ESF Hover Ability Removal

The ESF mechanic is already as simple as cam be. Yet you want to remove the only thing that gives it at least some character and interest. The game needs more complexity not less. More reward for skill. More reward for experience.

P.s. I hate ESF ******!

Yeah that's fine by me.

think about it with runways you can add a new base type and aircraft that can't hover would be reliant on airfields and airports to resupply and if you hold airfields or airport bases why not an air radar that shows non-stealth enemy aircraft in the hex and the hexes adjacent to the airfield/airport?

Energy management is by far more complex than hover duels.

I did enjoy Airfield captures on Battlefield 2. Airfield battles are fun no doubt - strategic asset chase reminiscent of WW2. The problem is that a faction can have a monopoly on Airfields which would make the game unpleasant for everyone else (even if each warpgate had a protected airfield). Another issue is PS2 continents are quite small. You could fit like 2 airfields on larger Battlefield 2 maps without looking like a Flight Sim. Maybe they could implement a 1 hex Resupply on a future continent here.

Edit: You could swap out Amp Stations, Bio Labs, or Tech Plants for Airfields but game will look and feel much more like one of EA's Battlefield games or a Flight Sim.

the same issue is there for MBTs though especially esmair and MBTs are alot slower to bring up from the warpgate. the maps are small but remember they can determine how big an area a base needs they just need to rework the hex boundaries.

they could add more space by moving the boundaries of the continents to the sea giving a little extra space. (i don't see why they couldn't make a port where you are trying to take points inside a ship that is just a base and not a vehicle)

they've removed some bases from indar, i don't see why they couldn't go to hossin, amerish and esmair clear some small bases to make way for airfields/airports.

I suppose continent real estate is possible. However, you can't land and take off an Air Zerg from a single runway in a short period of time. Air Traffic would be horrendous. Enemy fighters would just strafe waiting friendly aircraft. Aesthetically and game mechanic-wise, it's going to feel like a totally different game (even more so than Construction). This is not including the need to overhaul Air armaments to include bombs. It's a nice idea. We can play EA's Battlefield games to get that feel though.

Edit: Info on Battlefield 5 comes out tomorrow.

I fly a lot, esf mostly. I like the flight model, it's simply fun and challenging just to fly, and sometimes will just do that in game, not shoot at anyone, just fly around. I've been killed in esf by about every weapon in game I'm thinking, including pistols, grenades, c4 once (u were awesome).

Some people make it sound like, that over every fight, BOTH factions have esf's just happily farming away on ground peasants. In reality, it's usually just the defending or attacking force that has ground pounding esf's over a base at any one time. It's usually harder on an attacking force, if the base has friendly air, and attacking force does not. But we've all been there, the zerg, including lots of air, just moves to next base and overwhelms everything.

I think what people hate is this kind of scenario...they grab their buddy, few peeps from base, drive sundy to next capturable base, say esamir...stealth deploy...all's going well....killed the only defenders that were there, got the point....and then more people show up to defend, including hornet and AI equipped esf with thermals, which ***** you when re-deploying at sundie, or trying to get back into base from sundie, or any open area. And then eventually helps destroy sundie.

I can't tell you how often that happened when I started to play. It's rare that even the sundie driver will even protect his sundie w/tank mines or ap mines, let alone designate some protection. It's so often reactive rather than pro-active. There have been quite a few fights where I stayed in gunner seat in sundie, and that honestly was only thing that made difference in taking the base.

I look at some fights, and it's rarely an organized rush to the point. Even though there's 12-24 in spawn room, they run out in one or two at a time, seeing and hearing what just happened to the 2 dead guys that did the same thing...somehow blindly optimistic that it won't happen to them.

Actually give flak armor a try, med kits. I dunno if sensor shield 4 prevents u showing on thermals, might be good thing. Look and listen.

Don't do this. I flew to base last nite, the two guys that were ghost capping it stood in the window, 2nd story of building. Stood there looking at me, doh. Wrong.

Ground and air are and would still remain completely different. Infantry play is not nearly as awkward as flight in PS2 is. But yes, in 1v1s, some players do tend dominate. The removal of one tactic doesn't invalidate all other tactics, nor does it make them any more powerful.

I think we are both confused with each other here.

I'm all for adding a skill requirement. Forcing this change on aircraft would also reduce the need for AA in the first place, as they wouldn't be able to hover and spam like they do now.

This change would, if anything, reduce air's maneuverability. Not being able to suddenly "stop" midair and turn on a dime without plummeting into the ground.

