Air is not OP, they just doing the wrong role

BS.


Skyguards have no chance against a good pilot. A good pilot does not even need a gunner.

Also a single HA with C4 does not even need to fire a rocket to kill a tank. It's a high risk high reward scenario, unlike the air farming that is presently happening.

The ability to kill them instead of deterring aircraft that repair and try a different angle to attack me, rinse and repeat until I am dead.

Presently 2 skyguards MAY kill 1 lib, but only if the lib pilot screws up. Meanwhile those two skyguards cost more resources and required more certs then the Lib did.

Also AA presently gets almost no xp for fighting against aircraft. But require tremendous amounts of resources coordination and certs to even be effective deterrents.

This is the same crap that was removed over a year ago. Air farming everything on the ground with impunity, because the pilot has to make a major mistake in order to lose their aircraft.

Why bother playing anything on the ground at all?

When my sub lapses in 12 days I will not be renewing it while this lack of balance remains.

How about this:

1-12 vs 1-12 goes down on some small outpost. It's all a nice little skirmish... then one of the sides bring an ESF or Lib. Yes, if all 10 of the guys on one side stops, grabs AA launchers and shoot him, AND THE ESF/LIB DON'T FLARE, they will insta-kill him. Hell even if the ESF/LIB flare they might still kill the ESF, because he might just get greedy and hover around. Then they can wait for his flare-induced immunity to being locked to go away and shove some 4-5 missiles at him. 4-5 not 10 because some will have died by then and some missiles will insist that the side of a building is a more important target. The ESF will die to 3 missiles, the lib will survive 5 missiles, but it will have to retreat for repairs, and that time the guys on the ground can use trying to get the point back... ...until the Lib comes back and kill another 3-4 guys that got creamed out in the open. Then it's back to dedicating half a dozen guys to shooting the Lib or just not bothering.

However, they won't all stop to kill the enemy air. THEY CAN'T. Because there is still the other enemy infantry or tanks to deal with. Because of this the volume of fire the esf or lib get's is very low, giving them ample time to kill a few infantry, disengage for repairs, come back, kill a few infantry, and so on. That's how farming with aircraft works. You arrive, you kill until you are forced away, and unless you over-extend, make an error and crash, or on those rare occasions get alpha'ed to death by a HUGE number of enemy AA, you can disengage, repair and re-arm, and return. Now all you have to do is repeat this process. The only question is how you will finally die (if you do) and how many kills you get in the time it take you to die.

Worse off these two options are libs. ONE ENEMY LIB over an outpost you are trying to defend unbalances the whole thing. Suddenly you can't move freely outside because you will be zephyered/daltoned as soon as you are seen. If you dedicate any number of people to pull something to try to stop him, you take those numbers out of the guys stopping the enemy infantry on the ground and further endanger yourself to getting killed by the guys on the ground. To few and the AA is ineffective, to many and the ground-side enemy kills you all easily.

Because of this you soon find yourself giving ground to the enemy infantry because you can't really go outside unless the enemy is not in an angle to see you. You start pulling SMG infils more, and those don't stand up to easily in head-on fights with prepared opponents, so after a couple kills they kill you and then wise up to your plan, making it harder for you to pull off. In short order the point is flipped by the opponents who dig in on the point because you can either sneak in one by one to die, or you can run the gauntlet of liberator fire to get there, weakening or killing you before you even get there. The base is well and truly lost.

Now, I've been in the opposite situation many times. I've been there taking bases in small fights and my side brings a liberator. Suddenly the whole fight shifts sharply in our favor and my job of clearing a few rooms and killing a few guys, some of were busy pointing launchers at the sky, get's so much simpler. ESPECIALLY if the A point is out in the open, but even if it's not, knowing that allied aircraft will shell anyone outside the building you are in is making things a lot easier. You can even tell when enemies leave spawn because the dalton above starts shooting...

