Thoughts after my Return

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by JohnGalt36, Dec 22, 2015.

  1. Gundem


    I suggest you search some ESF tutorials on either the Forums or Youtube, you'll be pleasantly suprised that most skilled ESF Pilots actually say the exact opposite: A Liberator can't do anything against a skilled ESF. If Liberators are your problem, I've been working on a tutorial to take them down using different methods, organized by faction availability, cert investment, skill and coordination requirement. It's not done yet but I should get my lazy *** around to it, eventually :oops:
    • Up x 1
  2. JohnGalt36

    I guess my point is that there are hard counters that are easy for everyone to do for every vehicle except the Liberator. The Liberator is the only vehicle that takes any amount of skill to counter. Ground vehicles can be countered by no-skill infantry, other vehicles, mines, and air. ESF's are basically made of glass.
  3. JohnGalt36

    Also, Liberators aren't "my problem" in an ESF. They are, however, a problem when you're in literally anything else and there aren't any skilled pilots to fight him.
  4. Gundem


    That being the case, honestly I'd rather see the low-skill counters removed so the game as a whole has a higher skill-cap apart from infantry combat.
    • Up x 2
  5. JohnGalt36

    Honestly, I'd be fine with that. I'd be perfectly fine with libs being hard to counter if my Vanguard was even half as hard.
  6. Gundem


    Unfortunately, so long as Infantryside is the majority playerbase of this game, any non-infantry will continually be nerfed.

    The only difference is that MBT's are more often the infantry farmers, therefore they have gotten the most nerfs. Aircraft have gotten their fair share of nerfs, but not so many as all our AI weapons got nerfedhammered to hades we realized what was going on before and stopped farming.

    What a lot of infantry players refuse to accept is that as an infantry, they are bottom of the cert-chain. A profound quote, while not verbatim, went something along the lines of "The strength of infantry lies in that they can spawn aircraft". While the person who said it was talking in an aircraft discussion, it applies to any vehicle that requires nanites to spawn.

    I think we can agree that one of the bigger issues is how strong Infantry are against ground vehicles. And I can imagine that if Aircraft were as popular as tanks were/are, we'd have 20 infantry-based AA weapons that would make life hell for any pilot regardless of the population of a fight or how you flew. **** like C4-on-a-balloon Air Mines that could insta-gib ESF's and deal heavy damage to Liberators/Galaxy's or mini-Flak pistols that deal decent damage against infantry(To make sure they could be used as a secondary as well!)

    Maybe we'll see some changes with the introduction of ANT's. Give aircraft and tanks some objectives outside farm infantry.
    • Up x 1
  7. Mxiter

    How long it takes to destroy a lib like that?
    Enouth to /O or /L a friendly airsquad and make them cross the continent.

    Far from hard counter.

    The only lib hard counter is an other lib. You know what it mean?


    All air meta needs a revamp: lower skill floor (better survivability by more intuitive flying controls) but way lower skill ceiling (lower mobility and/or firepower).
    • Up x 1
  8. WeRelic

    It's surprisingly fast to kill a lib like that, even moreso if you happen to have A2A missles or rocket Pods (Yes, they're deadly to libs, but tough to aim).

    For the last statement: Absolutely not. The airgame isn't that hard to get into. People think themselves out of it before they even honestly try. I was one of those people until I spent some time learning the ropes. I don't run away from ace pilots or assume that I'm going to get wrecked as soon as I leave warpgate which most people seem to have stuck in their heads.

    I do my best, then ask pilots who bested me for tips and since most aces are looking for a worthy opponent and want to encourage people to fly, a vast majority have helped me out.

    This is the only way to improve. Asking for them to dumb down a system that actually requires skill and practice is a terrible idea, instead, how about we ask the players to man up and learn? Honestly, I would outright quit if they did that. Not just because I'm a pilot, but because they just negated months of training and practice because other people were too lazy to do the same.

    No. The air game is good, it's the player mentality that needs a revamp.


    EDIT:
    Welcome back, John. I just realized that I've posted twice here and have yet to say that, despite meaning to get around to it. Glad to have you back!
  9. WeRelic

    It's surprisingly fast to kill a lib like that, even moreso if you happen to have A2A missles or rocket Pods (Yes, they're deadly to libs, but tough to aim).

    For the last statement: Absolutely not. The airgame isn't that hard to get into. People think themselves out of it before they even honestly try. I was one of those people until I spent some time learning the ropes. I don't run away from ace pilots or assume that I'm going to get wrecked as soon as I leave warpgate which most people seem to have stuck in their heads.

    I do my best, then ask pilots who bested me for tips and since most aces are looking for a worthy opponent and want to encourage people to fly, a vast majority have helped me out.

    This is the only way to improve. Asking for them to dumb down a system that actually requires skill and practice is a terrible idea, instead, how about we ask the players to man up and learn? Honestly, I would outright quit if they did that. Not just because I'm a pilot, but because they just negated months of training and practice because other people were too lazy to do the same.

