Lower the air skill ceiling

You're not looking for a lower skill ceiling, you're looking for a lower skill floor.

Ace pilots should win most of the time, but the issue right now is that the skill floor on aircraft is so high that you have to already be good to know what you need to improve.

Have an experienced tutor helps a lot, but the air game needs something to make it easier to identify problem areas while being shredded by better players. That doesn't mean "make it easier". It means "make it easier to learn."

The skill cap can remain high, we just need a way of bringing new pilots into the game without coddling them.

Basically, when Rudelord turns my Scythe into Swiss cheese in one clip flat, have I learned anything from the engagement? No. I've learned that I'm not good at flying, but I knew that. What do I need to do differently next time? I have no idea. This kind of learning curve is what makes flying hard to get into. Add to that the fact that flying is inherently difficult (bumping things is unforgiving) and you've got a recipe for stagnation.

Surely you mean lower the skill floor right? Because that would make more sense imo. And make the "noob" weapons not cost 1000 certs. That is one way to guarantee noobs will not have them.

I dont know if I'm one of the good pilots on my server or not. - Mattherson

The trick is pretty simple. Fly in numbers. Join an Air outfit.
Flew with QRY last night, and we dominated Esamir skies during the alert.

If you can see 2-3 enemy ESFs from a good air outfit. Then RUN if you are alone.

Honestly playing the air is not that hard.
A week of gameplay and you should be starting to have a KD of 1 in a fair fight.

I think one of the step to make the skill floor lower could be discouraging the Warpgate Camping.
I go out with an ESF and I find a camper waiting for me in a place which is so far from his territory to be unexpected. He jumps on and destroys me with his weapons. This is absurd.
There should be a timer to stay in enemy territories.

Other point is the introduction of Coyote Missiles: they didn't make the skill floor lower. They are just a necessary and expensive tool to survive nowadays.

The real issue here is being able to learn. Engagements can be so swift that nothing is learned from the engagement in respect to the perspective of the a new player. Couple that with long down time between spawning aircraft (without some serious cert investment) and resource restrictions limiting the amount of times you can pull, means that the learning curve is a lengthy process and limits the amount of times you can try it slightly different to see if that works.

HOW? How do you lower the skill ceiling for new recruits. You can't really. Flying is a skill, that has to be learned. If it was easy everyone would do it, but it isn't easy and learning how is just as bad.

Best advice I can tell you is stick by the warp gate and use it as your safety net. Push out try and engage and the second it looks like you are going to get beat try to get back to the warpgate. or try and stick in groups of Air use the school of fish technique, and again once you find yourself in trouble head to the warpgate or near friendly aircraft or better yet a known area with friendly AA.

Honestly, the best thing you can learn is how to evade and maneuver. You are going to die and a lot, but learn from those deaths and one day you will get the hang of it.

Exactly. The air game doesn't need to be easier to play, it needs to be easier to earn from your mistakes and do better next time.

I'm at the level with my flying where I can dodge around pretty well, my issue is my aim. And that makes engagements long enough to learn from.

Last time I checked not everybody is capable of joining the Air Force and be a pilot just saying

There are some real problems with getting into air to air I think. Even experienced pilots seem to be always full of rage with how they don't enjoy it most of the time.

The basic problem is that there is little cover or terrain in the air unless you do only high speed ground hugging flight. So unless you run with a really large air squad you will always be open to very quick death from a blind spot.

There is also a problem with the weapons that some experienced pilots find the time to kill to be too high because of a large amount of dodging and with pilots respectfully keeping range from each other. While for general play the time to kill is way too short and encourages ganking which is too rng to be really rewarding.

It's a tough problem to solve for all players although people have some ideas that are worth thinking about for a start like making basic engagement radar and flares standard and always equipped and having a separate button to engage vertical thrust.

I have 7 hours logged on my Reaver; the first 3 or 4 were absolutely awful (i.e. no kills for me ). But after watching a lot of YouTube videos (LMS, Matti, Wycliff, etc.), I started to do better with the Reaver. Got about 60 kills within the last week or so (mostly farming infantry, but also some ground vehicle, Galaxy, and even the odd ESF kill here and there).

I guess as a novice to flying myself, I would recommend running an A2G loadout while learning to fly... Take out armor and infantry. While you do this you can practice movement (e.g. reverse maneuver) and aiming. I also found that rebinding the pitch keys and tweaking my aircraft sensitivity helped quite a bit.

So, after 7 hours of flying, my conclusion is that it's possible to become better at ESF piloting if you dedicate yourself to it, even though it's annoying to get rekt by BR 100 aces over and over. You can circumvent that to a degree by choosing your fights, i.e. avoiding areas where you know there are going to be swarms of elite ESF pilots. I found this to be a helpful guide to the learning process:

It would be nice to have an instanced area where newer ESF pilots of similar battle ranks could effectively compete against each other on more/less equal skill levels with the option to take what they learned and go fly against the big dogs at any time if that was their thing.

