[Suggestion] Put your ideas for AA fixes here.

There are a lot of people coming up with how to "balance" air vehicles. The threads are spread out all over the place so I figure we might as well start compiling the suggestions into one place.

You can just copy and paste your original posts and a link to the original thread below. Please try not to comment on any one particular suggestion, instead refer to the original thread in which it was posted.

If we can consolidate these things maybe the mods can sticky this to make it easier for people to add ideas.

Again, I would rather not use this space to discuss those ideas. What I want is for people to simply list them.

Popular threads:

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...-being-handled-wrong.69290/page-2#post-867162

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...lay-without-aircraft.68532/page-3#post-855107

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...thout-making-air-useless-in-the-proess.69659/

Here's an idea: Make them not effin terrible.

http://i.imgur.com/UDxVk.jpg

I literally could not hit this guy at all, I dunno about the other 2 turrets that were also firing at him but considering he didn't immediately bug out when his paint got scratched I assume they didn't. He sat right there, pelting at all the turrets and destroying them as we could do **** all to shoot him down.


Or here's a better one, had this nerd who went straight above a turret I was manning. When I hit him he went a few inches to the left. I turned my turret, shot him and again, he a moved a few inches forward. Eventually it got to the point where I could not turn my turret high enough to hit him, and again, they destroy the turret with absolutely zero threat to them.


"Anti air is meant to be a deterrent" my ***. You know what would be a great deterrent? If these things could actually kill, currently its about as well as a deterrent as leaving out a piece of cheese and putting a sign next to it saying "No mice allowed, no seriously guys" cause they know you wont take them down before they destroy the turret, which gives them certs.

And before some air jockey comes in, yeah we had a time where there was 4 burster maxes and 2 guys on the anti air turrets. Sure we chased off the odd air vehicle, we even managed to kill one! Out of the like 20 who we chased off! Then 6 of them come around and just bomb the every loving hell out of us, killing all the engineers who could fix the turrets and maxes then just destroying them. Then to make damn sure we would never ever attempt to do so again, hovered straight at the tower and constantly bombed the inside so we couldn't leave our spawn room.



Perfectly balanced indeed.

Turrents are useless in this game. They blow up way to fast to be useful. Then when you try to repair them you will just die over and over again. Generally the first 5-10mins of a battle all of the turrents will be blown... Good luck trying to repair them. Any effort you put into repairing one a couple tank rounds will completely destroy it again. Most likely killing you in the process. Why waste time trying?

They don't need any balancing. AA doesn't need any fix. Get over your aviatophobia. Start flying.

The concept of air being the only air deterrence is a bad idea. Units will avoid their counters because they *surprise* counter them, and being countered would put an awful damper on all the experience. This just encourages the air spam thats making the game unbearable at the moment, even worse with all the liberators flying around now. Poor experience distribution is only part of the problem, individual players need to know they can make a difference and that occurs by allowing individual players to *actually make a difference.* If I'm forced to engage a tank I make sure I get an anti-tank rocket and work out how to approach it. Sometimes I succeed, often times I don't, but I'm never under the impression I'm only to "deter" the tank. You know what deterrence is? Worthless. A tank who is deterred takes a 30 second break from killing to go repair then go kills some more. Same with aircraft.

Because there isn't any penalty for dying and there isn't any penalty for losing your aircraft besides the count down timer, killing an aircraft is the same as "deterring the aircraft for the cooldown." Sure, they cost resources but you'd have to be losing them ungodly fast to ever run low.

In order for air to be brought back into balance it needs to be treated the same as any other vehicle, not given a special snowflake status because of a terribly flawed concept of "air being an air counter encouraging epic air battles." You should lose your aircraft as often as you lose your tanks, sunderers, etc and with a similar kill count. Without this, players will always feel cheated by air because they can just limp off to go heal and rearm then come right back and lay into you again while all you can do is take it until they trundle off to go get more rockets to farm you with. This problem is even more exacerbated when your doing small scale operations where one ESF can literally squash an entire squad unless everyone pulls AA maxes, and even then some will eat rockets and die. I'm sure some people will scream "its a team game" but wheres the team play for the lone wolf pilot who knows ground targets basically can't hurt him?

Here's some sensible solutions.
1: G2A rockets are AA deterrence. Make them accurate and make them fast. They take too long to reload to effectively kill aircraft that aren't stupid and their lock on warning makes it clear to pilots they're under threat. This means any heavy with an AA rocket is an aircraft deterrer. They retain their terrible dumbfire mode so its a choice you have to weigh.

2: AA burster MAX is an aircraft counter. It gives up all of its AI and AV potential to try and get rid of aircraft and it costs resources. It should be an effective counter for pilots when played properly. (Catching pilots off guard, ambushing pilots who get too close, etc.) This would allow AA bursters to be good deterrence in large scale battles (because their long range firepower isn't nearly as good as their short ranged) while being a highly effective counter in small scale operations where lone wolf ESF can basically farm all they like without risk. These are positions where ESF pilots typically get especially greedy and thus a burster max could ambush and destroy the offender when he makes his careless mistakes.

3: Skyguard should be a aircraft hard counter. It costs as much as an ESF has no AI and AV potential because it is solely based around destroying aircraft. It should provide lethally protective air cover from a long distance and require special tactics to remove from the air or the assistance of support on the ground. They cost the exact same as an ESF and are worse for it, being slower, less maneuverable, and totally inferior against ground targets. This high specialization means they should be highly effective. Like the original skyguard of PS1, they are light chassis thus rely on support from other ground units for protection from marauding ground forces. Skyguard would be the primary air cover for tank columns.