And I've been in a Liberator getting kills in long kill-streaks. Last time was, perhaps a month ago by now or 3 weeks, I'm not sure. Me and an outfit mate were in a shredder lib. We were pushing the farm-lane on Indar between the Crossroads Tower and Vanu Archives. The VS brough new tanks all the time, and yet we scored dozens of kills, ON TANKS MIND YOU moving back and forth popping Magriders, Lightnings and Sunderers. We had support from allied tanks, a couple other Liberators, the occasional ESF and allied infantry battling their infantry.

I remember well how hard of a job the burster MAX'es and the Skyguards had in stopping us. Often enough when there was just a littl trickle of damage from the flak we tried to find the source and kill it. At least 2 of the Lightinings I killed were skyguards who gave their position away by shooting me, so I aimed after the incomming fire and shot. When we had to go away for repairs and ro-loading, we returned to that specific area and looked for the Skyguards first. It's not like it was hard, just start shooting any Lightning at the location of the skyguard previously, and be ready to leave if he returns fire and the damage starts to get high.

We kept this going almost an hour. One hour of not losing the Lib, in spite of several bursters (I killed at least one as I recall, rest likely died to our tanks or fell back) 3 skyguards (I killed two, and the last one I think was killed by an allied tank) and the occasional missiles. In the open terrain between the Crossroads tower and the Archives and the bases in between standing still with a launcher aiming for the sky is a good way to get sniped by a 50 caliber. The problem here is that the numbers never climbed over 25vs25. There were simply not a high enough volume of incoming fire to stop us. We accounted for two popped sunderers. We accounted for 4 Magriders, though in most cases they took fire from our own tanks. And perhaps worse of all, we killed 3 Schytes. My pilot would do a belly-flop in the proper direction and I'd turn the rapid-fire anti-tank shell spitting rotary cannon's on the enemy aircraft. Usually it did not take to long to kill them. At the end of the session we were both really tired so we FLEW THE LIB TO WARP-GATE AND LOGGED OFF. We did not even get shot down, or mess up with pilot error, as far as I recall.

You fail to see the problem with aircraft in small fights? with the TTK on them being so high, and the number of dedicated AA needed to alpha any aircraft, odds are good you won't manage to kill any aircraft in small 12vs12 fights. And because most aircraft pilots know this, these fights are the ones they will go to to farm as effectively as they can while risking the least AA retaliation - their enemies on the ground simply don't have the manpower to spare to deal with them. It's that simple. That simple truth leads to more of these fights being picked over by pilots looking for easy certs. Because they will get them.

And the longer this goes on, the more players will either quit the game, or go dedicate their time to aircraft play, eventually becoming a part of the problem. This will increase the numbers of air and so accelerate the process of people quitting or going off to play air more. This circle will continue until eventually SOE gives infantry, MAX'es and tanks some means of dealing with enemy air in at the very least a reliable manner, or they eventually close down their last servers of Aircraftside 2.

The hard counter to Libs is ESFs - again, the point of gaining air superiority is to allow your aircraft to attack enemy ground forces without getting shot out of the sky. What do you want a Lib to be, a glass cannon? It's a freakin gunship, gunships are armoured up the ***.

Oh well? The team with no air should have planned better. At that point they can either redeploy somewhere where there is no air, or stop and deal with the air. Air shouldn't be nerfed because people can't be bothered to take it out.

So what happened to combined arms? If only aircraft can kill aircraft and aircraft can kill ground vehicles and aircraft can kill ground infantry?

Why bother having AA at all? The dev's do not want AA killing aircraft, they have said this. You seem to know this also.

So if every fight is determined by the outcome of the "air battle", why have infantry? Why have ground vehicles? The only purpose they serve in the battle is being targets for the pilots. As you, yourself imply.

Also when was the last time you actually saw an air battle? I saw a one Friday, but mostly I witnessed masses of aircraft farming ground troops and bouncing off one another, literally, over a base that no one could step out of the spawn building at.

The people that re-deployed to grab AA from the next base over died to the smarter pilots who know that strat and realize you can get more certs over there once the defenders are pinned in spawn.

So why bother playing? I have not since Saturday when I logged on and re-deployed to every fight on Indar to find huge air zergs farming anything that dared try to play the ground game. That play session was less then 20 minutes. I just played a different game and actually had fun.

