ESF airfights...

Coming from a bias (mine) that favors skill and balance all around skill I highly disagree with your joy at being able to jump the skill tree where you shouldn't be (IMO of course). Nothing personal but on a gaming level I just hate how people embrace crutches if it gets them where they want to go.

That said I hate air locks more than coyotes and I'm loving the changes. In an ideal world though I'd like to see any kind of air lock or heat seeking weapon banished from every game ever made.

I know this sounds harsh and completely unreasonable (and I also realize that this will not happen due to economics) but I am strongly a proponent of favoring tools that allow people with the highest skill ceilings to outperform, slaughter and ruin hundreds of peoples days if they've earned that skill through either practice or talent etc....

(Just the competitive nature in me speaking) For those that get disheartened by that type of situation I have no concern for as I don't believe sadness/anger/frustration justifies noob tools and balancing in favor of people with lack of skill. Sadness/anger/frustration is acceptable as I see gaming like this as a challenge and not necessarily purely for pleasure.

I would not say such things if I were you. You are tempting The Roc, of which no true pilot is unaware. Even I fear its nigh magical powers of come-uppance and skymonsteresque manifestations at inopportune moments.

What is it? It is a Valkyrie with Black lumifiber and golden wings, and it waits to ambush your aircraft just as you reach the height of your killstreak. It seeks and feeds upon the arrogance and hubris of all pilots. Just when you think that you are beyond reach, that no one can touch your skill level, and that you have exceeded the skill-ceiling, The Roc will appear to crush your achievements and comically destroy them, often live, on twitch.

Have you just farmed 100 people in 10 minutes with an ESF by spamming lolpods at a spawn room? Watch yourself as you sweep in for that final pass, as the Roc waits just under bridge pylon, ready to dove-tail you into the ground in front of your entire platoon!

Just filled up with 12 maxes and laughed off your team-mates warning of skyguards and lockons? The Roc awaits to fly under you and turn sideways, firing up into your belly with rocket launchers, rolling on his side in sync with their reloads, and then swooping down to decapitate your maxes in mid-air as they bail from your burning wreckage!

Giggling to yourself as your liberator mops up an armor formation? While you watch them running with amusement, the Roc awaits behind the sun, coming to deliver LAs that spread in all four direction to drifter C4 you as it matches your slide, deftly curving and anticipating your dalton shots.

Think you're safe doing a flash repair? The Roc awaits, detaching and materializing from the cliffs and mountains around you to swoop in and deftly crush you against your own airframe with its beak, and then tank mine your aircraft to watch you comically explode when you drive your flash up to it!

It makes no sound until it wants to, is invisible to your silly radars, and will dodge behind you to kite your teams lock ons into your own galaxies! Coyotes whimper away and corkscrew into the distance, preferring as they would to attack the jungle rather than face it head on!

Its only weakness is that the inflight audio system is stuck in 16-bit MIDI, capable only of blaring its horn, and when it does, this is what emerges to announce its presence, and plays throughout your encounter:



Worst of all, when you look in the cockpit, you discover to your horror that its being flown using a joystick!!!!!

As you noted, your preferred setup of power distribution (pros perform like gods) makes no business sense for a game like PS2 (or design sense for the intended user demographic). PS2 is a playground for paying customers, that uses free play incentives to (1) attract people for a test drive, and (2) draw in enough players to populate the world for the paying customers. To actually cater to the grief/farm fun for small numbers of players (free or pay) if it frustrates and drives off paying customers makes no sense.

If paying customers like to have grief/farm fun, that is only really doable if they are generating enough money for DBG to offset the amount of revenue they drive away. Whether that be the griefers/farmers actually paying more, or just having their celebrity/gameplay in some way boosting marketing and profit for the game.

I compete in high level/tournaments in Street Fighter 2. Beating a low skilled player helps me more easily get through the brackets with a better record in a tourney, but it's generally not much competition (especially in a multi-match bout)... and that's really only productive when in an actual ~serious tournament. Seeking out and then beating low skilled players outside of a tournament or in a casual tourney isn't competitive, it's more griefing or farming, and it's not something I really fiend on. I'm not really into griefing, and I only farm when I really need to.

