it's not a matter of mastering something being worth .. it should always be worth to master something, that's not even a question ... the problem especialy with esf's is it's simply difficult to get into because the system behind it is conveluted and that unnesseccarily so .. yes you can go get a tankbuster lib and shred single vehicles no problem that however is because that vehicle is that powerfull .. however that doesn't make the bad flight controls good .. flyingskills on the lib depending on your loadout and crew may matter less than a one man esf ... a simple question why should be esf flying be exclusive to those who tolerate bad controls? what point does that make for a less skilled player especialy in a air to air fight to have to deal with the horrific way of aiming you are forced into missing shots not because the opponent dodges but because you are not allowed to control your craft propperly and basicaly have 2 opponents to fight that way .. your opposing fighterpilot and the controls ... and realy this is only with aircraft ... you don't hear any commplaints about grounvehiclecontrol ... when it comes to learning a certain weapon or vehicle it matters that the progress is fun ... to me it simply isn't with esf's with the current controls ... and then people wonder why there are so few pilots .. cause they get frustrated with bad controls and as a player you can't expect people to have to suffer through those bad controls just then after hours incappable of doing anything to eventualy be good enough to enjoy it ... i can aim a lmg, rocketlauncher or sniperifle no problem and still lose .. i can aim a tankcannon or machingun no problem and still lose in various ways .. i can however not aim a nosegun to even reliably tickle another opponent ... and eventualy crash even into some tree
matter of context .. a2g with exceptions is bad meaning skyguard f.e. merely tickle esf and libs and those with rocketpods or tankbuster have no problem to still get in and just bust it ... so that's not an issue with the aircraft nesseccarily but infantry and vehicles lacking the tools to defend themselfes outside a number advantage a recent example of personal experience me in a basilisk (which also rather is a allaroundweapon) ant vs default reaver his mistake he was too close to me so i downed him with me getting little dmg however me vs rocketpod, rotary nosegun both a bit further away than the default example (which i still would have won) just straightout outdpsed me without me doing any significant dmg ... and they just hovered .. not even adading or anything .. different example which i consistently experience: lock on infantry vs esf .. it takes 3 lock ons to down an esf the biggest problem is the time it takes for the infantry to get his shots of vs the esf finding that infantryman and downing him with his default nosegun or just get away with his speed especialy turbo .. and that is simply by default stats and an esf just for being a fast aircraft vs the slow infantryman or slower tank that are also hampered in effectiveness through terrain .. that doesn't even have to do anything with how the controls are ... the controls of esf become an issue when it comes to dogfights (be it hover or chase) and that is were reaction and millimeter precision matter .. and i tried it but with very few exceptions cause my opponent was worse than me simply got shredded ... and that is because my opponents used reverse manouver with me not cabable of aiming well cause game not letting me jaw left or right thus missing most shots getting panicy and unintentionaly roll messing up the fight entirely in chase scenarios i often had to cease chasing cause missing shots with lack of yaw on mouse and oversteering with the keyboard ultimately running into friendly territory with enough people to shredd me ... i don't think anyone complains when someone with a dumpfire RL or AP tankcannon oneshots a ESF because that simply is dificult as it should for its lethality .. neither do i complain if a harraser shredds me while in a lightning cause he successfully flanked me .. that requires a bit of practice but still isn't that difficult .. heck flashes downing a tank or harrasser .. no complains there either considering in how many ways a flashpilot can lose ..
