A brief history of the great air debate for all non-beta players, and why the nerfs will never end

The great argument of Air vs. AA will rage forever, due to a great rivalry between the two families. Until two young members fall in love and commit suicide at a young age we will never see the forum threads stop. "Why" you ask?
TLDR we will never have a balanced air vs. AA because instead of fixing the cause(MAX render distance), devs fixed the effect and won't take back buffs given to air (rocket-pods) now that you can see MAX again.

Back in beta testing which was not all that long ago due to early release; planetside 2 forums was first racked with the multiple threads by players in aircraft, they called out "Why can we not what attacks us, we are being shot out of the sky by invisible players" Then a very bright user or developer or something enlightened us that due to MAX units having the draw distance of infantry dual bursters were not within sight of the victimized pilots.

As many days passed without any hotfixes or patches resolving the issue, a steamed community began creating more and more threads about ALL AA being overpowered, since there WAS a rather notable advantage now that more people knew about advantageous AA MAX's. The great spam of messages continued building and building the issue until it seemed an air pilot could not take off without being shot down by a single shot of flak. And down from the heavens came the patch and in a majestic voice did teh development team decree " ALL AA SHALT FEEL THE FLAMES OF HELL AS WE CAST THEM DOWN AND TRAMPLE UPON THE REMAINS, ALL YOU POOR TERRORIZED PILOTS SHALL BE GIVEN GREAT FAVOR IN VALHALLA AND ABILITIES TO EASILY OVERCOME YOUR DIRECT COUNTER we won't fix the render distance though"

Now you see, the sparce amount of AA users gasped, for they had forever held the eternal role of guardian against the terrible power of the rocket-pods, which were now far more powerful than even tank shells. And for 7 days and 7 nights, molten metal rained from the sky and obliterated tanks, turrets, and infantry. Brave fighters remained, however now that the sky had access to a rain of power, the only way to defend against it was furthering the problem and abusing AA MAX render distance. Now both sides had a valid claim of overpowered units, and all patches ignored the issue.... until now. However a deep seated conflict has already begun, the AA units will never be restored after the devastating patch and pilots will fight hard for the right to glass planets with rocketpods.

Sounds like unit rendering distance is a bigger technical challenge than just simply tweaking a setting... didn't know this came up before and was shelved

So this upcoming MAX rendering change will make everything right?

I think what it domes down to is that MAX's need to be considered infantry to receive resurrection from Medics. However, because they are considered infantry for such purposes, they also share every other setting of infantry.

So the issue is whether they clobber together a hybrid code specifically for max's or move MAX's over to vehicle code completely..

The devs already don't respect the PS1 mechanics and the AA MAX, aka NS Burster, is purely fan-service.

There is no reason why the MAX specifically -needs- AA capability in the first place, all that could be mitigated to the HA giving him a (weaker) default AA lock-on launcher that is counted as a resource ( disposable 2-use fire-and-forget, ~100 pistol resources? yes?)
Let the skyguard be the -dedicated- powerful AA platform that shreds **** (but also larger and more visible).

There Burster MAX render distance problem solved, the MAX can now not shoot farther than he renders and everyone is happy.
Also obviously cert/SC refunds for people who bought the second burster arm.

But no, that would be actually logical as well as a good long-term solution.
The developers are more interested in applying short-term band-aids and over-tweaking **** that is broken to begin with in an endless cycle of OP and UP that satisfies no one.

MAXes are infantry. In-game structures of maxes use the same format as other infantry, although they have different rules for certain actions. If you played the beta, you remember the extensive downtime as SOE copy&pasted the resource requirement and timer code from the vehicle base class to the MAX - and botched something up in the process.

From a code point of view MAXes are treated like infantry with some (probably horribly messy) code duct taped on top to have some vehicle functionality.

Of course the Max needs an AA capability. It's supposed to be a flexible tough weapons platform for all 3 combat areas of the game. Always has, always will. Also, your lock on launcher idea is silly as that still brings up render issues. Last but not least it leaves you with no real AA response when you can't spawn Skyguards.

I don't understand this.
This made sense in PS1, since not everybody could be everything and spawn all the vehicles.
The MAX in that scenario makes perfect sense and its flexibility is a major asset.

PS2s system is already geared towards "be everything" with its on-demand class-switching and vehicle spawning, so the "flexibility" of the MAX makes no sense whatsoever.

Currently there are 4 ground AA platforms in the game, HA, Skyguard, MAX, AA Base Turrets

The AA MAX only has the problem of render distance because its a sustained AA platform, while the HA Launchers are Burst-AA.
Nobody is complaining about the HA launchers, not because they are worse or better, just simply because they don't have the sustainability of an AA MAX, thats the problem for pilots.
One can counter missiles with flares, which are abundant, so HA launchers aren't seen as a "problem" even with the render distance.
MAX AA can only be countered by shooting the MAX dead, which leads to render problems.

