What is the point of air-to-air missiles and why do we need them?

Vote for removed. Due to the lack of a training map, new pilots now have less a minute of flight time to learn before being locked out for 12+ minutes upon death. Absurd.

you can train in the warp gate.
you can fly fast (is you don't slow down, no missile will be able to hit you as their speed is lower than the max speed of an esf)
if people can't train, maybe we will see less flyboy in this game. Good thing, the last tiem i checked it was supposed to be a ->FPS<- and a ->combined arms<-, plus a "rock-paper-scissor" game. Currently, it'a fly simulator, where esf is itself combined arms and is lava (melt rock and scissor and burn paper). Less flyboy ? Yepeee.

without easy a2a there is no counter to a skilled lolpodder

taking away a2a and forcing nubs into aerial gun battles to kill skilled lolpodders wont make the ground game any more tolerable, itll be less tolerable.

since the only people an a2a weapon hurts is other air (mainly lolpodders and lib farmers) then its obvious whos doing the complaining on this one, the same people who already benefit greatly from the game mechanics of their own weapon. Im not saying thats wrong, I do it myself, I just accept there are counters too.

The Stinger also can't hit the F-16 because the F-16 never comes within range of it in the first place.

No, people "chill down low" because infantry are magically invisible(unrendered) further than 250 meters away, the flight ceiling is 1000 meters, and there are no computers in Planetside 2(I guess in the future everyone forgot how to make electronics) so no proper avionics and no targeting. In real life, the F-16 would fire Mavericks from 20,000 feet and instakill you and your entire armor column.

Pilots in PS2 have to be just about the whineyest group I've yet to encounter in games.

You guys have everything going for you , yet still ***** and whine about something as trivial as the lola2am. Can't wait for the tears when SOE actually nerf the crap out of Libs and make ground based AA viable.

To avoid risking the destruction of a $ 20M plane by a $ 50k rocket, which is a very real possibility (for reference: Soviet Union vs Afghanistan).

If the missiles ever make it...

This should be the SG's ability as well, 20 EXP per shot down missile or Lib shell.

Another thing is that the SLAMRAAM would like to have a talk with the F-16...

All I read is the OP is getting pwned in the air when he leaves the Warpgate!

*flex*

Sure I'm not saying that fighter jets are invincible, just pointing out that Planetside 2 vehicles are nothing remotely like real-life ones more than anything else, and if they were, the game wouldn't be recognizable.

I play aircraft and here so many people excuse A2AM as "revenge for rocket podders" but the sad fact of the matter is A2AM areunskilled, unfair and generally inapporpriate for a game which heralds itself on skill and tactical play. Although many would argue the same with rocket pod aircraft as well (which I to an extent agree with) the fact enough maxes, G2AM and small arms fire can at least negate the issuedoes show that at least this mechanic is not completely flawed.

But with A2AM it is flawed because their soo hard to dodge (you can argue low ground cover, but what about ESF pilots firing A2A DOWN UPON YOU, which and good A2Aer does), require little effort to fire and genereally have no counter (im sorry but 1 flare in 75 seconds is simply not an effective counter)

A2AM need lower ammo capacity, like 3 missiles per run. They also need poorer tracking so harsh ESF turns can dodge the missile, and lockon has to take far more accurate aiming on the pilot before it fires, maybe even reduce damage. These all, i believe, would balance the A2AM

like a 75 second cool down for like 1 flare is not a counter, it simply prolons our death. Also, if the A2AM pilot is simply following you close enough, or is firing DOWN upon your esf, then ground cover is invalid. The fact your quite happy to allow a broken game mechanic ruin an entire section of the game, simply because of bad experience with a completely different aspect of aircraft (one i can agree with though) is ridiculous

so, i'll say what every flyboy say when we talk about nerf their toy:

"deal with it"
"irl blablabla"
"use the same. The game is balanced as you can counter something with the same thing."
"l2p"
"stop whine"
"doopy doopy di doopy doop doop didoop da didilitum"

Atleast the vanu G2A missile launcher only registers its hits 1/4 times even when directly hitting.

And this far in the future I think we would have drones that you could just "launch" from the warpgate for 100 green resources to engage and destroy enemy piloted aircraft. Drones are smaller require no environment for the "pilot" and can pull of maneuvers that a real person cannot due to G forces.

Or we could just talk about the THOR or any number of SAM weapons.

And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface when you consider things like what if you put metal storm on a Tunguska (camping an ammunition tower in PS2)?

The point I was making is that the in game G2A launcher is a joke. It does not resemble a real working model in any shape or form.

The answer to your question is astonishingly simple: It allows people like me, who never fly (except when I want to get from point A to B fast) and who did not spend any certs on their ESF, to do something against the air spam. At least when there are multiple of us.

You are talking about skill but it is not only your skill but also your heavily certed ESF which gives you a huge advantage and lets you easily shoot planes out of the sky. A non certed ESF does not stand any chance against you. As most pilots on both sides are busy farming XP with their rocket pods, it is the groundpounders who need to do your job and shoot other ESF out of the sky. If pilots would actually do their job, we would not need these A2A missiles. But dogfighting is tedious and earns a lot less XP, so people prefer to spam infantry instead of other planes.

Can we at least agree that they are just ridiculously good and easy to use (just like rocket pods are ridiculously good against ground) ?

Hate against ESFs aside, they are extremely cheap.

Flares are currently unrealistic.

I think it would be better to be able to launch as many flares as you like within a time period.

However, you would be limited to perhaps 5 flare shots before you have to fly back to the warpgate to pick up more, for a resource cost.

Yeah, flares shouldn't be able to unlock missiles actually locked. It should only prevent other missiles to lock-on.

But hey, see my sign.

the counter is being a good pilot. I posted this almost a month ago http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/a2a-missile-redundancy.61427/

flying solid hours every day since then, a2am users have gone from beatable to hilarious

It's hard to take someone seriously when their main aim is to spam helpless infantry at sunderers and spawnpoints with rocketpods, complaining about someone being able to kill them from the air.

Not entirely true, the default esf is powerful just hard to use which is kind of stupid but whatever.

As for pilots preferring to farm ground, I personally think the metagame has shifted past that. I find it easy to rake in the certs by preying on new would be rocketpodders jumping on the bandwagon late. Half because they're not very good at dogfighting and half because there is now 5 burster maxes over what would have been a sweet farm spot a few weeks ago. And I use the default fuel tanks to do this..