[Video] Reaver A2A gameplay - New pilot progress lacking?

I quit the airgame because of 10-second death freezes, *****/PREY gank squads, SFS overpop, and SLS squads.

Thanks for feedback, I will have it in mind and see if I can get it done =)

Hi Matti,
I love your videos and have seen them multiple times. Especially your videos about ESF because I also want to learn to fly.
But I "consume" not even the videos about flying.
I am playing PS2 since january 2013 - so I am not a complete newbe. I spend also much time in VR flying and try out flying during normal gameplay. But:
- Viewing videos is a good way to learn but not enough.
- There are too many experienced players out shooting down everything withing seconds.
- And most of the time good pilots are not alone and when they are organized in a group they are invincible from my point of view.
This is the situation I feel.
And my own poor experience during try to fly an ESF:
- I do not know where the enemy ESF is around me and how far away is he/she. So orientation is my problem in the air.
- I feel that my own ESF is falling down like a stone from the sky (and I use hover stability level 3),
but on the other hand see enemy ESF hovering over ground targets and do not touch the ground. What do I wrong?
- I think I do not really know how I can switch the ESF from flying mode to hover mode and how to stay in hover mode
(If I try to fly in a Reaver or a Mosquito in 3rd person view I can see the dust going down - that helps a bit. But in Scythe?)
My result: If I try to fight against an enemy ESF I loose 99 % (1 % is pure luck). So it is very frustrating.
Or when I was not shooting down I touch a rock, a building, a tree or anything else and killed myself also. More frustrating.

And in my outfit we do not have experienced players so we can not learn from each other.
A flight acadamy/shool in an outfit which have average till good pilots would help much I guess.

the main problem with the air gameplay to me is the very...odd for lack of a better word controls and i halve flown plane's before IRL and how the air physiks (yes that's what im calling it) defy all laws of normal physics. and when i was playing PS1 the air gameplay felt a LOT more noob friendly and more controllable and were at least a little more realistic, and yes the a2a fights were still hover fights but they worked and were actually fun and it felt like you could complete something in a A2A fight for once. (insert more text about how ps1 did it better here)

Personally, I gave up on flying. I watched tutorials and a lot of your videos, but my major problem after PS2 released was that I didn't have a system that was good at running the game. By the time I had upgraded my system a year later, I found that I was hopelessly out-classed by players like yourself. The air game is so unforgiving, there's not much room to learn anything. You can watch videos until your eyes fall out of your head, but that's nothing compared to actually getting successful trigger time. And unlike most other things, there is very little learning opportunity from failure in this game. One second your are flying along looking for something to shoot, the next second your armor is bleeding off, and the third second you are looking at a death screen.

I'll tell you a little story. Once upon a time, I ran my own server for Half-life Deathmatch (still the greatest deathmatch game ever btw). Now, my server was small, and it wasn't super popular because I ran custom maps. So much of the time was spent doing what I called "priming the pump". Basically, sitting in my empty server waiting for someone to come in, greeting them, and then killing them. Now, I was not "the best player ever" but I was good enough to give ANY player a run for their money and in most cases the random guys who came into my server couldn't give me a run for mine. Generally, it went like this:

Player <randomguy> has joined the server
<Degenatron> say: hiya!
<Degenatron> AR grenade <randomguy>
<Degenatron> AR grenade <randomguy>
<Degenatron> Rocket launcher <randomguy>
<Degenatron> 357 <randomguy>
<Degenatron> 357 <randomguy>
<Degenatron> crowbar <randomguy>
Player <randomguy> disconnected from the server

And it went on like that for a month or so. Until I got smart and started playing down to their level. Literally letting them kill me as much as I killed them. I had to stop humbling and wrecking everyone that came through like they were my real life enemies. If I saw them standing in the middle of the arena looking around in circles, I might kill them but I might not. But then later I would do the same thing and let them kill me so they could see how easy of a target they were. After I started doing that, my server began to get a lot more popular. I got repeat visitors. People started talking and I made friends. I built a thriving community.