movement is already limited as it is making controls more accessible doesn't only benifit easier killing but also more ways to evade if you are a skilled player then lower skilled players having an easier time flying shouldn't affect you ... or do you fear losing more often? sounds to me someone simply doesn't want to share but keep the candy all to himself
Simple. To fly aircraft, is difficult due to the controls, when first starting* But it gets rather easy once you figure it out - which is the same for anything. The problem is; There is two types of flying, the 'flying' for A2G fliers, and the complicated meta of "Flight" for A2A. Flying against the majority of ground targets is easy, evasion of AA from ground forces even easier - Leave that hex, via any random direction. - Boost into any random direction. - Fly up. - Rotate or turn while increasing speed, in random directions. - Or find the AA source, and fire. For ESFs, running stealth is a defense in of itself let alone with above. None of which will help with escaping A2A aircraft, whom can match you entirely. IE A2A is hard - and harder to survive let alone when starting out. For Liberators, A2A is a cross between hard & easy, depending on your gunner(s) & piloting skill. Unless there is enough G2A vehicles to blot out an entire base, you can usually escape after engaging. Anything less, and you can drop entire tanks on the first run, and just whittle it all down easily. Against aircraft however, running is hard - and unless your rear gunner kills them, they go in-front of your pilot-operated gun, you have only the belly-cannon , which if the gunner is also good, makes short work of enemy aircraft. So piloting Aircraft is easy against ground targets. But the controls suck considering, and A2A is a monster. An ESF can engage any target it likes, since every weapon actually deals decent damage to every target type. Liberators have some of the best weapons, and have the advantages of flight, when facing non-aircraft opponents. The skilled in both, can dominate both aircraft & land vehicles easily with either - the average however, can not compete in the A2A game due to the massive skill requirements for it. A2G weaponry however is simpler to use, with G2A not being equal to it, making any level of skill with aircraft amplified when facing the ground. IE the pilots unable to compete with A2A pilots, easily can dominate the ground due to the perks of the aircraft. The A2A game is brutal to get into, fast paced, and uses stealth mostly making new pilots unable to even see them. Due to radar being built-in, all new pilots glow neon basically for the A2A pilots. G2A pilots can use either stealth to hide their approaches easily, or FS to repair nearly all but a one-hit kill shot instantly. Flying is easy, until you try to fight aircraft with aircraft. It stays easy as long as you avoid aircraft. The point here is, the Power of a ESF or Liberator, is incredible. You need little skill to fly one against ground targets, with the firepower simply amplifying any degree of skill. When fighting aircraft however, there is a massive skill curve, and extensive requirements to even start. Then add in the whole pacts between select pilots, the non-lethal nature of G2A unless massed (everything is lethal when massed enough, even sensor darts..), and you have this glorious bit of the fastest & evasive vehicles having superior weaponry, with the entire high-skill requirement only being for A2A, as A2G just needs basic understanding of the controls. In the case TR5L4Y3R's post didn't get the concept explained.
Dude, what YOU are asking for(and complaining about) is that you want the ESF to be able to yaw SO MUCH(and even by using mouse movement) that it will be like aiming an infantry gun. Talk about completely ignoring aircraft physics.
How is that in any way a contradition? 1: It's difficult to learn. 2: It does give incredible power for those that learn it. Now ofcourse it would be more OP if it was easy to learn and you would have 20 ESF groundpounding every base with their weapons, something that experience has shown can't be countered with 20 G2A weapons because the ESF can switch who receives damage too easily and completely pulverise the G2A weapons at the same time. But having a difficult learning curve, which is mostly difficult because of the inverted skill-curve that causes you to only see progress when you are already semi-pro, which is impossible to ask of the average player, means that only an exclusive group of players can abuse this to their will and lower-skill players will be excluded from the system entirely. That's not exactly any better. Also learning to ground-pound isn't exactly rocketscience. Once you learn the backwards unintuitive controls you can groundpound easily. It's a problem when fighting A2A. And that's also a problem with design, as aircraft (read: 1/4rth of the available aircraft the ESF) are supposed to be the primary counter vs aircraft. Which is why G2A is completely screwed! How would you flip it? Liberators are so powerful because they carry 2 primary weapons that can out-DPS almost every single other ground-based weapon. ESF are so powerful because of ridiculously powerful weapons (their AI-oriented Rocketpods deal +/-50% damage to a tank from the top) and because they have no problems slowing down and functioning as moveable highly accurate turrets. So how would you bring that