    No. The air game is good, it's the player mentality that needs a revamp.


    If you need someone to do testing shoot me a PM, I've almost unlocked everything on my Scythe, and most of my Lib as well. I play on Emerald.

    OT:
    Welcome back, John. Glad to have you back! Meant to say this earlier, but I have the attention span of a goldfish some nights.
  10. zaspacer


    I know a lot of players *think* they want a higher skill floor in the game. But locking more players out of Combined Arms is a step in the wrong direction for the game's player population and meta.

    Skill floors impair built-in reliable gameplay balance, and they reduce the importance and impact of strategy and situational awareness.


    Libs are much less lethal in general to ESFs 1-on-1 than they used to be. The Dalton just doesn't seem as dangerous.

    Where I get into problems with Libs is when either:
    1) I (a solo ESF flyer) over extend to engage them and then another enemy Air shows up
    2) they have amazing accuracy

    As has been stated, ESF Loadout is another big factor in how hard/risky it is taking on a non-elite Lib. Rocket Pods are probably too good against too many targets.
  11. LodeTria


    Rocketpods are not good at long ranges Vs aircraft, they are for close range only and if you do manage to hit something that far out you just lucky. They are good close range though, esp vs galaxys or anything landed.
  12. JohnGalt36

    Thanks! I plan on playing quite a bit over the break before my last semester of college.
    • Up x 1
  13. oberchingus

    Breaks are healthy. Welcome back.
    • Up x 2
  14. Sulsa

    Glad another one is back.
    For 3 years, through buffs and nerfs, I have always believed that no matter how good any vehicle is in Planetside 2, they have always been 'situational'. Sometimes a lib is a monster, sometimes it is rendered completely ineffectual by the opposing force.
    I think the whiners (not you OP, just in general) get so invested in one aspect of this game, that when they get hit by an effective counter they freak the f*** out rather than readjusting.
  15. Inex

    That depends on how you're defining 'popular'. Aircraft are as desirable as tanks. Probably moreso, but you need to understand how many people pull aircraft, compared with how many people want to pull aircraft. If you want to see how desirable air is, there`s a simple method: search the forums for the phrase 'Don Alfrago'.

    The main reason you don't see as many people flying is simply that a very small group of good pilots can wipe out an entire continent worth of aircraft. On the other hand, it doesn't matter how good your tank crew is; the HE farmer at Mao has nothing to worry about from your crew ravaging the Quartz/IE field. So players learn that getting in the air is usually a shortcut to the spawnroom, minus 350 Nanites, because some cert starved Skyknight is going to blow them out of the air. Assuming they don't run themselves into a tree, or slam into the ground trying to infantry farm.

    Personally, I'd just love to see some formal definitions of what "Skill ceiling/floor" are supposed to mean.

    For some reason "ceiling" seems to be used as "as player skill rises, how far can in-game effectiveness rise in correlation?" Whereas "floor" gets used as "How much skill does a player need to be minimally effective?"

    That aside,
    you're a nut. Telling a F2P player base that it'll be 6 months before you get to fly without getting ruined is madness.
    • Up x 1
  16. Haquim

    No chaos here, thats a proper staging area.

    And you won't. With the potatos that DBG uses to run this game it gets laggy with 200 people in a fight, never mind that scale - which would propably be more than all active players together fighting over a single AMP station.
  17. JustBoo

    Not sure if that is even true, but let's go with it.

    Oh I see, yeah, I guess staging areas are all peach cordials and rainbow colored unicorns, huh. I mean just ask (or read about) any veteran's account from D-Day in WWII, or any large scale battle.

    See *Contrarian. No reason, just 'cos ya' wanna'. Right.

    [IMG]

    Virtual Machines (VM) are becoming the bane of performance. People literally do not understand them and so-called professionals think they can load 20-30 VMs on one hardware server and it will all magically work. <big giant sigh>.

    Edit: Added an e to quote.
  18. zaspacer

    I believe those descriptions to be pretty on.
  19. Inex

    For consistency of the term though, you'd expect "floor" to be "As player skill drops, what is the lowest effectiveness in game?" (i.e. the MAX complaint).
    Or for "ceiling" to be "How skilled do you need to be to get maximum effectiveness?".

    I mostly get confused because I think of the commonly used definition of "skill floor" as "barrier to entry".
  20. WeRelic

    Ad hominem aside, you're spot on with your definitions of skill floor and ceiling, but I never said it takes six months to become effective. I said that they would negate months of my training and practice, not that it took me months of practice to become effective.

    It was roughly 2 weeks before I was consistently effective with an ESF, and most of that time was spent certing up rather than actually learning to fly. I'd say I learned to fly confidently in little more than a few hours. I've heard roughly the same estimate from every player I've talked to about it, that flies regularly and doesn't hold an immature "I can't do it, so nerf pls" attitude.