The current state of ESF dogfights

I knew of plenty of pilots who before skill got nerfed, became a much better pilot to the point of being an ace well after the game came out. Now there are things cert wise that IMO should be changed so its a bit more fair equipment wise, but if you take out skilled play, then the game just becomes boring for even the less skilled players in the long run. Sure at first they will have fun and get kills but once people realise that there is no way to really improve your game play, they will leave. That is why games like starcraft, counter strike and MOBA games are extremely popular even though a majority of players are bad... the bad players want to become good so they practice, and they eventually become better while looking up to the Diamond league players, even though fighting them they would get stomped. Without being able to get better, the game just becomes a grind and / or a numbers game which is fine for a facebook game you play for a short time, but not fine for a game that is trying to retain players for long periods of time.

Agreed. I own the coyotes and have tried them and hate them. They feel like they make me a bad pilot and the dogfighting with them is mindless. I don't even engage in dogfights any more if a coyote user is involved. I will either run from them or ditch my plane and just get another one. Dogfights used to be the fun moments in flying, now I have no interest in engaging other aircraft unless I am jumping them. The second I hear the coyote spam start I have to resist the urge to uninstall the game.

It isn't just ace pilots who can beat up AB users. If you run into two newer pilots with these things your odds are slim of keeping your aircraft. The best you can hope for is to take one with you. The second you break to enter hover and engage your health rapidly vanishes. This seems to make casual players happy, but it has pretty much drained the airgame imo.

I could just join them and run coyotes and fly with air zergs, but I'd really rather just move on to another game if it has come to that.

Seriosly how you want balance players who did play realistic air simulators like IL-2 or Space simulator like X series.... for years. It did take my cca 3 weeks master ESF...

Reason why good players us new lock on rocket and cannon is: they dont have araxius medail on it, im making less xp with new AA missles only and that slow shoting cannon is jack of all traders good vs all, but not realy good at anything.

Soo... if you cry now, wait when all make medails and pick usual set

+This cry about esf balance is there from start and even pro pilots prefere diference esf so its not like they are unbalanced, you just have to find best esf for your fighting style. Of course you will meet monsters on your way who can take you 1 v 3-5 in air and win with minimal damage, but with practic you can fly like them and bully new players

I learned to fly in August, never bothering with the a2am and learning by time after time pulling an esf and following people around. I do however agree that it is harder to learn how to fly now than it was for me, and i wasn't even one of the pre-ace, pre-g2a domination pilots. What has been making it harder for actual noobs is the existence of the a2am and coyotes. they take away the ability of the noob pilot to learn from an encounter with another esf other than he had coyotes therefore he won. the problem for new pilots in the current air game is how punishing death is. waiting 15 minutes after 10 seconds of flight is not a productive system for getting into the air. SOE should allow unlimited pulling of an esf with a nosegun and AB pods until you have 50-100 hours in the air.

The Air Game as it stands is rotten to the core. We do not need Hover duels or any of that nonsense because that is not what this game is about. We need A2A weapons that anyone can use to shoot down A2G Craft and remove them from the Air Space around the bases, allowing for ground forces to actually advance and capture bases or to allow for reinforcements for besieged bases.

It's the same with what Vehicles should be doing as well, supporting the core focus of the game which is to take and hold territory.

well they could do that, except it's boring and not effective

Give the Light PPA a velocity buff

So, Everyone should automatically be able to shoot down everything in front of them? Sounds like boring zerg gameplay to me.

The 'hover duels' are not really duels in a sense, its just one form of combat that comes with VTOL aircraft... Having said 'hover duels' and beating your opponents and then taking air dominance is what this game is about, and not just hover fights, forward flight fights as well.

The thing that is fun about being able to flip over, flybackwards and engage your enemy is the fact that no, just because someone is behind you does not mean you can not fight back, in fact, that person getting behind you could put you in a good possession to take them down. The air game indeed is rotten to the core, but it is due to the lock on weapons, not due to the ability to hover.


Also, Last I played, the infantry seem more content to farm other infantry than take points, so there are a lot more over all game play problems that have been pointed out for around a year now which have nothing to do with unit balance itself but inherently effect said unit balance.

Sorry i had to go before i finished my post about skilled vs unskilled.

So to continue. We need some way to from training squads in vr. Meaning squads in vr that can only friendly fire other squad members. That along with making vr bigger would allow a better way for players to practice and teach each other against real people not stationary targets. This would benefit everyone not just pilots.

Its not that hard to learn flying. With BR25 you can already have a decent ESF with certed AB, Hover III, NAR + Utility. You can use the AI nosegun to learn how to engage ground on a low pop continent and start to get some A2A experience. And at the beginning you also had some veterans from beta and pros.