to the A2A game? And how would you bring the niche unintuitive controlschems of the A2A game to the A2G game? Counterplay. It's all about counterplay and how players feel after an attack. Like the sniper in the video, if an ESF kills you the ESF is having fun, but there's little the ground player can do to protect himself. He can't spot in advance to see if it's safe to cross a courtyard, because the aircraft are too fast and can show up and kill them before they are done crossing. The ground player also can't equip weapons powerful enough to actually counter the aircraft. Picking the "high skill G2A" weapons like AP guns means creating a giant area above you where you can't even aim at the aircraft and are at the mercy of hoping they will enter your lower vision. Picking the other G2A weapons means you are using a deterrence weapon. And with the exception of the Skyguard you are too weak to stand up against enemy aircraft who have been alerted to your position because of your own firing. "but it needs teamwork!" Yeah! Let's use teamwork against the most lone-wolf vehicles in the game! That sounds like a fair game design! How about we also add an LA guy that carries an airhammer and has MAX armor. That requires teamwork to bring down as well and on one of the most lone-wolf classes in the game, good design eh! Now I'm not saying that you personally are saying this Jumaro, but there's plenty of people who use that argument so I'm trying to prevent players from trying to use that useless argument. Additionally the counterplay of the aircraft is also tiny: If engaged by G2A your options are limited to point in a direction and afterburn, or shoot the guy first if you happen to see him at that moment. If engaged by A2A all you can do is use HF and RM to combat them. Which is basically an automatic win for the guy with the most skill in it. There's no alternative skills to learn in the air-game. Unlike for example the ground game where accuracy, weapon effective range, trigger discipline, terrain knowledge, situational awareness, flanking capabilities, usage of your class/vehicle's abilities etc are all important and each can be mastered seperately and it's up in the air who wins the battle. So either way, there's practically no counterplay involved in the air-game. That means players don't enjoy it that much, except ofcourse the high-end of the players who get to abuse the power they've gotten... Because the amount of time required, and how unnecessary it is. Why spend 30 in-game hours on dry practise, if you can let players learn it easily, enjoy it, and let them "practise" by simply playing the game? What is the added benefit of making it time consuming to learn? I'm assuming that with "mastering" you mean "learning the basics" and not becoming a pro by mastering the entirety of the skills you can learn at peak efficiency. We know the current system is bad. Practically no one uses it. You can try to blame the players, but why would you? They are using just about every system, and despite preferred classes and vehicles everything is used. Even ANT's are used for combat, as are Sunderers, MBT's, Lightnings, Harassers... And that took learning as well. And that shows that if most of the population just ignores the air-game it's the game design that's the problem, not the playerbase. It isn't hard to understand: They have learned it the hard way, and they have the priviliged position and want to abuse it to their hearts content. And so they also want to defend it. Also the whole reason why the majority of the people complain and aren't willing to put the same time into it? The very actions of the players who mastered it. They annihilate people, and by extention force any new player to put more time in it than they themselves did as these players have far little to go on to learn how to progress and need to master it better before they stand a chance. And also once again we run into the average player problem: You have to be semi-pro or pro before you can withstand the A2A game because of it's inverted skill-curve. So you are asking an average player to become better than he'll ever be just for a single game with a control-scheme that in all likelyhood will never ever come back to any game? That's a massive waste of time for them. They are the average player. If the average player cannot pick up a part of the game's design that should represent 1/3rd of the game and enjoy it, then that part of the game's design fails! It is an issue of tough to learn and taking too long to learn the basics of A2A flight good enough to defend yourself. It's also an issue that it's completely different from the rest of the game, making it out-of-place. So no matter how you spin it, it simply has no place in PS2 and should be altered. Because the time requirement is too high. Because the amount of skill required to start the A2A game is too high. Because the amount of counterplay available is too low or practically non-existant compared to everything else in the game. Because if Libs and ESF can be learned in minutes/hours, then their power could be dialed down to similar levels of ground units and we can do away with the ridiculous G2A deterrence system? Here's a question, again, why would a long time to be at a "basic" level of A2A be better than a short time? Besides "the players who put a lot of time in the current system can mercilessly take advantage of the time they put in".