Games are meant to be fun, presently the amount of aircraft flying around make the ground game not fun at all.

When in reality, they log off and play different games. You want pinatas to beat on, why would anyone play the pinata classes? Which in this case is anything on the ground.

You have not put much thought into this, have you?

I am not complaining that air is "op because it killed me" (don't attribute to me that my argument is whining that something managed to kill me, that's dishonest in the extreme and putting words in my mouth) I am saying that while Air itself may be perfectly okay, it becomes OP by virtue of anti-air being highly UP right now.

That's the very core of my argument. Air is effectively over-powered, because anti-air is under-powered. If you try to claim again that everyone but you(#) are just complaining and not worth answering, I will write you off as a worthless troll and block you. I have no time for trolling. If on the other hand you want to present any actual arguments for why the ground vs air balance is somehow fine, I would welcome any arguments you feel like making.

However, "You are just complaining that you got killed" is not an argument at all. You want to argue? Feel free to answer my arguments or make your own, otherwise, you can kindly excuse yourself from the topic.

# "Am I the only one that don't complain about air because it kills me?" = "Everyone but me complains about air because it kills them." = "Everyone else is just complaining about air because they die to it, their statements are therefore irrelevant and I don't have to answer them."

Actually, I have put thought into this. Maybe they should play a different game if they can't be bothered to take out the air. As I said, it's a power weapon. You could make the same arguments about tanks as well as maxes. People just don't like to change their play style to fit the situation, but that's what they have to do.

The team with no air got unlucky. Because on occasion the team with no air is an outfit that can say "Alpha 1 through 5, please go get ESF's and get rid of that lib" or they brought their own aircraft from the very start and are the ones with air superiority.

Most of the time the "team" without aircraft are 12 random people who happen to go there for the fight. They don't have a plan. They don't have a squad, or platoon, or live coms, or perhaps not even an outfit to call on. They are 12 random players, and now they are getting farmed. One gets killed and don't alert the guys in the other side of the base, so they get killed. Any AA attempts are sporadic because some simply leave, some try for the enemy infantry again, and some might just grab launchers or burster MAX'es, and if those MAX'es are lucky some engineer will help them. Maybe they even get a ress later when they get killed too.

End of the day though, "They should have had a plan, shame on them that they did not" is a pitiful cop-out and an attempt to explain how the error is on the guys getting farmed, not the ones farming because it is so easy.

You are basically blaming the victim here. Anyone with an over-arching plan can react as properly as they want, or even re-deploy as a team. Everyone else is screwed. It's those "Everyone else" that keep getting farmed, because organized squads with good AA chase them farmers away in short order. When you are constantly trying to dodge AA, it's not that fun, it might even be dangerous, so why bother? There are, after all, plenty of other small fights that don't have organized outfits opposing you...

AA is not meant to kill aircraft, as has been stated by the dev's and everyone except you seems to know.

Enjoy playing with yourself.

Generally speaking, if one gameplay mechanism is very capable of it's intended role while still being very capable in other roles that it's really not supposed to be, that gameplay mechanic is overpowered. Additionally, if there do not exist adequate counters ( as in anti-air being too week ) to one gameplay mechanism, then again, that gameplay mechanic is likely overpowered.

Ground anti-air needs to be buffed. It's very rare to find good ground battles these days. It's either a smash and grab operation or within minutes, air arrives to **** over all the fun that could be happening. "Nope, no fun to be had here."

Wow King of Snark much.

You can shove your attitude, I meant nothing by it other than I don't see a problem with the air-ground balance right now.

Exactly "power weapons" should be going into real battles not running around to the small ones.

Well it can kill an aircraft with a coordinated effort. Unless we are talking about a whole squad of aircrafts, then it's a deterrent at best.

I always do

I don't think you understand my mindset. If people are playing with randoms and not communicating, then they shouldn't expect things to go their way. PS2 is a team game with a lot of variables that can change the battle. Playing with randoms is cool and all, but you're essentially just leaving every battle up to chance at that point. You can cry "blaming the victim" all you want, but this isn't a **** case. There are not "victims" here, it's a video game. Sometimes people get owned in video games, they aren't a victim, they just have more to learn. You have to really stretch to call someone a victim because they got killed in a video game. In fact, I don't think that can ever actually apply outside of hacks or exploits.