(Why did SOE make the training wheels weapons both cost 1000 certs who is that for... But I am suddenly curious if coyotes can hit a plane behind you if they're close enough)

Ignoring Coyotes for a moment, currently I feel like the onus of skill in a hover fight is placed almost exclusively on aim, which I personally consider to be to its detriment. I can list many examples of games that feature self aiming and or homing weapons that still have a great deal of depth and skill involved - Aim just isn't one of them, and they're usually better for it.

Starting with a more obvious comparison, there's the Ace Combat series. The important part here is how missiles behave, I found a quick example. You only need to watch a few seconds, all I'm trying to show here is missile behavior. The player had a lock and fired, but they weren't in a good orientation versus their target so the missile couldn't track. In this case, the target was flying perpendicular and the missile couldn't turn to match.

BUT the player could have given their missile a much better chance to hit by turning into their opponent's path, essentially leading them but keeping them in the radar cone, causing their missile to essentially cut the corner. This however, does not give the offensive player the assured hit, they are firing where they think their target is going to be, by turning off such that they move out of the missile's effective envelope. In planetside 2, the missiles is essentially inertialess, or might as well be, basically never missing so long as homing remains putting the onus of retaining lock solely on the attacker, all they have to do is look at their target. I think that's the cause of the vitriol, the attacker can only fail, the defender basically can't succeed.


A more out-there example of skilled play not being tantamount to aim:



Very near and dear to my heart, Virtual On. Ok, there's a lot going on here, I'll try and break down what's pertinent.

Each VR (Virtuadroid, the players control them) has three weapons that behave differently depending on how they're fired. They can also dash, which they do a lot. Firing while dashing automatically aims you at the opponent, which also gives you a target lock, causing everything to home in a bit. You can also automatically face the opponent by jumping. Firing while dashing locks you into the dash to its natural conclusion, which depending on how the relative direction of the dashes gives one opponent an advantage (thus a hit) if they both dash. The simple version is that dashing towards where your opponent started their dash puts you at an advantage. Both players need to recognise when this has happened and when it has, abstain from firing so they retain a mobility advantage. Not firing allows you to dash cancel and start a new dash or jump, curve their dash, or do a 90 degree turn to their dash.

An interesting tidbit, because forward dashes are faster than other dashes, facing away from your opponent can be advantageous, but you still want to keep track of them mentally.

So, quick summery, this game needs situational awareness (who has the so called "thrust vector" advantage, and where they are if they're off screen), reaction time, quick decision making, many others man do they even have names for this. And aiming is 100% automated.

In spite of all the references to "VR", playing virtual on with an oculus rift or similar device would just be, well, all the vomit. The camera moves a lot.

Well, that's where I stand. Thinking about it, I get the idea that the infantry gameplay was much more studied than the other forms.

Back in the day, Dogfights use to rely on both aim and avoidance, but SOE hated the fact that really good pilots could fly circles around not so good pilots and the good pilots could kill 3 bad pilots that are attacking him at the same time. Since then, the ESF's agility has been nerfed by increasing the amount of fuel used when using your afterburners.

Here is a video I made back when maneuvering was much more important.

Velocities were also lower, so that you had to be pretty close to be an actual threat to your opponent. With the shift from rotaries to defaults as the 'Go-To' nose-gun, the reduced ability to maneuver is exacerbated as the trade-off of accuracy for avoidance is generally hardly worth it nowadays. In order to score a kill you had to get yourself into a position where your opponent was vulnerable, instead of being able to engage from vast distances.

And let's not forget situations where lock-ons weren't all powerful. Remember being able to charge down a missile and then cutting to the side to make it fly past you and break lock? That just doesn't happen anymore.

And this is why I get depressed when trying to fly now a days... SOE has secusfuly nerfed skill in favor of making the air game a numbers game, much like the ground game is.

I dislike that greatly.

They can.

The current state of ESF dogfights:
Lib flies in and obliterates everything.

Why I only fly libs now, they are really the only enjoyable aspect of the air game for me anymore.

You seem to not have really played in the aircraft. Speed and acceleration unless they're boosted on the Mossie by at least 50% mean nothing. Because of the game physics, optics available, and afterburn, the second a Mosquito, or any craft stops the hover fight it gets ripped apart. I dont know how you got the idea Mossies are meant for turning but that simply isnt true. Their tiny speed capability means they turn worst than any other ESF, (thats the scythe's intended domain, but again flip a reaver over and it out-turns even them). In order to make it viable one on one combat the Reaver needs to be slowed down and made less agile, and the Mossie sped up. No damage modifiers are needed.
Also it seems that you simply want to be unmatched in an aircraft, the coyotes are balanced much like the rest of the AA in such a way as to allow victory without requiring air support. Now there could be better tweaks obviously, but the fact remains that the ESF's are wholly unbalanced, and greatly require fixing.

Today, I realized that the Tankbuster only costs 100 certs...

How dueling a scythe feels like