You guys do realise why we have the hover ability ... right?

If not, go and get an esf and take off and land 10 times.

Ps2 physics are wonky as heck, always have been and probably always will be.
The only reason why we have the hover ability is because of those physics and how horribly the system reacts to aircrafts landing.

And this is after countless improvements.

Remember the days where landing on a pad 9 out of 10 times caused your esf to glitch into it and either explode or be stuck?
Or the fun times we had with mosquitos and scythes doing backflips during every landing?

For ***** sake, even now the landing gear is completly screwed and requires you to crashland into the warpgate a few times to retract or doesn't deploy at all.


And just as a reality check, air never gets any development time and resources dedicated to it ... so agrue all you want, nothing will change.
Case in point the bugged out ui esfs tend to have ... we had those issues since the first days of the beta!

So what you're saying is that because the flight mechanics are bad, it's perfectly acceptable for aircraft to hover over a fight and farm with impunity. Is this correct?

So what's wrong with the farming?

When I focus on the objective at hand, be it a regional base or player one. ESFs are not a concern most of the time. I think most will agree since regional bases have control points inside most times, or when they don't, they provide adjacent buildings. Do you have a different experience somehow?

Or is it the fact that they farm better than the tool or method you're using?

Lol, I like how nearly every "suggestion" in this thread is some sort of nerf to the ESF. The same people that sit in a tank all day and farm infantry and other vehicles like nobody's business, what hypocrites you all are.
As a mid-high tier level pilot (not expert or Ace by any means) I have some brief analysis of the situation since the latest patch:
I want to start this post by making this point crystal clear:

• The amount of anti-air in the game is borderline absurd right now.

Most players in this game have no idea what it's like to fly these days in PS2. Especially since the construction patch, there is more anti-air than ever, with deployed walker sunderers, skyguards and G2A lock-on heavies camping underneath hive shields like a German flak battery. Not to mention the shameless A2A lockon wielders that keep ducking in and out of the shield to repair themselves close to the warpgate. Basically this, when combined with the already dangerous turrets that are in the game means that if you get into an air to air combat situation, all the other player has to do is to flee close to the ground and he will likely drag you right through a crapstorm of AA that can certainly kill you in a few seconds.

Flying in PS2 isn't easy, it's the area of the game with the highest skill ceiling, and it is very rewarding if you put the time into it. "Dumbing it down" by downgrading an ESF into a conventional jet is like longing for the horse and buggy days because you're too scared to drive a car. Not everything is supposed to be easy and simple, some things are challenging and therefore more rewarding when you become proficient at it. A pilot in PS2 has to work for his skill, this is not the Battlefield series.

I feel like players these days have this sense of entitlement that they deserve anything they want and the gratification that comes with it instantly without dedicating the right amount of time and effort.

In short, the flying in this game is interesting and fine as is with its 3-dimensional controls. Just because some of us get killed in our tank by an ESF pilot with hornets during those 5 minutes out of the day that you were away from the "herd" of AA protection does not mean ESFs are overpowered.

Oh please. The game is set in the distant future in another solar system (galaxy?), and isn't bound by the confines of current technology. Use your imagination a bit and realize that designing a "super jet" that can hover isn't that farfetched. Even tanks can hover in this game...

This was PS2 2 years ago, if you try that tactic today you will have a burster max or two and lockons on you so fast your head will spin, at least on Emerald.

I can get farmed by them because the vehicle they are in is inherently capable of destroying mine rather than them having tried harder than I. That's fair, if not for that I would be unstoppable.
What pisses me off is that there is nothing farming them, there is no air vehicle that can farm them while requiring less skill to use.

If that were true this thread wouldn't exist. Nobody wants to do AA because it's boring, ineffective, and expensive.

1. Aircraft come
2. Pull a Burster
3. Aircraft leave and farm somewhere else because you didn't put out enough DPS to take them in one
4. Stand around waiting for them to come back
5. Switch to AI or AV because standing there is mind numbing and you blew 450 resources on this ******* thing
6. Get podded to death when the aircraft inevitably come back

1. Aircraft come
2. Pull out your G2A lock-on
3. Try to lock them
4. Fire a missile and watch it slam into the ground or watch the ESF tank the hit and fly off to rep
5. If you're unlucky you get shot in the head while looking at the clouds

1. Aircraft come
2. Pull a Skyguard
3. Wrestle with the huge CoF
4. Watch as the aircraft fly away
5. If you're unlucky they shove a Hornet up your *** or blind you with rocket pods, or a Lib hovers over you and mauls you with the TB and belly gun, or a Gal goomba stomps you

