Avoiding lolpods

Every SINGLE time I set up in a good flanking position for sniping, within 20 seconds a lolpodding esf comes and slaughters me without me even being able to see them. This has happened 4 times in a ROW now, how can I avoid this?

I am so ****ing salty right now

A few things you can do is to avoid skylining yourself, it make you easy to see and opens you up to easy spotting which an ESF could rely on, stick to darker areas so you're harder to see, and ideally a place with a boulder or something you can use as cover, also cloak yourself every now and then even if you dont need to, just to remove on spots placed on you.

The sound in the game leaves a whole lot to be desired. That includes aircraft that are completely silent until they fire upon you, almost complete lack of walking and running sounds on most surfaces, etc. I play with a good set of closed-ear headphones and the lack of subtlety in the sound palette is almost painful.

Basically, if the sound was worth a damn, nothing with a jet engine could sneak up on you. So just default to what Kuro says above.

Yeah it's pretty bull that cloaking sounds are louder than a jetpack or an ESF

Hmm interesting, i have no issue hearing oncoming ESFs or even footsteps behind me in a quiet area.

What sound card are you using? You wont hear these subtleties with and on board sound rig (i couldn't).

How to deal with mentallychallengedpods you ask. Heh, let's see. You'd need to understand few things first.

Exhibit A : Cloak.

It's a lie, and false feeling of safety. Thanks to 'genius'TM rendering priority, it doesn't exist for a2g cheese purposes practically.

Long story short, esf flying around rendering priority for 1 infantryman :

1. Is it there? Yes.
2. Is it crouched or standing? Depending on answer render in crouch/standing position
3. 5-30 seconds later depending on server lag. Check for visual stuff, it might be cloaked, render cloak after said delay.

In other words you can be immobile Stalker, constantly cloaked since 30 minutes, and for mentallychallengedpods user flying around you will render as you would just have cloaked 5-30 seconds since the moment he got LoS on your position. Therefore, yeah well things which Kuro said about skylining, you can basically disregard as they won't matter for avoiding esf, however they're useful in terms of avoiding infantry.

Spotting doesn't really matter either for esf doing mentallychallengedpod a2g stuff since they mostly use thermals anyhow. So you're lit up like a christmas tree just long enough for them to spam your last know location, regardeless whether somebody spotted you or not. Nonetheless being paranoid and recloaking after every shot, might save your hide, so it's still worth doing.

Exhibit B : Cover mentioned by Kitsune as well.

'Soft cover', like bushes obscuring your character visually don't exist for purposes of avoiding a2g bull excrement either. Thermals see through them. However hard cover, boulders like mentioned earlier could be your friend. On the other hand if anything I prefer trees - odds are rockets will hit them preventing at least some of incoming damage to reach you, which means - hurray you MIGHT survive.

In other words : hard cover is your friend

Exhibit C : 'within 20 seconds' or in one word - Movement.

You stay in one place for too long. Sniper on the move is happily alive sniper. Reposition faster, 10 seconds in one spot [ general vicinity of 20-50m from direct spot from which you were shooting ] is asking to be killed. Doesn't mean you have to necessarily abandon your sniping nest. Just try to relocate faster, pick 3 spots from which you'll take shots, and every few kills/10-15seconds at most relocate if fight looks like it can attract mentallychallengedpod users.

Exhibit D : Lack of painkillers for rear-end issues some people suffer after getting sniped

For some peculiar reason, plenty of people have allergy to getting their dome splattered all over the place with a well timed sniper rifle round. Which shouldn't really matter since by behaviour on battlefield you could say that they're frequently trying to break walls by smashing said dome at them walls. So it wasn't of much use anyway...

What does it mean? Well it does mean that some random guy whom you sniped in timespan of 20 seconds at your sniper nest, got mad, and decided that either in order to 'repair' their k/d or just simply out of spite they pull esf specifically with intent of using mentallychallengedpods on you. Because reasons. It can even get as bad, as wasting some heavy in frontal shootout with sniper rifle in CQC, and said heavy immediately pulls a2g mentallychallengedpodesf from the same base in which he died to carpet bomb area in which they last saw you. Yes, that actually happened.

Exhibit E : Paranoia.

