The ugly truth: Fighting Air is Boring.

If that really was the case, why are aircraft (and to be honest, so many other things) a hard-counter to tanks and the likes, whereas the only hard counter the aircraft have, is another aircraft. Another issue with this is, that essentially, all you need to be good at, is flying. Once you reach a certain skill level with your vehicle (or anything really) you can start using your superior skill-level/experience to make up for faults in the weapon system you are using, and perhaps make up for inherent advantages other weapon systems have over you. This risks having people that are essentially un-kill-able, except for the most extreme of odds. To make up for that, certain hard counters are typically introduced, which gives the game more of a rock-paper-scissors feeling, and enables most people to combat most threats to a certain degree. However, by having the only hard-counters to aircraft being other aircraft, you are essentially impervious in the air, except for when you make terrible decisions (which costs any vehicle their lives).

The difference is, tanks for instance, can die without being able to really do anything, even if they were paying attention to their surroundings, simply by virtue of the aircraft being their hard-counter (and no one on the tanks faction wanted to either pull AA or saw the threat, since the tank wasn't RIGHT next to them), and it isn't only aircraft able to do such things. I'm quite proficient with my Tank Mines, and placing them in places where they are impossible (or nearly) to see before you actually hit them. But of course, pilots shouldn't have to fear such things, as long as they aren't making themselves easy targets (and what happens to tanks in such situations? They die before they can reach cover, or get C4'ed, depending on the situation).

It's founded on the fact that piloting takes considerably more skill than AA, or everyone would be doing it. Plus, aircraft do sacrafice several things to attack ground:

ESFs have a truly pathetic healthpool. The reason people think ESFs are so frustrating to fight is because every pilot knows that allowing flak to hit them is pretty much a death sentence.

Both liberators and galaxies require a gunner to kill everything that isn't a tank,* and each cost a fair chunk of resources. This is in comparison to skyguards or bursters, which everyone wants to run solo, and only deserve to do so because of their high resource cost.

Aircraft are far more visible than ground units. Tanks can hid behind cover and shoot, but an aircraft needs to be pretty much fully exposed if it wants to shoot.

*solo liberators/ramming skywhales excepted, but both of these take even more skill.

Instead of just leaving a fight, yesterday I tried longer than usual to play AA (1 hour or so). Every single stats I had decreased. From SPM to KPM and even my K/D. I really don't care about those stats but it is just an example of how unrewarding it actually is.

The game basically required me to give up my fun and do a job because someone else is having fun. In the end I didn't really kill much of anything and despite being slightly outnumbered, my faction lost every base even though we had lots of maxes and heavies with lock ons. I think 1 of the 3/4 liberators died, while the galaxies laughed at us and continued to bulldog everything.

Buff AA and let air have to rely on ground units to support them by killing said AA. It's not like you can have a meaningful attack or defense with out ground units. We might actually have a combined arms game then, well we still need to get rid of a few walls here and there but we're getting there.

Then the solution isn't to nerf aircraft, but to buff tanks. Infantry are too powerful anyways, for their cheap cost.

Buff vehicle AA, but leave infantry AA the same or worse. It doesn't matter how many times you kill a lockon heavy or a max, they can keep getting rezzed indefinitely.

Also, low SPM is charachteristic of any vehicle not in prime farming position. Any good pilot or tanker gets lots of downtime relocating to repair and to avoid threats. This is even more evident for someone who flies the liberator instead of gunning it, as they'll get almost zero kills per hour, and only about 75% the spm of their gunner.

It takes more skill to use the NS-15M than the T9-Carv, but no one's arguing the NS-15M should be better in every way and the T9-Carv resigned to endless defeats by their NS-15M masters.

Air is so far up their own butts right now they can't even see that everything else in Planetside has a reasonable chance against each other. A HA can reasonably take on anything on the Ground with it's Default ML-9 Launcher and a bit of luck. The MBT may take more resources and skill to 2 man but it isn't afforded a special unkillable status because it has to work harder.

Yes the AA weapons need work and I would love some more skill based AA weapons, but the ones we do have also need to be ANTI Air, not "Kind of Annoying for Air"

What? I see plenty of aircraft actively using terrain to their advantage, both to completely block LOS from AA sources, and partially block LOS to their target so as the target has a harder time returning fire / spotting the aircraft. Not something unique to aircraft. Yes, if you are flying at a height of 150m, in the middle of a canyon, everyone will see you coming. If you either fly on the other side of the cliffs, higher (or potentially lower, but it's risky) you can avoid being seen by using the exact same terrain tanks use.

Is that really all you got from that? Doesn't even touch upon the thing on hard-counters (or skill levels making up for inherent disadvantages being countered by hard counters, which doesn't apply to aircraft). Unless you mean tanks should be buffed to be a harder counter to tanks than aircraft currently are? That wouldn't even make sense. Feel free to elaborate in a manner more specific than a single vague sentence, that most likely just implies you didn't read the answer.

I can agree that infantry AA isn't all that bad but definitely anything mechanical such as a turret or max weapon should be much more effective. Keep in mind that they are playing the way they want to play, while the people trying to fight them are playing the way they must play. In large battles it's not as bad, usually everyone can play the way they want to play and still have fun, but you can't always find those fights. As TR on Mattherson yesterday I didn't find one decent fight ALL day.

Edit to explain the fights I found: There were an abundance of fights where we had 20-30% pop but heavily camped by air units or fights where we had majority pop and we just sat around doing nothing. There was one good fight at Indar Excavation but it didn't last very long. My play session was about 6 hours from about 3pm EST to 9pm. I stayed logged in way too long for the poor quality of pvp to be had.