Which makes me wonder why you reference your "competitive nature". I *love* competition, but when an ESF Ace or Gank Squad is camping an enemy Warpgate and jumping and crushing solo low skill players, they are griefing or farming. There is not really any competition, it's pretty much a forgone conclusion. Now I *have* seen Aces that take on insane odds and see how long they can last before dying, and that most definitely is serious competition as they are on a death clock. But in those cases, the Ace only lives for maybe 20 seconds to a minute max, and they are doomed... but hey are brawling like madmen to stay alive every extra second.

I used to play early EQ at a high level and solo crazy stuff with a Bard (mostly charm kiting, some chant kiting, and some faction? kiting, etc.). Often it was figuring out the process right that was tough or how to do a specific map or group of mobs, but then it got easy and it was a forgone conclusion. I still did it to farm xp (myself or me and others), or to farm items to sell or to give to lowbies in the zone, but I also did it just because it became kinda a fun methodic, relaxing process like solitaire. But this is vs. PVE, there wasn't really griefing anyone.

The ultimate farming machine is the ultimate goal for me, I like steam rolling people. I think it's still a function of competitiveness even if it's got negative qualities to it. If I was to thorough I'd say it's the product of being equally lazy and competitive. Wanting to be the best, and then do the least amount of work once there.

Rocketleague has such a skill-curve. The higher your skill, the more power you gain per skill. That's all good for Rocketleague because it's a lobby-game where different skill-levels are separated from lower skill-levels. Rocketleague might have the highest inverted skill-curve I know, because it's not just "low, medium, high, pro" skill levels but every step of the way is another skill-level, and every single step higher can defeat the previous step without real contest.

But PS2 isn't a lobby-game or a game where skill can be divided. This means that adding such a skill-curve would ruin the game for everyone else but the high-skill players.
But why on earth does a high-skill player need to kill hundreds of players just because he's higher skill? That's absolutely no requirement to show you are better. Imagine if the 90% of the players get an average of 1 KD, but you are that sole player out there with 3 KD. That's already a testament of your skill right there. Now PS2 has too many opportunities to farm to be balanced like that, but PS2 can have many more goals to achieve if only the developers added ways to visualize and boast about them. AMS destruction, destruction of enemy resources, resource use vs enemy resource destroyed ratio, average damage dealt per life as infantry/vehicle, average damage received per life as infantry/vehicle, average assists per life, objectives completed (if we ever get more than destroy Sunderer or overload Generator) etc etc.

Besides that, only the air-game has such an inverted skill-curve. You can't get the same results in ground vehicles or as infantry, so why should aircraft suddenly have a completely different skill-curve? A different skill curve is acceptable, but this is the difference between a candle and the sun.

What Zaspacer meant was that if you can steamroll people, it's not competitive anymore. Saying you want to steamroll because you like the competition is like saying you want to use a lamp to power your solar cells. In fact using a lamp to power your solar cells makes more sense as at least that's possible, if counterproductive.

I'd call it more Griefing and Farming than "Competitive", because they aren't really able to compete with you. It's kinda like stealing candy from a baby, the outcome really isn't in doubt, you're aren't really competing with the baby for that candy (except on a very devil advocate level)... you're just taking it. And when the outcome isn't in doubt, that's not really competition... it's just inevitability.

It's a lot like Kramer Karate:





I can appreciate you and Kramer liking to dominate. That you enjoy crushing your enemies and seeing them driven before you. But I just don't see it as competitive. Liking to win or get stuff easy isn't the same thing as liking to compete.

Having people that play better than you is essential to competitive gameplay. Those players represent a challenge that you can strive toward. People improve their skills as they play. People improve faster when they go against stronger opponents than when they go against weaker opponents

If there are no dominant players in a game, that means the game isn't based on skill anymore. And when there's no skill left to learn, there's no real competition, there is no reason to keep playing

I just spent some time on a frontline that had an ally Constructed Base with an Ammo Supply Sundy, AA Auto-Turrets, a Sky Shield, and some nice rocks around some of it. I used it with my ESF like a clown fish uses an anemone, and it was brutal to enemy air. Half the time they were jumping me as I was just settling into it and I was oblivious to the attack (I never really used Engagement Radar much before, so I'm still not reacting to it as much as I should yet). I went through 4 ESFs and Lib this way, and I didn't do much heavy work on any of them.

On the one hand it is a clear example of the power of Constructed Bases in providing Offensive Support to Permanent Base attacks. But I'm not sure that kind of massive advantage is a good thing with Constructed Bases being so complicated to deal with.