The skill floor is already too low versus ground targets.

There's nothing to talk about here until Rocket Pods & Dalton are specifically given reduced damage modifiers versus ground Infantry. Reducing their Radius was a cute gesture by SOE but it ultimately just makes those Payloads a lot harder to learn to use versus the ground Armor & other Libs they should really be used specifically against. (not for me, I bullseyed an enemy Lib @ 300m+ just last night my first time running the Dalton in months... so don't pull the L2P card here). .....infact, if the Damage modifier itself was just reduced versus infantry, then the Radius could be increased again and MAX crashes wouldn't always be so heavily crutched on in certain bases where the only way to hit ANY of them is directly from the air.


Meanwhile when it comes to actual ESF'ing ... A2A is the only variety I run and the skill floor for that used to be really approachable as long as SOE was actually doing their jobs by banning the obvious Prediction-Bots running rampant in the skies last year. For the most part it seems like they actually continue to succeed there b/c I've seen only 1 esf pilot still around (his name is a reference to a certain overrated Starwars bounty hunter) who's that blatant. I fully understand the frustration of gunning purists who think AirHammer shouldn't exist, & Tomcats should remain buried in the ditch with Hawk launchers ... but if those guys were true Gunners then they wouldn't have rocket pods at all, they'd have Afterburner extender to just OUTRUN the lockons. (and if Afterburner secondary needs help, then I'm all for it, I still run it myself in my #2 config)

Lol what? you think the best way to make new pilots competitive in the air vs aces, is to give them a lower dps weapon, great idea... i have a feeling you are in the auraxian coffin maker trade... the aces would just eat them faster...

On topic:
no. if you want to be competitive in the air vs aces, well you need to be an ace, welcome to competitive entertainment.
you cannot just give a super easy to use weapon that will kill all the high skill players, because all that will happen is they use it to dominate newbs harder.. ie tomcats, coyotes.

i am no where near an ace at this game , and heres my anecdotal training montage
beta, i heard about the game and reaver lolpods OP! so i flew and sucked, but got kills because OP, like no maneuvers, played it like a standard aircraft. this is the first 14 hours of my air time (of 32)
skip forward to a few months ago, id taken a long break, completely changed my controls settings everything to the point where flying is a very different game.
(now bear in mind i play on miller one of the higher popped EU servers, that is host to a lot air hate Daddy and his RO minions, the DIGT air zerg)
and yet i hardly saw them. funny that from the way people talk in this thread its as if the "elitist boogeymen" play all the time and never let the newbies fly.and are always swarming the other warpgates (protip if the warpgate you spawn in has an air zerg outside, go somewhere else? come on this is simple mapside .. look at the population figures..)
it may help that i joined a cracking good outfit, that was willing to give pointers, and operates an air squad at primetime, but that means its prime time.. say hello to BRTD and DIGT ...
and yes you will die. yes it sucks , but in 18 hours i went from herp a derp to able to hold my own fairly well. i will still lose to the aces, but so i should,

you dont hate when a br100 max crushes you in a biolab, you dont hate when a br100 fully upgraded magrider does an epic drift around a tree to catch your VG with its trousers down, so don't whine when someone is better in the air than you.

I don't think the skill ceiling is so much an issue as the skill "ladder" (the rate at which players ascend to the skill ceiling) and the skill floor. Right now there's very little motivation to even pull air, not because there's a lack of situations that demand it, but 10+ minute cooldowns, and nobody except pro-leet air outfits actually run dedicated air squadrons to help new players learn. Those alone create a fairly sizable barrier of entry. And in my experience, you learn to fly best when flying with others. It gives you a sense of security that really helps when getting off your feet in that side of the game.

a( you only have 50 hours, that's nothing
b( practice more, because it's fun
c( if you dont' like it pull a sky guard, not like the a2a squads are going to do anything to infantry

the problem with adding powerful weapons intended for new players is that experienced players will abuse the hell out of them discouraging new pilots more

l2p scrub, you're not mlg enough

I couldn't help myself...

Whether they're new or not, rocket podders all need to die

The real issue here is the spawn timer and the ridiculous number of certs necessary to gear up a decent ESF. Flying is always going to be the hardest thing in the game simply because -every- enemy can see you (if they're paying attention). Learning to deal with that (by being hyper vigilant and NOT staring at the ground all the time) is the hardest part.

Im an average at best pilot and I think the ceiling is just fine where its at. In fact, I love going head to head with the top Waterson Pilots. Yes, they will almost always win, but its pretty darn fun.

I have not seen a genuine "nerf skill" thread in some time. Thanks for preserving the status quo.

Effectively, this is buffing lockons.
no