ESF Hover Ability Removal

They are doing WHAT????

The LPPA I can understand, its basically a more powerful version of the old PPA that ruined literally everyones day.

But the airhammer? Why? It is kinda annoying when a reaver is sneaking up on me (for some reason they make NO sound at all unless they are already close to me for a couple seconds) and onehits me, but if I see him coming theres a good chance hes either eating a decimator or has to break his attack and evade.
The fact that it is performing on a level with the LPPA is more a statement to how little people care about doing some goddamn G2A, since there is barely any easier target to have, than to the power of the goddamn weapon!

And the BANSHEE of all things?? WHY???? This thing is already underperforming a whopping FOURTY PERCENT in KPH, KPU and kills total. Because somebody thought bringing it down its previous 20% overperformance needed a moronic nerf of its explosive damage capabilities by a total of 87.5%!!
And they want to nerf it further?? Again: WHY?? Or maybe rather HOW?
How would they even do that???

And that's all you will get. Is more derailling.

You don't deserve anymore than that. Go be a pedophile somewhere else.

And here's the root of the problem. I think it would make the air game more complicated, and would have the added effect of partially nullifying A2G, and therefore by an extent reduce the need for good AA. You believe the opposite.

This is why I say we are at an impasse. (Not to mention the grand total of our efforts accumulates to the typical amount of sh:t-all.)

And why on earth would I deserve nothing more? Because I'm trying to be logical? Because I point out your errors? Because it's you who perhaps is throwing tantrums with deliberate derailment rather than manning up and having a solid discussion?

I've explained why I think the air game would be dumbed down, can you explain why it would be more complicated?

Also even if you remove hover flight, I don't think you removed the problem of aircraft vs ground. The reason people complain isn't because it's (necessarily) about them being OP in any way, but because they can't fight back properly unless they have very specific weapons and loadouts, most of which are incredibly debilitating when you want to do anything else. There's no way to actively use cover when an aircraft attacks you. You either are already in cover, you are almost in cover anyway, or you are a sitting duck. Vehicles have it worse, and they can't even hide on 99% of the continent, they can't even dodge. All they can do is sit there and pray that a friendly has AA.

And that's what's wrong. You can't enjoy a system where you either have to sacrifice everything just to be capable of retaliating, and even then you are a deterrent even though ever other weapon in the game is a full-on killer. You don't see AP shells deterring, nor rocketpods, or noseguns, coyotes, HEAT, HE, small-arms.... Sure it has an inherent exponential scaling problem which is just that: Another problem. When you are effective you are now sitting with a useless weapon that can't be used against anything else.

To fix this, players need to be able to defend themselves. "defend" does not mean "outright kill their opponents". A defensive weapon could be a deterrent... Which already shows how messed up the G2A game is. But most of the ways to defend yourself could easily be done through non-lethal weapons. Something to make it much harder to hit you like a smoke screen or reducing their maneuverability so it's harder to aim and steer away from the ground. You can introduce weapons that make it much more dangerous, such as weapons that leech all the afterburner fuel from ESF meaning they can't have an easy escape anymore. Defensive weapons and abilities would allow you to focus on different tasks such as objectives, AI or AV while not being a sitting duck when caught by aircraft.

Let me make it clear to you. I don't care how I appear to others in this community. It can go screw itself for all I care. I've made that perfectly clear in the past. If people don't like what I say, they can hit ignore. I make my opinions, I state my facts, and I put conviction and confidence behind everything I post.

Now you have to ask yourself this. Is arguing with me worth derailing a thread? Do you care more about proving me wrong than advancing a discussion? Apparently the answer is yes. And because of that, is why you had lost the argument. And will continue to lose as you derail this further.

I'll go till the thread is locked. I'll wager it bothers me less than it does you.

And throw a tantrum when someone points out you were wrong.

You have absolutely no redeeming value anymore? Not a single idea that spouting nonsens could be hurting the game? What this does to you is irrelevant to me, what it does to the game is.

I can and have. But to reiterate, dogfighting would become more like actual dogfighting instead of just hover fights.

I'd argue that because A2G is so hard to effectively combat from the ground, when combined with a powerful arsenal is why some view air as OP. Kinda like wraith flashes, where they can easily approach, spam, and leave from complete stealth/relative safety.

Anyways, thanks for the food for thought, but I think I've said my piece on the topic for now.

I like the idea of active deterrence/defense.

Something like a "scramble cannon" - a pistol-like tool that players can cert into. If they manage to successfully shoot a low-hovering ESF with it, it causes all of the ESF's secondary weapon rounds (aka ground pounders) to scramble off and go in all sorts of unreliable directions for a minute or two.

Some people will be quick to call you a complete idiot, but I won't. Your general line of thinking is solid, you're on the right track, but removing hover really isn't the way to fix this. Most people don't understand the intricacies of air combat with real physics. They only see planes flying in circles shooting each other down in movies and TV shows; when in reality there's a lot more to it than that. The problem with removing hover is that this leaves an air game where all you can do is hope to see your opponent first and turn. There's no room for creativity without hover mode because there are no actual physics and all aircraft behave almost exactly the same. An air game without creative freedom is a stale air game.

However, I do agree the mistakes in air to ground balance started with how they designed the aircraft to fly and the kind of weapons they allotted them to use. One potential solution with the way things currently are (at least for A2G farming ESF) would be to increase the damage of flak, reduce its velocity, and possibly increase the cruising speed of the aircraft. The idea is to make them much much harder to hit on the move, but if they decide to risk hovering for easier shots at ground targets without scouting for AA first they'll be obliterated. Would be nice if they could raise the flight ceiling as well to make balancing something like this a bit easier...