The moral of the story is that "priming the pump" is more than just being there to stomp the ever loving crap out of people, you have to build their confidence, bow to their level, carry them up, and gradually build the kind of opponent who can put you down even when you're at the top of your game.

The problem is, this ain't that place. There's no room for that here in Planetside. You take for granted that you and the other Ace Pilots came up together, matching each other skill for skill, and raising the bar against one another. For us amateurs, the bar is already way too high to compete. You try to do what I did, but up there in the air and you're shark bait. There's really no fixing that.

It certainly can be fixed, just totally change the flight model to a more traditional one. Then at least players coming from other games get a "familiar" feel and can be somewhat competent. I've always disliked the hover fighting flight model and would much rather see ESF's act like fighter planes.

Hover fighting doesn't just screw up A2A combat, but being able to hover and aim (powerful weapons) with relatively good accuracy has been hosing the ground game since launch. It's all about "available time on target". Jets have to "fly past" and only get a limited window to attack ground targets, hovering ESF's extend this windows far, far too much.

P.S. Liberators hovering is BS too, but the air game will never change (flight model).

Hmm, i've been thinking... Many people say they want a traditional flight model. That means somewhat 700+ kmph? 1200+ to break the sound barrier or so. That means stuterring, freezing and lagging, new render problems, and ESFs generally moving faster than the bullets meant to shoot them. Dunno what to think of it though. I like flying with my back in front and shooting the other way xD

I see this ALOT, and i have no idea what their problems are! i keep chalking it up to lag.

Such is the purgatory of allowing a high skill ceiling in a game with no matchmaking.

Flying an ESF is a long, complex, and confusing learning curve.

I think what would help most is if someone could gather all the good (what is "good" would have to be vetted by a good player) tutorials/post links/etc. and then lay them out in clusters in a sequential manner (from noob to ace) for people to digest. That way, players can comprehend and get into the sequence at their level, and progress along it to continue to improve.

Beyond the problematic learning curve, Gank Squads and "better players" (doesn't have to be an "Ace", just someone better than them) are both huge walls of death to most players. There seem to be many Gank Squads and Aces that roam Continents hunting for ESFs to pick off.

Also, the Cert investment on ESFs is both staggering and confusing, and well beyond the budget of many players. Matti, you would improve your tutorials if you would always list your Loadouts used, minimum spec Loadout suggestions for Cert challenged players, Loadout progression for what to put Certs into as you go, and ideal Loadouts.

I also agree with Leftconsin that a dedicated Air Channel would he HUGE for improving the flying game for most players. It would help players learn from each other, it would also help to warn about heavy AA, and it would alert of enemy gank squads and aces that noobs could avoid and ally gank squads and aces could hunt down and take out.

back when I was learning how to fly, the most difficult thing for me to grasp was aiming the nose gun. I did play some arcade flight games and a little modern combat flight sims, and in all of those sims, there is a gun reticule that pops up when an aircraft is within gun range. I think it would be better for the game in the long term if SOE removed A2AM's and Coyotes and implemented a more streamlined HUD (distance indicator from target aircraft and gun reticule) either as a built in system or at a cost of utility slot / secondary slot.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, there really should be a dueling system in the VR. Having an area where aspiring pilots could test weapons/slot loadouts in actual combat and practice dogfighting each other without having to worry about resources would go a long way toward improving the learning experience.

I posted this already but anyway.

All of you who say the controls are counterintuitive or bad or what not, all of you who are saying you dont last a second and get ganked by pros. You're all lazy whiners. Pick up the A2G build and avoid fighting other esfs. Learn to fly and kill ground, after you will get comfortable with it its time to try a2a.
You dont have to be superman to compete in the air, you have to play it and not whine.

