you said the scale is tipped towards AA right now and the lolpodd hell will definitely never get back, a little step towards balance wouldn't hurt much.

My two cents:
Nerf AA hard, and nerf lolpods into extremely limited use, or just turn them into powerful unguided A2A rockets. (It isn't like they haven't fundamentally changed weapons' use before, it just happened)

Reasoning: By nerfing AA, air survivability will be raised by a lot. And to counter this as well as strengthening ESFs' intended role as air superiority fighters, lolpod is removed from the A2G equation. For Liberators, this means that they can now perform their intended role as an A2G platform, and an exclusive role for that.

Side effects: Galaxy becomes unstoppable from the ground with weapons intended for AA, you'll have to bring AT guns to bear, or nerf Galaxy health, which would lead to other problems.

Flame away.

Agreed. However, a core root of the problem is that the ESFs are A2G fighters. If there were proper dedicated A2A fighters, then air would be the hard counter.

I never said anything about removing libs
1 man aircraft should not have highly potent kill everything A2G weapons.
Liberator A2G needs a buff as soon as rocketpods are removed.

They are because it is easier, farming infantry in a teritory your faction already controls is safe: but since the xp update it isn't as rewarding as A2A.
If A2A pilots were allowed to chas podders inside of the ennemy territory without being denied by all strikers/G2A launchers within a 400 m radius, there would be a lot less A2G ESFs around.

I can't believe people still want rocket pods nerfed. You are basically firing marshmallows that take years to reload at the enemy.

Every MBT has highly potent kill everything weapons too. The nerfs on rocketpods already made them pretty weak and I think ESFs should have some A2G potential so they can still matter on the battlefield, that's why they shouldn't be totally removed.
But as I said, I'm ok with nerfing them even more if that's what you guys want.

MBT'S are slow and cannot fly.

I would say there should be more damage from fighter weapons with longer sight ranges. With the amount of carp out there trying to shoot you down, make the preferred way of aerial attack be lightning-quick strikes with maximum firepower and then running for the hills.

MBT guns also don't have a 360 degree spheric firing angle, due to them moving in two dimensions and have gun elevation limit.

Yeah and they have a crapload of armor as well as firepower, a lower skill entry point, and on top of it all, cost a solid 50 resources more than an ESF.

Flying on Indar is just not fun now with this new system. I am thrown into a large fight I will not last in, I can't see what is shooting me because of the draw distance being limited by the amount of people in the area. The TR on Waterson normally have a crap ton of air because of their G2A power (Yeah they have some really damn good pilots but most of the TR are sub par) Something really just needs to be thought of, the number one thing I can think of is RAISE THE FLIGHT CEILING. Another thing is rethink the G2A missiles and AA Maxes. The Skyguard should take place of the AA Max and the AA Max should be a deterrent.

Either way I enjoy flying in this game and not much else (and flying is slowly starting to become why bother? The only thing I really do is hunt libs and take out podding ESFs) and well if things don't change I will be hitting the road.

And no I am not a LOLPODDER check my killfeed for proof.>.>

You simply cannot compare an ESF to a MBT.

An ESF dictates the conditions of an engagement in ways that a tank will never be able to do. Any angle, from any direction.

An ESF can fly off to safety and repair when a MBT is going to be a smouldering pile of debris, no matter what it tries to do to survive.

If you want to have to keep retreating to repair between attacks and kills, fly an ESF.

If you want to get a handful of kills before dying, spawn a tank.

You can live so much longer in an ESF than you can in a tank. The two just don't compare. I'm not saying that it's not frustrating to fly an ESF sometimes. I know from experience that it is. But I also know from that same level of experience that it is as equally frustrating to try to accomplish things in a tank/lightning, if not more so.

Infantry are at the top of the food chain in this game (which I am all for). Vehicles require patience and no small amount of learning if you want to be even moderately successful using them.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that ESF's are the only thing that has a hard time in this game. Also don't think that just because every time that you get off the ground in an ESF, it feels as if the entire server is shooting at you, that it isn't exactly the same for other vehicle users as well.

This game can't possibly be balanced for a single type of vehicle. If you interfere with AA again, we'll be back to the bad old days of overpopulated skies again like we had at the end of beta and in the first few weeks of release. That might have been fun for fliers, but it was absolute garbage gameplay for other people and no small amount of people quit the game never to come back again because of it.

How can that possibly happen when so many people have spent thousands upon thousands of certs and no small amount of Station Cash on their ESF's and Bursters?

It's just not going to happen so there surely is no point in taking this discussion down that road.

I think there will be a new aircraft introduced that will make the fliers that want air to air battles very happy. Just be patient and wait for that to happen. There can be a rewarding air meta-game without nerfing things into oblivion or alienating people even further by making them feel like they wasted cash on something that is then neutered into uselessness.

pods are pretty dam useless most of times .. people hate splash damage it seems in ps2 and they hated in ps1 . so most weapons featuring splash in this game have stupidly low splash damages at stupid ranges like 0.5 m . so now most explosive weapons you have to get a direct hit with to actually kill with . so leave rocketpods in as they are far from the fearsome tool they used to be .

I imagine it's worse for non-TR pilots, but flying on Indar today, I could only skirt the edges of the massive flusterclucks, and AB away as soon as a non-rendering burster started chipping away at me. This, combined with the rocket nerf (it's now normal to have to use an entire salvo of rockets to kill ONE enemy infantryman), makes flying pointless.