I agree with this. I am one of the people who often take on the special duty of taking an anti-air role. Unfortunately even being a deadeye with Flak weapons and always having my lock on launcher close by, I rarely get kills. The enemies just seem to fly away so often, repair and come back now knowing there is a threat in the area and looking to take me out a lot faster than I can take them out. I will say though that I think liberators are the biggest problem. Just too tanky for my tastes.

Want to solve a big part of Air problem (specially the lib problem)? Remove the 3rd person view. A lot of certs aren'r used because of that. A lot of interception which could make, for example, a lib/gal suffer, an a2g esf suffer or an "assassin role" a2a esf suffer don't happen because 3rd person.
Removing this you don't need even change anything about liberator agility, because the crew will cry front an esf, instead of destroy it, as the majority of esf "pilots" which will have to pay attention on everything, including AA, since is hard to find where is the origin of damage in 1st person. I say that for myself, because I hate 3rd person view, and I try specialize everyday only in 1st person. But when I use the 3rd person to understand my own gameplay, I can see how this hurt the ground, the new air players, and the super advantage which liberators gain with that.

So, just remove 3rd person and a lot of problems will go away.

EzZ mode? If air was so easy, more people would be doing it. Fact is, aircraft are one of the costliest and most difficult areas of the game. Gunning might be easy, but first you have to find a competent pilot willing to let you in their craft, which is hard unless you've spent the time and certs on your own aircraft so they can gun for you in turn.

Fact is, it just looks easy to farm ground, because the only pilots who survive long enough to get into position to farm you have already spent hours and hours practicing their craft. Airplanes don't need to be nerfed, AA and tanks should just get similar dificulty curves, with equivalently scaling rewards.

Ok so the skygods in this thread have proven alot of stupidity:
NO ONE asked for buffs in the effectiveness of AA (atleast no one who stayed on Topic)
This thread is PURELY FOCUSED ON THE FUN AND SATISFACTION ANTI AIR PROVIDES IN NOT A SINGLE WAY.

Combined arms on an asymmetrical battlefield is a not understood by these people.

Trying to make sense of what they say without keeping that in mind will drive you nuts.

Except for Skyguard I have fun with AA. Killed a full lib today with a Nemesis. Yesterday I got several Reavers with Bursters down. Skyguard is mostly crap because you sit around and are bored and as soon as you start shooting suddenly the sky is clear and an armada of tanks and infantry is hunting you. Key is to stay versatile. If no air is around, you can switch to AI Max or take out your lmg. A Skyguard can not be changed and thats the problem. Let them change their loadout back to something else and the problem is gone.

you have to be one the laziest people in gaming. terms are everywhere and i can solo libs with a burster max with extended mags. i may not kill them inless they come back but they will leave any hex im in as long as ground troops are protecting me air will not touch a hair on their head while im alive. this is a learn to play issue im afraid if you want troop only fights biolabs or cod will fill that need.

I know ,combined arms game blahblah etc. If I want to play CoD I should just leave, got it. The 3 parts of a combined arms game are supposed to be in balance infantry, vehicles, and aircraft. Are they? Even if they are, is it fun to try to kill infantry? Armor? Aircraft? It isn't fun to try to kill aircraft and I know every pilot is saying good, that's what we are trying to do, make it hard to kill us. It is guys, it's very hard to kill you. So much so in fact that I don't want to try because it's such a pain in my butt to kill you that I don't want to try? Does that sound like fair fighting to you? Nah, I'm sure next you call me a whinier noob who just can't shoot. Keep telling yourself that until there are no more infantry targets to shoot at. I have played since beta, I have seen countless of my comrades leave and guess what the NUMBER 1 reason for leaving has been so far? Enjoy your afternoon.

ok i will i can "BY MY SELF" with a max unit stop any aircraft in my hex 1 to 1 or 1 to 2 after that i have to reload and might die XD. to stop air you need to pull aa. fun fact - a lib we used to do all medic runs and shoot them out of the air with smgs 10 medics can shoot down an ESF's with smgs in 3 secs teamwork is broken as **** learn to use it.

Aircraft aren't better in every way, they just give that impression because every pilot that you see farming you is one of those aircraft that didn't get killed in some other way, and likely has quite a bit of experience under their belt, meaning they've learned how to make themselves as hard to kill as possible. A common complaint about aircraft, and vehicles in general, is that they can relocate somewhere else, heal up, then return. How is that any different than from infantry? If a player plays cautiously, they should be rewarded for that caution.

As for AA weapons, I've posted a thread on how I feel current AA weapons should be changed to require more skill and better reward that skill here. I understand that ground units should have some method of effectively countering aircraft, but simply buffing the weapons we have currently would completely shut aircraft out of large fights.

At the same time, however, it's much more dangerous for any aircraft to use terrain than a ground vehicle. I'm not trying to say that "aircraft need to be in midair all the time, so they need to be more difficult to kill!" I'M trying to say that during an attack run, at the point the aircraft is shooting, it needs to be able to tank whatever shoots back at that time, unless the enemy uses coordinated fire, because for an aircraft to use its guns, it needs to expose at the very least its frontal profile, and often its underside for a gunner to be able to shoot.

Tanks should be buffed so their secondary AA weapons are fully capable of killing aircraft. Teamwork is OP, so if a tank sacrifices its gunner's AV power, that gunner should get not insubstantial AA power.

I'm not going to disagree with you here. Turrets are where they should be at, since they cost no resources and can be repaired by any engineer for free, but vehicle mounted AA should be more capable, since it can be permanantly taken care of, and requires individual gunners.

Tower guns are bigger than vehicle mounted guns and should therefore hit harder and faster. It's not that difficult a concept to visualise. Historically speaking a howitzer generally creates more collateral damage than a revolver.