You can blow up drop pods?

I was manning the AA turret at an amp station swatting some flies when all of a sudden a drop pod spawns in front of my cone of fire. 5 hits of flak later it explodes in mid air.

BR1 light assault killed.

Seriously, give the new player experience a complete overhaul. I feel bad enough already.

It's even better when you land on a drop pod with your drop pod. Reminds me of Section 8 drop podding on people to get a kill. Was fantastic.

Yeah, killed several drop-pods too. I feel bad for BR1 though, if it is their first introduction to the game.

A2A missiles lock on to them as well. Good luck hitting one though.

Ouch, poor guys. Didn't even have a chance. I know it's realistic and would be pretty cool to do it effectively to hold back enemy reinforcements, but on a BR1 player, I feel sorry for them.

I regularly shoot them down in an ESF as they appear in the sky over bases.

They need to make this game more newcomer friendly. I feel bad every time i kill a new player barely out of their drop pod.

You can, but I've shot at many a drop pod with flak turrets and it normally does very little damage (nowhere near enough to destroy the drop pod before it deconstructs). I can only figure it was some kind of bug that you took it out with five shots, or maybe it got severely damaged beforehand somehow.

On the other hand, I have been killed by a falling drop pod....maybe some BR1s become BR2s before they even see the scenery?

At one point in beta you could shoot them out of the air with flak, but I've not seen any get killed since they changed it.

I think it's fine. It doesn't happen that often.

If you were in a vehicle it probably also died.

I don't mean to be disrespectful to the Devs, but who had the bright idea of getting fresh grunts (whom have never played this game before) the initial game experience of being dropped with light assault into enemy bases/battles only to have their ***** kicked?

I have many friends that have tried PS2 because I told them it was awesome, and their universal reaction to their first 3 minutes in the game is "WTF? Why was I dropped into a fight before I even had the chance to pick a class or anything"

Give the bloody noobs a chance to look around at least...

I think they're trying to hammer the whole 'death doesn't really matter anymore' thing into people's heads.

Strangely enough...I think it counted as a suicide. Maybe because I was in the air as light assault and it was a 'friendly' drop pod that whacked me?

I'm of two minds on the battlefield drop. On one hand, it is very new user unfriendly. On the other hand, when I was a newb (about a week prior to end of beta) I was really pumped to see tanks and firing right off the bat. Granted, I only lived for a couple seconds, but then I respawned at a a big ice cream truck thing called a sunderer with a bunch of guys in the same uniform as me and we all got rocket podded to death, so it all kinda evens out. Wait...no...that isn't even. But it was exciting.

My first pod dropped in the path of a tank and I got run over before the pod despawned. Ended up lying on the floor thinking '...I question the intelligence of this deployment method.'