Eh, because it takes litterally the lowest of the lowest skill in the game to have an ESF/Lib escape G2A fire? Even the very G2A weapons themselves require more skill to keep leading you (including lock-ons) compared to a Lib/ESF's "skill" to point their nose somewhere without obstacles and press W+shift (only W in the case of a Lib). Also when talking about the skill curve there's two separate things people always talk about: A2G and A2A. A2G is easy enough once you've learned a rudimentary control over the unintuitive control scheme. There's relatively little skill involved especially considering that there's no drop on your weapons. It's harder to shoot at long-range targets in tanks than it is to groundpound. And escaping G2A weapons is the lowest-skill act in the game, throwing down an ammo pack requires more forethought to make it more useful! And then you have A2A, which besides the unintuitive control scheme also uses unintuitive maneuvers. All the maneuvers you'd expect a fighter aircraft to pull off give you zero power, in fact they give negative power as any twist and turn will allow your opponent to close the distance and get a better shot. But RM and HF? Those give power. Those are the only maneuvers with enough speed to actually escape vision and in a direction your opponent can't directly follow. Additionally RM and HF use an inverted skill-curve, where the more skill you get the more power you get per amount of skill, which is the opposite of what any other non-lobby game does or even what PS2 does in the rest of it's combat. No they don't ignore it. You should be wondering: Why don't people complain about a top infantry/tank player, but they do complain about the top pilots? Because the months and months of an infantry/tank player aren't insurmountable. There's ways you can still win the fight. You aren't likely to, but it's possible. That's that counterplay again. You can grab C4, a MAX, a vehicle, you can try to pick a different weapon and get an advantage by using your ideal range while your opponent isn't in their ideal range, you can flank, surprise, spot, try and sic friendlies on him or even just walk away and not be bothered by that player. Additionally you aren't fighting your controls while trying to fight your opponent. All that is absent when engaging a pilot. Additionally the "top 1% pilots" is bascially 50% of the players in the air, everyone else has quit because of that 1% and the twisted control scheme. From the early days we know that the control scheme isn't enough of a deterrent to players. The skies were just as filled with aircraft as vehicles most of the time, even though many of the early aircraft would crash quickly. But as HF and RM started their rise to power the aircraft players drained and they drained fast. Were you there? If you were, you should have seen it happen. If you remember how the skies drained from pilots as HF and RM started to dominate everything then you would know how detrimental it has been to the entire airgame. I don't get how you can think they are one and the same. Why can't something be OP but hard to learn? Does it matter it took someone 5 months of playtime to learn something, only to become virtually impossible to stop afterwards? Just imagine that: A player capable of murdering entire platoons and tank columns just because he took the time to master something across a few months. It wouldn't be balanced in any way, it couldn't be balanced in any way. The gameplay would be horrid for all the players getting massacred by that player, and it wouldn't be fair for the player who mastered it if he couldn't do anything with it. Well it could be somewhat fair by increasing his chances to win without making him capable of massacaring entire villages worth of people. But that's not the kind of thing you seem to want to hear right now. Yes, but that time does not in any way, shape or form remove good game design from the equation. It doesn't matter if it took you 5 full years of game time to master it, you should never ever give only those that master something a far superior power that makes victory over those players almost impossible. Also, there's no reason why the game should have something that's hard to learn the basics of (talking about A2A again). Additionally saying "but now someone mastered it, so we can't change it anymore because he needs to get his advantage" is a terrible excuse. You can still have them be rewarded despite changing the air-game. But considering they've already ruined the gameplay for others long enough I see no reason to cater to them in any way besides the basics of "easy to learn, hard to master-->those that mastered it will have more power but not excessively so". No they don't want it both ways. Seriously how is this in any way wanting it both ways? It's two seperate things: OP weapons and capabilities on one end and hard to learn hard to master on the other end. These are separate things, and it doesn't matter if you changed one. If you made the weapons balanced, then the hard to learn hard to master part would still screw the airgame. If you changed it to easy to learn hard to master, then the weapons and capabilities would still be OP. They are separate entities of the airgame that screw it up, that's why people name them separately. Yes, by that the aircraft players try to keep their power and misunderstand what the rest is saying.
you can yaw already but only with keyboard keys which is inprecise .. i "merely" want a switchoption for the mouse .. the other thing i talk about is strafing for movement and no i don't care how unrealistic that is .. i stopped caring about the game's authenticity with its arbitrary damagemodel the moment i started it ..
What needs to be removed is the maneuver where the pilot noses down and hovers in a circle like he's circling a drain yet never loses site of his target. I will admit that I am a terrible pilot even after hundreds of hours attempting these tricks.
As a reminder please keep posts on topic and constructive. The topic is flying, not "Why so and so's argument is wrong." Thanks!
I fly a little, for me personally, instead of 'easy to pick up, hard to master' it's 'excessively difficult to pick up, damn near impossible to master.' The level of dedication needed to fly is insane. I actually don't know what to say that hasn't been covered verbatim excessively. But I'll say this •Is it difficult? Excessively so. •Should it be difficult? Yes. •Should you have to be a combination of god-complex, victim complex, and masochistic to fly well? No. •Are people lazy ***** who don't want to put in a damn bit of effort to accomplish something even in videogames? Also yes. •Should they be called out on the above? Hell yes. •Should you have to remap your controls as a Requirement just to make flying the least bit bearable? No. •Is flying a scarce bit rigged? In a manner of speaking. •Should it be changed? Yes. •How? Beats me. Fortunately for me, I'm an acquired masochist. So I'll grit through the current flight mechanics to learn and practice. The majority isn't so tolerant which says a lot or says very little depending on who you ask. Movie quote 'I don't think i can do it.' 'You mean it'll be difficult.' 'Very.' 'Well this is not Missionifficult it's Mission:Impossible, difficult should be a walk in the park for you.' And THAT summarizes flying in PS2 perfectly in my humble but biased masochistic opinion.