I'm not saying infantry should be easily farmed by air. I'm only saying that SOE shouldn't be making any balance changes because some random new players are outmatched. If anything, they should be working on things in-game that will teach them what to do in that situation. One way other games do that is with beginner servers, but that's obviously not an option on PS2, so maybe improving the tutorial, or adding something to the VR trainer would viable. There are counters tp being farmed, they do exist, the only issue(if you can even call it that) is that new players don't know what they are yet.

First off, that's your opinion. There is no reason why small battles need to be infantry only.

Secondly, how do you propose they do that? The only thing I can think of would be to add more underground bases. I'm ok with that, but that has little to do with air balance, that's a map issue.

Goyo, the simplest problem with your argument is that the video game is a business. When you have one aspect of the game that makes the game less fun for a group of players, you risk alienating those players and losing both customers and content. You can look at all the forum posts on the subject as evidence that players are getting frustrated with the air balance as it currently is. You can give as many arguments in defense of maintaining the current balancing as you want. About teamwork, about resources, about skill, about roles. You can give the most eloquent argument you can.

In reality, what will matter is if the liberators in their current state are driving away players. And if you have players getting killed by vehicles that they can't reasonably fight against, you will drive away players.

Out of curiosity, why is it so important for you that liberators remain as powerful as they are now?

If that is the case, if all you wanted was to state that opinion, then why not just do that and not out-right state that any opponents to the current air vs ground balance are just whining? Why do YOU get to shove your attitude around and I don't?

And what arguments do you have to share that air vs ground balance is okay as-is? How would you possibly reach that conclusion?

You said that the guys on the ground getting owned by the aircraft has their own lack of coordination to blame, that it's basically their fault that they get out-matched by a liberator above the base shelling down. Now you repeat this by stating that "SOE shouldn't be making any balance changes because some random new players are outmatched" First off, I think that if you got 12 guys in a base fighting another 12 guys and a lib shows up and they are next to helpless in stopping that lib from farming anyone it wants, that IS indeed an issue SOE should look into. The problem is essentially the unreliability and high TTK of the available anti-air. Secondly you repeat the idea that these are random guys who don't know what to do. You don't have to be new to be screwed by the imbalance in PS2, you only have to be part of the side facing the imbalance, that is, be one of the people on the ground.

My argument has been that the anti-air is weak and unreliable. This holds true no matter how experienced the user is. Anyone can get the basic concepts of "aim weapon at enemy press button to fire" even if that's a flak dispenser or a lock-on launcher, so the use of these weapons don't have much to do with fantastic skills, unless you somehow learn to predict the patterns of flak's COF build and aim accordingly, but you will likely have to be some kind of math savant for that.

As for the victim-blaming accusation, you don't have to be talking about a criminal case for this to hold true, though I do find it humorous how touchy the accusation seem to be to you.

In the case of a liberator shelling a base and killing some guys, the guys on the ground are basically victims of the liberator's firepower. The issue is not that they get killed in a game, the issue is in the balance being off and them being unable to effectively shoot back. In the case of ESF's they are not a terribly big issue because small arms fire can kill them, so a persistent ESF can and will eventually incite a reaction where the majority of the guys on the ground aim for the skies and shoot him once he comes over the hills. Assuming ofc they have not lost the base by then, but whatever. Libs are worse because small arms don't work on them and dedicated anti-air weapons take longer to kill them. Top that off with the lib's stable platform for shooting on ground targets and you got a recipe for imbalance towards the guys on the ground.

That makes them victims. Victims of bad game balance. By showing up here and telling me that they just got to deal and get better, you are in essence blaming the victims for their bad position to retaliate against aircraft from. You are saying, basically, that they just got to try harder, even as I have said several times now that that's not the issue here; it don't matter how hard they try when the odds are mathematically stacked against them.