1. Aircraft come
2. Take 3 people off the line to pull Bursters
3. Shoot down the aircraft
4. Realise you traded 3 times the resources the pilot spent to take him down

1. Aircraft come
2. Take 3 people off the line to fire G2A lock-ons
3. Watch them slam into the ground, the aircraft throw out flares, or if you're unlucky it turns towards the HAs and guns them down
4. At least you didn't spend resources this time

1. Aircraft come
2. Take 3 people off the line to pull Skyguards
3. Wrestle with the CoF and maybe shoot down an aircraft that doesn't bug out fast enough
4. Now you have 3 paper weights
5. Enemy takes the point and the base is flipped while you sit around waiting for aircraft to fly over because you know as soon as you jump out of the Skyguard they'll be back

I think your issue is entirely perceptual. I'm not really convinced you are being farmed by ESFs. I'm really not.

So what I'd like for you to do is go to https://www.planetside2.com/players/ then after searching your character, click on Killboard. Then under Timeline click deaths. It should look something like this:



Then I want you to count the number of deaths you have suffered from ESFs. That's the number I want to know. This number will give me a rough percentage of your last bit of experiences playing.

I'm finding it HIGHLY unlikely that people get 'farmed' by air as much as they claim. But if there is evidence of you getting farmed.. I'd like to know exactly the extent of it. You see, I'm not calling you a liar. I'm not even entirely disagreeing with you. Just understand that my experience with ESFs as infantry doesn't match yours. So this is the only way for me to get information to compare in a semi statistical basis.

Well you some times catch players spawn from sunderer/spawn room again and again runing in line on point without thinking...throught i did kill them with esf before they decide ignore me not even check if im around or pick AA rockets, AA max, dont use sunderer AA cannons,atc... I think this kind of players will die anyway, because i dont see much diference if i do circle and throw bombs or make smaler turn and shoot them with rockets. ( same target on same place )

Yes that's the point, 90% of the A2A tactics you can pull off in PS2 either don't help you or even help your enemy by giving them time to catch up.
So you don't invalidate any tactics nor make them any more powerful, because they already are crap. And the whole "but some players tend to dominate" would still be true, because it's a nonsense statement. It has no value in any discussion. "In infantry combat some players tend to dominate". "In tank combat some players tend to dominate". These things are just as much true, but only the game mechanics determine how much they dominate.

You are removing options, dumbing down the A2A game to what would basically amount to "the first to get behind his opponent wins" because you've just removed the only two truly viable A2A maneuvers the game offers. But if you improved the existing maneuvers so that both VTOL and high-speed combat become available you create a wider range of effective choices a player has, which means that players don't necessarily have to train hours upon hours in the VR or against friends to get good.

This would be just as bad as giving G2A weapons more damage. You would destroy the air game since you would remove any good opportunity for A2A, which people wouldn't like since you would simply be dead once you get someone behind you. The only thing you could try would be... Slowing down (which makes you a good target) and plummet to the ground in the hopes your enemy won't have the maneuverability to do the same at that point. But if your enemy is at a small distance (which is getting shorter giving him more ease of shooting you to pieces), your now very predictable flight path will cause you to die quickly, up until you start up your ESF again and have to accelerate, again a period where the opponent has an easy way of gunning you.

It would nerf A2G and give ground units more opportunity no doubt, but that only means that aircraft are now on the stickiest end. If you go A2G and get caught by an aircraft, you now have an enemy behind you and no way to effectively shake him. If you go A2G and meet AA you will either be deterred from coming back since you will get hit and you will need to go back for repairs (or use NAR+FS to stay alive, limiting the amount of viable loadout options) and you still have to deal with the fact that G2A has the biggest force-multipliers and can potentially blow you to pieces.
And if you go A2A, it's a matter of praying you get behind someone before he gets behind you.

You could make it so interesting, you could finally solve the air game and make it fun, engaging, worth it even if you crash and burn instead of "well I came up against a skynight/gank squad and are now dead, let's return to something you won't get curbstomped at even if you have less than half the skill of your opponent". Yes it would create a necessary change for G2A weapons... But G2A needs an overhaul just as much.

The number of deaths doesn't matter. If it did then the shotgun wouldn't have been nerfed, if it did then nobody would complain about C4.
What matters is being cheated out of a fighting chance.

Also I didn't read anything past the first 3 lines.