The problem with the air game isn't that it's hard to master. The problems are: - The learning curve is a ******* brickwall, consisting of skysharks that instantly shoot you down. Imagine this in an infantry scenario. You take a Max and suddenly you become visible through walls to any other Max on the battlefield. And not just visible, but they can also shoot at you through walls. Also, your controls are those of Steel Battalion. You step out of the spawn room and die, while everyone else is having fun. The only way to evade the instant murder is to practice arcane button combinations and precise mouse calibrations for an hour in the spawn room, where you occasionally die because your team mates are getting annoyed and start giving you some of that NC faction flavor. (The latter is a stand-in for the occasional dick that appears at your warp gate and shoots you down while you are training) How often would you try before you give up? - Thanks to this brick wall, the brick wall becomes self-perpetuating. Because only certain lunatics learn the air game, the air game is populated entirely by the skill equivalent of aimbotters. There is no hierarchy in the air, it's only "**** or get ******". This means that there's a small pool of air players in the game, which means that base fights never get decent air support, which means that groundpounding becomes very appealing and easy. If the air was swarming with ESFs of opposing factions, I swear that groundpounders would be occupied with evading fire and fighting back, instead of farming infantry. In fact, I would applaud a Liberator who manages to get off the occasional shot while constantly taking care to not die to swarms of ESFs. - From a ground perspective, air is so low in numbers that it's not worthwhile to take AA loadouts. Specializing for AA only makes you moderately useful in that regard and ***** you in ground play. It also allows ESFs to sneak up and lolpod you, as you often do not expect any to be present. If ESFs were either omnipresent or made a distinct sound on the ground, you would have an environment where an infantry player could actually interact with the air meaningfully, instead of via random encounters. If air was omnipresent, there would be enough AA on the ground to allow you to reliably shoot down aircraft via proper target prioritization. What this game needs is more aircraft, to dilute the cancerous and stale pool of skyknights. @Sil4ntChaozz: I see you have played Dust 514. Have you tried the air game in that game? I loved how hard the dropships were to control. The sound that they made was a ******* genius idea. It both warned infantry and doubled as a tool of psychological warfare. Just hearing the sound would send everyone scrambling for cover. I wish the vehicles in this game would start producing sounds to make them less sneaky against infantry.
The flight controls and aircraft handling in PS2 are the worst I've seen in a video game, ever. It is not, and never will be, worthwhile to a majority of players to pour the unreasonably large number of hours in required to learn them.
Then be glad that you missed Dust 514. You would have learned the magic of feral screams. The experience is quite different when it's not nanites on the line, but a persistent currency, and when the aircraft handles more like a drunken cow on ice skates than a weird anti-physical hoverfighter. No, seriously, PS2's flight model isn't that bad. It takes a few tries to get the coordination down, but the mechanics aren't hard to comprehend. You mostly just need minor muscle memory adjustments. Note, I'm not talking about hover fighting and ****, only about actually flying.
While I agree with the lack of aircraft, leading to a shear increase of aircraft domination on the ground... Their weaponry & capabilities are still murderously superior to ground units let alone their direct specialized opponents on the ground. As the moment there is more aircraft, there is more aircraft to fire onto the ground. While we'd finally get air support, we'd be even more dependent on it, due to the sheer number of aircraft available to attack. G2A requires numbers to actually do more than alert Aircraft to their presence. So if there was only more aircraft, would that not mean G2A would need to be in increasing number the moment allied aircraft aren't available? As what is the point of ground-based AA, if it doesn't work without outnumbering aircraft to heaven & hell? As well, aircraft are the fastest thing, with the ability to come from any angle. Sound alone wouldn't help - without a direction, you can't even begin to aim before it fires. But yes there needs to be more aircraft... just not with the present dis-balance between G2A & A2G. Also cover doesn't work against aircraft, unless it has nothing but a door way far from the interior rooms - As otherwise, you can fire into it and watch the common aircraft AoA splatter them inside the building.
I still cant do this properly. The only RM I can do is a backwards arc. Not this strait line thing people talk about.
Hoovering in a circle like that is first of all dead easy to counter manouvre wise, and second, if you counter it right you get the top of the circle dancer and burst him down easily as hes very predictable. Msg me here on the forums if you want me to show you how to counter it.