No amount of trying is going to change the fact that, for instance, a lib takes 8 missile hits to die. Should the 12 guys on the ground ready 8 out of 12, 2/3 of their guys to alpha the lib when it comes over? CAN they even do that? Can the remaining 4 guys hold of the enemy infantry on their own while the others devote their time to downing the lib? Can they even hope to have all 8 alive after the lib flares the first few missiles and then possibly kill a couple of the HA's with launchers?

And when those 12 guys are not even on coms and coordinating their counter, is it fair to say it's their fault that the 2-man liberator above, that may not actually be coordinating either, can attack 12 enemies in an outpost with impunity because they know that the volume of fire needed to down them can't be reliably produced so they will have ample time to disengage and repair as many times as they need while they keep shelling with impunity? Is that still somehow the fault of the 12 guys on the ground?

I don't think so. If you do, please explain to me how it's so fair that just because the 1 person flying the lib, with or without a friend to help gun, can spend 450 aircraft resources and can now kill anyone among 12 players almost entirely unopposed because unless the lib pilot mess up and crash or over-extend, the 12 guys below can't hope to kill him, only suppress him for some time? He can be back as many times as he needs, and the gunner is even optional. Even if he has a gunner, he don't need to communicate much with him, if at all. He just parks himself over a small base with an active fight and let his gunner do the rest.

The small scale battles involving barely a squad-sized group vs another squad-sized group may be the worst case to have a lib come farm them, but it's not the only one. Still, we will start here, and I will repeat my questions:

How is it fair and okay that a vehicle that takes at most 3 players but needs no more than two to be optimal and at worst can be operated by one, can kill anyone in a 12vs12 fight almost entirely unopposed?

How is it fair to claim that it's the 12 people on the ground that need to change and try harder, as opposed to saying that something has to be done to balance the 3-man vehicle to not be such an overpowering factor?

The problems with PS2 ESFs is that they took the TWO PS1 fighters (the A2A Mozy and A2G Reaver) and rolled them into ONE super A2A&A2G fighter the ESF.

Almost every problem with PS2 Air can be directly linked to that horrible game design mistake (including Libs, because a pure A2A fighter could be desinged to counter Libs much more easily than a one with A2G roles as well - without making it totally OPd in an A2G role just so it could counter Libs A2A better).

What a terrible example, MWLL had horribly unbalanced aircraft.

The LRM-80 Shiva raining unstoppable death from the edge of space.

Firebombs one-hit-killing anything short of a Clantech Heavy.

The only counter was someone had to volunteer to give up their fun to get in a completely defenseless AA tank. And even then on the bigger maps, all the aircraft had to do was fly to a different part of the map and blow things up there.

The most effective anti-air unit in that game was the Summoner with LB-20X and jumpjets. Half the air kills I got was jumping my mech in front of low-flying aircraft, because anti-aircraft tanks had the same problem we have in Planetside: You can damage them, but they just fly away and repair.

Yeah, you're right, according to Battletech rules aircraft has shorter ranges and works a bit better. But that's the reason nobody in MWLL used any aircraft with 'classic' weapons on them. It was LRM-80 Shivas, HGauss Shivas, TBolt Sullas, or FBomb Sullas.

The whole AC thing should be started over by giving them a proper flight model, that at least resembles physics. Current flight model (especially Libs) is from a fairy tale. These things can circle around a base, go upside down or sideways without losing any altitude. They can also accelarate very well and leave the fight if damaged. It is crazy.

Downfiring cannon is also stupid, it is overpowered and should be removed (give it another forward firing weapon).

The other big issue, is that AA duty is very boring and costly too - to be a bit effective you need a 1000 cert NS burster arm (Max still dies to shredder in about 1 second - ridiculous). Skyguard even more expensive.That will still not kill Lib, it will only make it to fly away or get to you and kill you.

It is way too easy to see and kill enemy infantry on the ground.

On top of this, G2A lock-on launchers are currently broken.

It is equally annoying when our own side has a Lib overhead. Suddenly you are out of your job (of killing enemy) and are relegated to point flip and wait duty. Terrible. You wait for the base to flip, while the Lib racks up the kills. Not fun.