Everything wants to kill you in this game. Terrain, random aircraft not even shooting at you, friendlies, enemies, more friendlies...Deployables...Ammo packs, don't ask about last two. Bad memories...well mixed actually good and bad, you can also kill hostile vehicles with those.

Basically just try to be more alert and not relax too much while sniping from flank. Deploy your motion spotter in vicinity, and zoom out minimap for higher probability of spotting aircraft on minimap as soon as they start shooting. It will still show infantry closing in on you, although you'll need to zoom in asap whenever you'll notice them on zoomed out minimap because that means they're in 50m radius from your position.

Well this should do the trick to an extent, there is also stuff about actual evasive manoeuvres, when mentallychallengedpods are already shooting you, but too tired to explain this as well at the moment. Might add that part later if you'll be still interested.

As it is for sound, and correlation with integrated sound cards in terms of quality minor details like footsteps/jetpacks/'minor small tiny teeny paper mache aircraft models flying around'. It seems more or less random, since I started playing PS2 I went through 3 PC rigs, and played on 2 more as a guest all/most at least with integrated sound cards, never had problems hearing footsteps or the like in quiet areas. However aircraft is in this regard as always 'special snowflake'. I remember several occasions when people were complaining about sound of aircraft disappearing completely, due to bugs. Yay. Most recent I remember was increment of liberator engine sound volume, when next patch after that change hit live servers liberators' sound from flying cheapass diesel engines made in early eighties in USSR switched to nothing. Like in completely. It was more silent than a dead planetman.

Or a bug related to mentallychallengedpods specifically : if I recall correctly there was one which didn't give any audio cue of rocketpods being fired at you at all even when they hit you [apart of sound of your health going lower] as long as esf in question fired them from edge of render distance.

Personally I ditched ingame sound ages ago in favour of relaxing music, although if memory serves you could possibly adjust quality of your audio via ingame settings, specifically something like 'number of audio channels' I think? It was allegedly somewhere in tab related to ingame voicechat, I remember that if you turn that down to 0 you have absolutely no ingame sound. Then again increasing that over basic level if you have older rig could impact your performance.

Meh, I'm usually not doing too much of long range sniping, although those things I mentioned help me avoid getting shot by mentallychallengedpods 90% of time, despite having no ingame sound active. Hopefully it'll help ya and some others in avoiding a2g cheese.

I thought the cloak rendering for ESFs was fixed, I guess not, I'll have to be more careful when sniping.

Ok 20 seconds was a bit of an exaggeration. It was more like 2.

This is actually not true, like many actions, cloaking is synchronized with the server, the only lag will be the client lag between the server and the other player. You will see your own server lag as a delay between activating cloak and actually cloaking.

My suggestion would be to avoid overly exposed areas. Aircraft are actually quite loud, whoever said they weren't is talking bs. And Jet Packs are too. The cloak was designed to give a sniper/long range class cover while reloading, and to help reach flanking positions. Stalker was a mistake, it doesn't really work well for most players, and now, even with op amp grenades, infiltrators still want more (vehicle hacking). Think of the cloak as very good camouflage, not invisibility. The decloak sound is to give other players a chance tor retaliate, without it literally all you would see is people playing smg infiltrator or stalker.

Exhibit E : Paranoia.

Everything wants to kill you in this game. Terrain, random aircraft not even shooting at you, friendlies, enemies, more friendlies...Deployables...Ammo packs, don't ask about last two. Bad memories...well mixed actually good and bad, you can also kill hostile vehicles with those.
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I don't know if anyone else knows this. But in the PS2TS the engi autoturret used to completely mow down friendlies to try and hit its target.

It still does that if you stand in front of it, I think.

They fixed it greatly since then. I raised a lot of noise about it before it hit main servers. It was crazy how much better it was at killing allies then enemies. It seems to aim away from allies now and it won't hit you if you're crouching on top of the turret.

It also can't survive 3 c4 to the face anymore either. Good changes since the test server.

I haven't had any esf rendering issues on PS4 so far, so maybe it's a PC thing?

I've only had this happen a couple times and mostly.. it was my own fault. I got cocky and started power sniping without movement or cloaking like normal. <_<

Biggest thing is just.... stay cloaked. Like.. 99.9% of the time. If cloak is running out and you're in the open, hide to quick recharge and then go back at it.

Only uncloak to fire and then quickly re-cloak and move around a bit.