Here is my vision... instead of being able to fly in low speeds keep the ESF in high speeds. Once you take off the plane lowest speed would be 150 (guessing here). Add a button that reduces speed to 0 and lands (weapons offline at this point).

Strongly buff the up and down boosts in combination with various upward and downward flying allowing for sharp turns. Now we have the tools for some fun acrobatic air to air moves.

Air to ground will be balanced since now you will have small time windows to target and fire as you make bomb runs on certain targets.

I really recommend for everyone who wants to remove the hover ability to go an play war thunder for a few hours.

Then you should start to see what the planetside 2 physics engine would need to provide to make dogfighting not only a checkbox but an actuall feature.
And then ask yourself ... are you willing to ask the devs to stop working on everything else until the outdated simplistic joke of a physics engine ps2 uses is up there?

Are you willing to stall development of anything else for at least a year and are willing to endure the bugs such a huge change would cause?

Or do you simply want to **** what we already have, because skyknights are evil ... sob sob sob

This game has been pretty much unchanged for like 3 years.
Protip: Modelling aerofoils and flying pencils isn't that hard. You're just plugging in numbers.

Let remove the Hover abilties on ESF, because we want fighter jet, with LESSER 50% Hit Point, that get shot down with one Anti-Air missle? WHY NOT, ESF have flare anyway, I mean we just really hat the HYBRID of a heli and jet. Let just nerf it and ask for HOVER Heli that does the same thing and get 50% "FIX" on the speed.

We can go all day, maybe the hover idea was not so bad, why did not not think this through, your ideas count, BUT YOU HAVE TO GET CRITICIZED on them. Please take them and grow from them, PS2 in my view is in quite a rub.

Now LET remove TANK HOVER! Dear Joy, I mean Tanks do not really need HOVER to begin with! Let just delete Vanu Sov. because they are there to fill in for the 3rd side. Blah blah, I have nothing against you, but I should just remove myself from forum.

Good Luck with bringing more IDEAS! Yes HIT US with them! But be PREPARED to think about them with other PS2 players!

Actually it is realy hard.
Changing a physics engine in a way that it suddenly starts to account for drag, energy loss from climbing vs energy gain from "falling", altitude dependent performance of the engines or the effect of g-force on your turns and manouvers just to name a few is a little bit more than plugging in numbers.

And none of it is currently implemented and it's more than likley that the engine couldn't even handle it if it were.

But i am sure YOU could do it in a day.

I've told you in at least three other threads that if you don't like what I have to say, then to click ignore. You've not taken the suggestion so that is your own fault.

Take the advice, you'll be much happier.

You are abusing the forums.
You know what a forum is? Especially one called a discussion forum? You know? One person says something, then if others don't like what they have to say they can offer other views?

Saying "meh, I'll ignore someone who is filling other people's heads with completely wrong and ludicrous idea's" would be giving you the victory. I won't give you that satisfaction. When I challenge your views and "opinions" you suddenly go off on a tangent, throwing tantrums and trying to blame me for everything including derailing the thread even though you do everything in your power to actually derail the thread yourself.

I'm abusing you, what do you intend to do about it? Well the answer is obvious, you'll keep provoking and derailing. My intent is to derail and make you look like a jerk for it. The difference between you and I is I'm honest about it. And it shows.

Never said anything about coding. All I said is that modelling an aerofoil or airplane is easy. Because it is. All they have to do is apply arbitrary values.
Just make up a drag coefficient, they already have weights for the vehicles so finding PE is easy, kinetic energy from a dive can be found through the change in height, altitude performance really doesn't matter because this isn't a sim and the flight ceiling is 1000m.

These things are not hard because I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel.

You are right, but clearly the engine ps2 currently uses does not support this.
Which means you would have to add those features and more likley have to overhaul the whole engine.

Let's face it, this game is at a huge disadvantage here ... not only is the engine it's using "old" and was never intended to take these calculations into account, it has to work (at least in theory ... probably soon this might not be the case^^) for a lot more players than an average warthunder match AND has not only to also work for ground units and vehicles BUT also and most important is already in place.

With in place i mean that ANY (no matter how small) deviation of the way it currently handles the physics we know and expect of this game, will result in a catastrophical sh*tstorm.




And here is food for thought ... do you realy think the vtol hovering system (or airsubmarine) we have was originally planed?
I am almost 100% certain that hovering was simply a way around the restrictions that was chosen during the development process and found good enough.

Casein point the reverse manouver(s) ... something that was considered a bug for a very long time ... yet it had to stay in.
Don't fool yourself, this was not because the devs thought it was a fun gimmik, it was because the resources to overhaul the physics engine even to the point where it wasn't possible any more just never were avaliable.

That and the fact that the dedicated air community always was rather small (and nowadays is even smaller) by comparisson and even back then selling such a project to the rest of the playerbase was almost unthinkable

I don't know if you flew at the start of the ps2 beta, but let's just say it was a mess and it was a mess the system was barely able to support
(meaning we had years of cuts and performance reworks before the stuff one nowadays considers simplistic and outdated actually worked as it does now)


Do i wish for energy fighting in ps2?

Hell yes!

Am i willing to suffer trough the time it will take to make those changes to the game and the debug iterations that sure as hell follow before it's even remotly playable (or at a point where it could compete with what more specialised games offer in this regard) ?


Hell NO!

And just to clarify i am a dedicated pilot in ps2 ... and one that spends 90% of his time doing a2a combat!
Meaning air nerds like me would be the ones to gain the most of this and even i wouldn't want the devs to do it.

Given how small the dedicated air community (as in people that use esfs for more than a quick cert gain and actually do a2a combat on a regular basis) AND how HATED it is ... well a snowball in hell has a better chance than us ever seeing something like that.


And even then, vtol at least in some form would have to stay ... simply because it already is something people associate with ps2.