The MAX needs no AA capability.

It would certainly fix the rendering problem.

It would also mean enormous amounts of Station Cash refunds and cert rebates which is why this will never happen.

The AA MAX is here to stay. I'd prefer that it was treated like a vehicle. I don't think any MAX should be resurrected by Medics. If you die in a MAX that is the end of that. I also think the timer should start from when you die, not from when you spawn it.

Otherwise, when we finally get some real indoor combat the next complaint will be MAX spam. It is coming too. In a game where everybody can spawn anything, we have the outdoor vehicle and air spam. The same will happen with AI MAX'es once we get genuine indoor fighting.

ya the render thing is pretty dumb. using a technicality as an intentional game mechanic for balancing is pretty dumb. almost as dumb as saying flak should lose damage the farther it travels, this is a flawed "nerfing" mechanism because guess what... they are in the air of course they are going to be at long range!

also having flak being the only AA available is pretty ******** also. what is this 1940? of course laser guided and lock on technology should be in the game. it worked beautifully in ps1. i dont understand why they dont just look at how things were done in ps1 and copy paste? why reinvent the wheel? your botching it.

Problem is that the lockon missiles in this game are abysmal.

I know, I'm just pointing out a solution that cares for gameplay and not $$$.
I'm perfectly aware that this will never ever happen and that band-aids will be applied vigorously in an attempt to "balance" things.

I'm just giving a heads up, a reality-check if you will, to people pointing out that other, better, solutions exist and why they never will see the light of day.

The devs care little about the gameplay and have no intention to actually make a decently designed game.

A MAX is half a pixel tall at max LIB render distance.

I actually understand SOE's approach to ESF balance at the moment - turn them into glass cannons is pretty much the philosophy between the ESF nerfs and AA buffs.

What mystifies me is how they can hit ESFs so much and not do a single thing about the stupid Liberator aka planetary obliterator!

Because most of the time the lib pilot/gunner will bail and leave you ~100 XP for just the vehicle kill.

And you could have gotten 10x that rocket spamming infantry.

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/happy-new-year-update-02-info.77203/

So your plan was, leave Anti-air seriously underpowered?

AA works really well now... still think they should get xp for damage rather than just kills though.
the render distance should fix the major problem we pilots are having with AA maxes and not knowing where we are being shot from.

as for the AI Maxes and the upcoming tunnels... i predict scatter max max crashes... because the thing annihilates everything so much faster than the other maxes.

Well, then why have all the other stuff at all. Clearly, MAX is supposed to be better then everything else, right? Let's make this another MechWarrior game, shall we?

The reason why AA vs. Air is impossible to fix is because AA gets exponentially more powerful the more of it you have on the field. If you have 10 AA guns all across an area and they are taking on 10 aircraft its very easy for them to coordinate their fire. Just shoot at where the other guys tracers are going and you're quickly ramping up the damage to the point where the target aircraft dies, or at least has to run before it can even retaliate.

That doesn't work in reverse though, if you get 10 aircraft they can't knock down an AA gun easily with concentrated fire, especially fighters have a really hard time working together. Even if you get a bunch of aircraft working together to clear the AA, the AA can easily take cover, just run into a building, hit the MAX charge, just get out of the killzone while the other AA units continue doing their thing. Also when someone pulls a new AA unit they can get it in position pretty easily because they are so hard to see.

As long as AA vs. Air works that way we'll never see real balance because there will always simply be this magic number of AA where it becomes deadly, and you can argue about what that number should be till the cows come home. As of right now any organized outfit can make sure it has that number, and when damage XP comes in I think having enough AA around to render air next to useless will be the standard.

The error I think the developers may be making in balancing this is that in order to buff AA they are making it higher DPS rather than higher survivability. It will in the short term fix the problem of air being to strong but it may well risk the game flipping back to being dominated by tanks. Obviously Skyguards needed improved damage (which maybe could of been achieved by tightening accuracy) but I think MAX suits were not to bad previously.

What they needed to stop from happening was for aircraft to be able to kill the anti-air options so quickly that they never had a chance to get any damage on target. Flak is obviously a sustained damage attack while rockets/lib weapons are more of a burst damage weapon which creates the problem. The amount of times I've seen a Lib fly over somewhere using the Zephyr with night vision scope blasting any MAX suits on the ground before they could fire back or when flying an ESF I've been able to pick out a burster MAX to kill before they could even see I was there is innumerable.

I apologize about cobbling together the TLDR in the expanded version it goes all the way to the current update. Also don't take too much of the expanded version seriously I took some artistic license.