Hm, perhaps, oh well that's me and that's what I like.

Even the best players can get better without having someone being better than them.

Sure.

Sure.

It really depends on a lot of different factors. Like what you are trying to improve on and how much stronger/weaker these opponents are than you (and the nature of that strength/weakness). You can improve or improve fast off all kinds of situations.

In ST, I developed the muscle memory for Dictator's jump away/toward instant overhead Forward by going into lower skilled rooms and spamming the use of the move more than would have been safe in a higher skilled room. This gave me the chance to repeat that move over and over, until I had it down on reaction. But there are also cases where it's better or essential to be playing even opponents, and others where you want/need to play better opponents. It just depends. (I need to develop the muscle memory for Dictators slide to ambiguosly cross-up a Dhalsim that teched a throw, and I play lots of Dhalsim in tournaments, but I can't just spam the move for hours in those situations, so I have still not developed that muscle memory like I need to)

It also depends on how you learn/improve. I am a visual learner who can watch top player vids and get better, but some top players I know don't really learn well from watching stuff.

In general, some of the best training is definitely by playing against better players. So I don't mean in any way to say playing vs. stronger opponents can't be or isn't often amazing. But improving is a very complex issue (and you can probably see I'm pretty OCD on the issue), and there can be merit in all kinds of training.

There are lots of games where the competition is fierce, the game relies on very high skill level, but no player is currently dominating.

You can be at your pinnacle in skill and still compete. Even if you don't learn something new in a close fight, that doesn't mean it wasn't competitive.

As far as "reason to keep playing", that is up to the players. But lots of players don't lose interest just because their skill level has leveled off.

Dear Skyknights,

to me it seems in the discussion about low skill weapons like coyotes you entirely forget about ground.

I understand that you feel you deserve to come out on top in an engagement against a lower skilled player, since this should be the reward of skill. And you will come out on top as you just land more shots as the scrub does, but you need to use coyotees too.
The point is that a scrub can at least damage you (retaliation) and several scrubs / one scrub that sneaks up should be able to soot you down. “Why?” you might ask. The reason for this are the farm chariots (A2G ESF, Liberator, battle Galaxy) and completely stupid G2A situation. In fact ESF are the only means of defending ground against air. If you skyknights dominate the A2A you are the only thing to protect ground from instagib air farmers. Now wonder: is it fun for ground to hope for a sky knight? Remember ground my also be very skilled in what they do -first person shooter- and expect to be somewhat successful with it and not always be farmed by the chariots you, as a skyknight, protect.

So as a ground slugger I think it is perfectly OK for skyknights to have to adept to coyotes until I get my means of shredding an A2G ******* in the 0.5 sec with no pre warning as they do with me.

Again, this is no reason to make skillful players practically unbeatable. In fact it asks for the opposite. To have a challenge you need to give players a perspective that there's something to beat there.
Rocketleague as an example again: They could put you as a noob up against the top players of the game time and again. The problem is that you'll not see any progress, and your progress will even be impeded since you'll try maneuvers and skills that you can only really learn if you have learned the less complicated skillsets first.
The first thousand games you won't even see progress, your opponents will simply get more than 30 goals in the 5 minutes time they have to whip you and you won't get any in return. It is a challenge, but it isn't an enjoyable one especially since no matter how high the skill level sores, most players will belong to the average player class and won't ever reach that top play.
So what does Rocketleague do? It still provides that end-goal challenge, but by giving it to you in steps. You can see progress each time you learn something new or beat someone who used to be a higher level. The best part is that for the large average audience, they'll get stuck with the rest of the average audience and still be able to enjoy the game.

But that's not possible in PS2's world since we don't have lobbies. The solution? Offer a high skill-ceiling to reach, but reduce the rewards for reaching higher skill as you go along. It's still worth reaching that higher skill, but it doesn't mean the largest part of the playerbase simply cannot enjoy that part of the game.

well, maybe your wright and i was a little exited with the opportunity to fly and kill when i wrote this post
but now i am more airborne and finely getting a chance in the air
i promise, as soon as a have enough skills to combat with the nose gun i drop the coyotes and have a good old western dual

i am not bad at air games but PS2 with the hovering an back worth flying is different
all i need is the time to learn, now with the new coyotes DBG made it possible for me to stay in the air