So you are killing people, defending a base and having an absolute blast! Best game in the world! But the comes an ESF with lol pods and BAM! No more fun, now you are just spawn camped by a few ESFs and cannot do anything about it without coordination while you just want a casual play session. You know what would help a lot? Dome shields that were on PTS for a while... But thats just a random solution to the issue of A2G ESFs just murdering the fun aspect of the game for the majority of players.
Oh boy. You just suggested to nerf air (only true ultimate MLG skill). Prepare for a five star ****storm when all ESF pilots (only true ultimate MLG players) see this...
Air definitely doesn't ruin fun. It's part of the mix of weapons. You signed up for a deeper game with combined arms, rather than a shallower game where only infantry matter. To be clear, I think the ideal is more like: Indoors, all infantry classes are viable (meaning MAXes get fixed a bit.) Outdoors, all vehicles are viable (also implies that infantry aren't viable apart from niche situations.) There should always be enough room between bases for a good vehicle fight. Bases themselves should often be entirely indoors. (Which means the force shield is actually not a bad idea. Only the idea that "air ruins fun" is flat-out wrong.) Vehicle decay timers should be much longer than the current 5 mins. All of which mostly just gets us back to where we were with Planetside 1's excellent ebb-and-flow between infantry-dominated and vehicle-dominated portions of the game.
Having to run past the sights of many camping vehicles to get from anywhere to anywhere while inside a base is the definition of combined arms. I'm pretty sure that Sun Tzu said this.
The most fun i've had in my last two sessions has been shooting down the aircraft that came to kill my magrider. And I laughed so hard at the guy who crashed his lib into the ground trying to hit my mag. A tip for pilots. Flying straight toward my mag front on and low makes it easy for me to give you a face full of AP canon. Don't do it.
Well that's just stupid. Mags are the easiest to TankBust because they always face forward. Approach from behind OnTopic: Try using AA. There's potentially TONS of it. A small contingent of AA will chase away all but the largest swarms... which can still be stopped by less than half their number of AA.
AA is bad though. As soon as all the air leaves, which it inevitably will, you become useless and you essentially blew half your resources for a glorified fly swatter. At best, all you have to show for it is a ribbon or two.
The problem aren't organized air pushes - those are fine. If you're pulling 46 ESFs, you're committed to blasting as many tanks and sundies as you can before the enemy inevitably pulls AA and kills you. The longer it takes for the enemy to pull AA, the more damage you will do. The problem are opportunistic air scavengers - air is unique in that it's always air that controls the engagement, not the infantry or vehicles. If infantry pulls AA, the ESF farmer breaks off and starts farming elsewhere. As such, AA isn't a hard counter for those situations, because the farmer doesn't care about actually winning the fight or destroying any particular target. In that way, ESFs are pretty much the vehicle equivalent of sniping. With a vehicle.
Well if you win the battle, there's no valid complaint being made here. You've won. Who cares if someone came in, poked you in your weak spot, and then was chased off? They're now irrelevant to the battle, and penalized you for being caught unaware. Seems like everything worked out as it should...
as an average ESF pilot, you will destroy the game for air, I play tank air and infantry and know all sides of the argument (to an extent) ant esfs are only a threat on 12v12 fights and libs on 24v24 fights, organized though they can be a bit OP, (that's just do to the Higher than needed Lib Damage)
