Firstly I have to say I really like the PS2 players site, well done SOE! Reading previous posts about planes being OP, I had a quick look at the top ranked player on each server. I noticed that many, but not all, of the top ranked players have accrued the majority of their kills from planes. Having flown planes (badly) I understand a lot of skill is required to fly one well and some of the manoeuvres by ESFs I've seen have left me wondering how the h*ll did they do that. Are these statistics a concern to anyone else though, especially if you check out the K / D ratio? I for one have sworn numerous times, on hearing the swoosh of an ESF, the pods of doom hit and it's off to respawn I go. As an averagely skilled player, I'm sure I'm not alone there. Perhaps SOE realised this trend and in an effort to make the game less frustrating for us vertically challenged players improved AA weapons. Not trolling, as I wish I could jump in a plane and shoot them down, but I normally last about 10 seconds when pitted against other decent pilots.
This is the best/worst part about ESFs. They are very hard to learn at first, but the potential once you can fly is very high. Just to give you a glimpse into what i mean, let me describe my own situation. I am sitting on over 7.5k kills in my Scythe now, but for the first week or two of flying i was constantly dying to enemies and what seemed like the most evil trees ever created in a video game. Now i usually run 100:10 average on kills/deaths due to the fact that i am almost always able to exit a bad situation, and engage when/where i would like. I win 90%+ of my dogfights, and have the ability to shake 2+ esfs back to cover. I would say the majority of my deaths come from an insta kill (1 shot tank/dumbfire rockets) and random collisions (friendlies/suicidal enemies/evil trees). Rocketpods are VERY strong but the real kicker is that i prefer my nosegun (rotary) for most infantry kills, as my magazine is 50 rounds, very fast fire, and very fast reload. So the point is, unless you have coordinated Flak that is willing to wait until i fly in too close before shooting (lol yea right, like an AA max can resist shooting) , i have no real natural predators as a higher end pilot. As long as i am picking my fights wisely (ESF speed/agility allows us this choice), i am not going to be dying to enemies anytime soon. And if i want to, i can easily deconstruct and logout/in to further maintain KDR/deny enemies my points.
There wasn't much anti-air spam at launch. Most AA cost 1000 certs (700 SC). AA wasn't all that strong either. Air pretty much had a free ride the first month or so to punish everything on the ground.
Keep in mind that ESF's and Libs were not always so dificult to get kills in. they were nerfed pretty hard a month ago. The majority of the top ranking players are those that flew the unerfed ESF's and Lib and spawn camped people at the old spawn buildings. It was really a huge problem at one point. All they had to do was get a Lib and a few ESF's at any spawn point and they could completely lock it down and farm hundreds of kills in an hour or so. The nerf made ESF's MUCH weaker than they used to be, so you can't do that anymore. When I browse through other players statistics, If it says their most played class is an engineer, I just move on the next player, because most of those top ranking players got there from the old aircraft spawn camping.
