Official word on air gameplay?

Automated G2A Missile Turrets at major bases actually sounds like a good idea to create a sort of "hostile territory" for enemy fighters. Currently I think it's kind of wierd that the territory captured by your faction is a less save region from enemy fighters than the front line. Make the G2A turrets available at tech plants, amp stations and bio labs, make them destructable and make the missiles flareable. That way you can still fly in enemy territory, but it becomes more dangerous to stay for too long and new players could more easily retreat to saver regions.

It is a better idea than pain fields everywhere. I'm now finding myself checking the map pretty often while flying just to see where the vanu air zerg is patrolling. Just a quick M press and mouse around until I see the purple blob in TR or NC territory. Then I know if I should hide or not.

From a designer standpoint, it's similar. Both are creating a "No Fly Zone". The actual strictness of that No Fly Zone can be more or less strict (think of a slider bar in a video game's character appearance customization: you can slide it left for more difficult or right for more easy) and you can add in various details like ways to defeat it. The "theme" of missiles vs. painfields vs. NPCs, etc. are all just what color paint you want to use. Kinda like how Back To The Future uses technology to time travel and Army Of Darkness uses magic and Somewhere In Time uses hynotism, they're all just gimmicks to achieve time travel in the movie and tie in to whatever other themes the movie has.

Smart move. It would be great if SOE has an all-faction Air Channel per Continent so players could tell each other about the location of the Air Zerg/Gank Squad, extreme AA, wherever Air Support is needed, etc. And it would be nice if the people who could use "Orders" actually used them to send messages of actual use like "Warning: VS Air Zerg in our territory at x".

I agree this is very weird.

It's largely because SOE is trying to make the game (near) totally PvP, with no automated systems. And then on top of that, they aren't adequately incentivizing anyone doing things like patrol work.

SOE could make this game a lot more complex and a lot more strategic just by tuning how they incentivize players.

I did ask for an all air channel when SOE was asking for QoL suggestions the other month. I would certainly use the hell out of it.

So, in summary:
"I've spend a total of 200 days practicing hover fights so screvv you I don't want to see any changes. I don't care that the current state of air meta game destroys the combines arms aspect of the game and to be quite frank I couldn't care less since I'm here for the farm anyway. Btw., L2P noob, and could you follow my list of the knightly hover fight rules since that's what i'm good at? K, thanks."

Why do people always say this? I see new pilots all the time, some quit and some get better. All you have to do to stay alive is stay near friendlies. Friendly air, friendly zerg, a tower with active AA turrets, whatever. Stick near them and you'll be fine. Get more adventurous as you improve.

This is not exclusive to the air. Most people I know, myself included, mostly play to get kills. Sometimes pumpkins. That goes for air, tanks, and infantry.

Hey if you're not willing to shell out thousands of certs you shouldn't be able to fly! Ok that was sarcasm, tomcats and coyotes are an issue.

Cue ground pounders telling us it's part of the game so it's perfectly fair. Funny how they don't believe that about the PPA or AV Mana turret or whatever.

I have never seen SOE respond to any of these air threads, so don't hold out too much hope. Higby once tweeted that he wished they'd implemented lock on weapons to be more interesting, but they never followed up on that.

Im guessing not. But they probably wont admit that they screwed up the whole airgame bit.
I predict that they wont even acknowledge it, and keep pretending like its not a problem.

Di you think this topic has come up again mostly because of the Air Directives?

The highly skilled pilots all of a sudden need to replace their AB Tanks for these other weapons so they can meet a Directive goal.

Easiest way to lower the entry skill ceiling for new prospective pilots:

Make Yaw Bindable to Mouse X-Axis. (For that matter make the Air controls FULLY customizable).
- This allows new pilots (or frustrated potential pilots that gave up) the ability to fine tune their aim.
- This also makes Dog-Fight Frame more valuable when compared to Hover & Racer Frames .

But for some Higby reason, he didn't like that idea.