5: Base turrets should be anti-air cover working in the same fashion as a burster max, but because they are more obvious and can't use ambush tactics base turrets require multiple turrets to coordinate. These provide most of the ambient fire in a base assault.

6: ESF should be an aircraft hard counter as they can pursue aircraft. They seek out and destroy or intercept targets before they can do damage to the advance. IE, stopping liberators before they can claim some tank kills.

The game needs to be set up so that a player doesn't become more entitled just because he spawns an aircraft. A liberator is not entitled to any more experience than a sunderer or a MBT.

Welcome to a community forum where people discuss issues.

I suppose we'll go ahead and put you down in the "leave as is" column.

This is a non-issue.

AA is *perfect, you want to change it stop playing!

*perfect from a business point of view I mean. If you make a game to sell or subscribe to then you just make it as fun as possible, with a F2P game there are other considerations, imbalance that causes people to spend money is a good way to address this. Yes aircraft are seriously annoying, so you buy HA AA, max AA, Tank AA etc, cha-ching. When you find none of that works you might even start flying and buy rockets and upgrades for your plane cha-ching.
Now don't get me wrong, things aren't out of hand and it's still a good fun game. But with F2P games you have to realize there are reasons other than pure game play for why things are as they are.
So there's no point moaning and stating the OBVIOUS like base AA turrets are rubbish, there's a reason they are rubbish and it's not because the devs don't know how to increase their effectiveness.

AA cannot be fixed because the AA problem is only a symptom of the broken Air Balance.
With overpowered air and hard AA counters, it's not possible to make AA an effective counter to air as that would result in AA constantly completely shutting down air.
So AA remains ineffective so that aircraft can be used, and, without an effective AA to keep air in check, the naturally overpowered aircrafts are effectively overpowered.

If you don't think air needs to be fixed then you're blind or use air and enjoy it being over powered. This goes for all factions, you have a vehicle thats only counter is other air. The combination of high damage, high maneuverability, high speeds and decent armor make it impossible to kill.All AA whether it be turrets or weapons are useless against air unless you have 5 to 1 odds and even then you wont kill it unless the pilots an idiot. Aircraft has enough survivability to be able to hover there, kill what ground unit they need to, all while taking hits then simply speed off, heal, resupply and come back to repeat

There is a real simple way to balance them, reduce armor on air vehicles. the only one that should have armor is the galaxy because its slow to begin with and suppose to protect troops inside it. This will make AA more effective without increasing there stats at all, it makes more logical sense for air vehicles since aircraft need to be light to be able to move fast.

Alright I know I got into a bit of jab up above with Zer0 but try and keep the frustration to a minimum. Say your piece and keep it clean. If you really believe air needs or does not need changing, you'll want this thread near the top of the forum where RadarX and the devs can see it.

Keep the posts coming and keep it clean!

Yes, you're a pilot who flies around insta-kiling everything and farming certs off of defenseless players. Good for you. Now please get out.

Anyway, my idea:

Give a massive increase to the damage of flak but also give a massive damage falloff. This makes AA deadly at close range, decent at medium range, and terrible at long range. This lets AA defend itself but means it cannot snipe distant targets.

AA Phalanx, being immobile and less common, would have slightly higher damage and less falloff.

XP awarded based of of hits. This will encourage more to play AA. And then this will reduce the airs control over the ground. The damage AA does is fine. Just need to reward the AA for the damage now. Nothing to complex.

Why would anybody use (or pay the huge pricetag) for a weapon which cannot even kill anything? Every other AT or AI weapon does their job effectively and fast because they are dedicated weapons and can only handle one role.

Why do you think that AA should be the exception in that it cannot kill the ONE AND ONLY THING IT IS MADE TO COUNTER.

What enjoyment is there in shooting a target that takes no damage from your attacks? He flies away for 1 minute, repairs, and comes back again. You honestly think people are going to spend 1000certs or $8 for that experience? Give me a break.

Provide a flat XP award for deterrence.

Set a sphere of influence around the AA unit, enemies who enter the sphere and are engaged, damaged and subsequently leave damaged award a flat reward as long as a set % of damage was performed on the invader. Can stack with assists from A2A actions.

So you solution to air imbalance is to have everyone go air? Nice logic.

Exp rewards don't remove aircraft from the air.

With the exception of the Burster MAX, every other AA piece is beta-lasher levels of useless. The AA Phalanx is the best example. 4+ active AA phalanx at an AMP station is still not enough to ground things like Liberators. They just do appalling levels of damage.

Even at point-blank AA phalanx cannot kill an ESF before it shreds the AA into kibbles. At range? Forget it. The damage falloff (combined with the horrible damage) means you won't even scratch their paint. Libs/Gals are almost immune to it at anything other than short range.

All these thread are useless. Devs and SOE does not care that majority that play on the ground and prefer to cater to minority that likes to have OP air power, generally there is nothing on the ground atm that is effective against air. At best, you can have couple of Maxes that will scare a few EFS, until Liberator comes in and dumps on them.
Since it is a free to play, I'll just will play for free, until either OP air gets neutered and I will then buy membership, or I'll find a different game.
As it is, large battles that I participated in the first week of this game are harder and harder to find. In most cases you just see a herd of zerg moving from place to place with little opposition. If there is good battle develops, air just comes in and wipes everything on the ground. The last good places for ground fight are Bio Domes, but who wants to spend all the time ther. Population on three servers I p[lay is lower now then it was when game came out, but there is sure a lot of air power around.

increase usability of skyguard (increase accuracy/turret turn response)
increase damage of A30
fix render distance of AA max

imo that would balance AA

Skyguard is still left dealing pathetic amounts of damage.

You also forgot to mention the AA turrets - but then again everyone forgets about them. Considering how useless they are I can't blame you or anyone else.