Yeah...you just have to spend like 100hours...even if you played other games before. Same counts for tanks and infantry...no...wait...it doesn't. The only thing that isn't intuitive there is the behaviour of tank tracks(for people that didn't play tank games before)...but that is at least realistic.
Flying in PS2 is neither intuitive nor realistic, it's just practice, practice and practice. You could as well force arrows set controls where Up arrow would make you turn right, left arrow go backward, right arrow for forward etc...it would be very fine for someone that wants to spend 100hours on retraining his brain and he could then call himself a pro cause beginners will simply suck due to the whole thing being not intuitive and unlike other games.

The short story is that if you didn't get into the air game early enough, you are a cert pinata for those that did.

Nobody likes being a cert pinata.

Then there's ESF resource cost. No one wants to spend resources to be a cert pinata.

You can only learn so much in the VR. You will still get slaughtered on live against pilots that have tons of experience against live targets. And it's very hard to learn anything when you're getting slaughtered - playing against skilled players can help people improve but if the gap is too large the less skilled player is dead before they learn anything.

Now, certainly you can bang your head against the wall and slowly rise to mediocrity, but a pilot with a year or two advantage on you will always have that advantage. You can't really ever catch up when the skill ceiling is so high. Infantry is squishy enough, and tanks limited enough in mobility, that you can still beat vastly more experienced players. Air... it's a different story. They're durable enough and evasive enough that the veterans can still win quite easily even in a disadvantaged situation.

but but but.... dumbfires! D:

Come on, dont tell me you're auto good at infantry the moment you hopped in game. To be really good you still have to spend those said 100 hours or even more.
To reach skillceiling in airgame you need lots of hours, probably about 400-500 hours.
To reach infantry skillceiling you need quite substantially more time, about 1000-1500 hours for the current game and perhaps it wont be enough if nobody is mentoring you.

To come back to the thread how novice and low experienced players could better learn to fly I have the following suggestion:
In VR you can test everything including using ESF to fly. Problem is that you can only shoot on
a) NON-MOVING targets and
b) they do not shoot back!
So VR for me atm is the second place after looking gameplay videos for getting familiar with controling an ESF. Not more.

What about a personal option within the VR to let everybody can decide to take damage like outside the home warp gates on the continents? (enable/disable friendly fire) Then players can enter the VR and they can better learn to fly and fight against moving targets (1. level) and shooting back (2. level). ATM you can shoot your friend(s) but you do not know if you hit a him/her nor how much damage you made.
If you can decide you can be shooten and get killed or not you got feedback of your action you take in VR.
Clearly that every "kill" in VR never touch K/D ratio for shooting down and dying ...

One way to counter people trying to ram you: descend. They usually hold the vertical thrust down and will go higher above or no vertical movement key. In this case they will pass above you while you easily maintain hover for having a slightly lower altitude. The moment they are on top of you turn around and shoot, they've usually completely lost their sense of direction.

What could also help is to curtail the snickering elitist attitude of many "Sky Knight" players who live to give people lip about how utterly superior they are.

Frankly, it's thanks to them I enjoy my AA role so much. Enemy aircraft = strong urge to mow them all down, at the very least make their lives as miserable as I can.

The logic is simple: If I'm going to take the abuse from that kind of player, they will take my burning flak cannons, and they will LIKE IT.

If the dedicated pilots want more enemies in the air to deal with, they may want to endear more players to actually try, and the first step to do so is to not be smacky and annoying to play with.

After THAT, a number of different ways one can encourage more air-craft A2A action is to simply help them out. Open up air-squads, help teach the willing rookies how they can fly better. Hell, open up open platoons and weed out the unwilling from the willing and teach that later group what you can. Fly in groups with them and lead them in fights with enemy aircraft.

This is how my outfit gets recruits. We run open platoons, play as well as we can and lead with example. The derpy ones are weeded out the one's who have the will to help out they stay. Many of those end up joining the outfit, presumably because they like what they see and the action they get and want more. This should work well for the air-specific players out there.

TL-DR - encourage a positive attitude and can the smack to make you a more interesting party to be with. Then, lead by example and show/teach how it's done.

If all factions on all servers did this you would have far more people in the air, and far more people pulling air to fight air, instead of grabbing their lock-ons and flak cannons instead.