ESF Vertical Afterburner nerf makes reverse-flying pointless

The problem is, if you don't argue (however futile as they don't have a clue) then the devs would think that this is what the community wants...

good, you should be on the ground capping anyway, not cert farming with lolpods. i make a living poppin u turds with my striker

ummm bye?

i honestly dont understand how people dont realize ragequit threats are laughable to forum readers

orly? Please sir, with your infinite knowledge of flight tell me how to dodge bullets without using the reverse.


If you say corkscrew, you all ready lost.

You are sadly mistaken if you think the only thing the pilots are complaining about is losing the ability to farm with lolpods. What I find amusing is this change won't have a large impact on the sad sacks who only know how to lolpod infantry. Infact, most good pilots these days don't really even run pods to begin with, as afterburners and rotary are the most effective anti-air weapons good pilots have access to. Any pilot worth their salt realized a long time ago it is far more enjoyable to dogfight other ESF than to destroy ground targets. Killing infantry with lolpods, or rotary, is an after-thought or something you do when you're bored.

zedfonsie said: ↑

“Morons these days, not even worth arguing for...”

The problem is, if you don't argue (however futile as they don't have a clue) then the devs would think that this is what the community wants...

It's really disappointing to see such a low level of intellect,
Idiots these days, not even worth ... oh wait, it's not even anything against people lacking social knowledge

So your idea is "Lets make flying in this game like all other games!"

Sounds legit... not.

Mouse75,

strange your last air kills were with rockets, oops I didnt say anything

I don't quite follow your failed quote.

As I recall I also said this: "Killing infantry with lolpods, or rotary, is an after-thought or something you do when you're bored." Hmmmmmmmm.

Also, since you failed to notice (or just wanted to prove some feeble point), most of the kills on my board are from infantry weapons.

Please bother someone else, troll.

I think all the infantry heros here posting fail to realize that this doesn't effect an esfs ability to hover... So your still going to get lol podded the same amount if not more then usual due to the inability for pilots to properly take on other aircraft.

You thought it was bad before this is just going to turn into aircraft hunting infantry like at release. Instead of ESFs taking on the proper role of air dominance and armor suppression your just going to get Lol pod guys strafing running away and repeating over and over and over again... Which will cause the devs to put dome shields on every continent which leads to the phasing out of combined arms of PS2 even more.

You fail to realize the trickle down effect that this will cause... Best pilot wins because of the high skill ceiling this is the main determining balance between all 3 aircraft. You take that away ohh man literally everything will have to be rebalanced again.

Its bad for the long term appeal in the game along with causing a ton more work for the devs... meanwhile you start losing the remainder of your flying community and could possibly cause imbalance between the factions (which is bad for the game... did I mention that yet?).

All the comments from non-flyers thinking this is a great idea makes me chuckle. Not only because they obviously have no basis for having an informed opinion about air-vs-air mechanics, but because they miss the point entirely and think this will somehow benefit them...

You know what the end-game of this change will be? The high-skill pilots who run ESFs now (the ones who just don't just end up leaving that is) will transition to dalton-libs. They are already currently some of the most dangerous and versatile AA in the game, and after this ludicrous change that only allows you to strafe-dodge at 1/4 speed goes through then that will mean that they get exponentially more effective against ESFs. Currently you need a top-end pilot to deal with a top-end dalton-lib in a 1v1 (this can even be done solo-lib by the best pilots) and air-strafing is basically the only thing that allows you to have a chance at staying alive and whittling the lib down - hoping to not make a mistake and drift into any of the lib's death-zones. daltoning ESFs at that speed is going to be easy - and you know what that those liberators will do once they run out of air-targets? They will be pounding the living **** out of the ground. Hope you look forward to that...

-Stigma

As it currently sits on PTS, I do NOT like the changes. Hover battles with afterburner (AB) thrusting around gave ESF fights a dynamic and, imo, FUN aspect to the game, unique to PS2.

While I don't have a crystal ball to see into the minds of the devs, I see two reasons they may want to nerf reverse thrust.

1) Lower skill floor.

The problem with this is that it doesn't lower it by much, if at all, while simultaneously lowering the skill ceiling. New pilots that don't know the reverse maneuver or can't do it well will still be shot down (doesn't lower skill floor). Medium skilled pilots might be shot down more from new pilots on their tail (slightly lowers skill floor in a way). However, the real reason the skill floor is so high is bec its so easy to lose your ESF and as a new player it hurts due to resources, timer, lack of invested certs, and lack of experience. This could be remedied by either making ESFs tougher so you get "more" out of each pulled aircraft (not necessarily a good way to go). Or you could make it so that newbie planes cost less, and can pull more often, based on the "certs applied to the loadout" This would also add another layer to game play for vets in that some players may use "bare bones" or "cheap" planes when resources go low. Sort of how like in counter strike people would sometimes buy cheaper guns in a "save round"

2) Create an added benefit for afterburner (AB) secondary.

If the afterburner secondary changed the factor from 2 back to the current value of 8, then this would give benefit to that secondary, and perhaps more importantly, give a downside to running rotary/pods. As noted by higby previously, they see rotary/pods as a sort of jack of all trades loadout. If rotary/pods had a hover AB factor of 2, while someone with rotary/afterburner had a factor of 8, then this would give an advantage in dogfighting to the one running AB instead of pods. This may be their intent. However, without the cert tree to test and without any announcement that the AB secondary will actually do this, it is all speculation. And as such I hope that this change doesn't go to live.

Unless the devs come out and say that AB secondary will give back the current hover AB factor, I think this change would hurt the community of pilots by taking away an aspect of ESFs that added depth and, imo, fun to ESF play.

What would effectively end up happening is all the good pilots will start doing ambush-tactics only (because positioning will be the only deciding factor in who wins in a duel once you are atleast mediocre at aiming). What that will result in isn't newbiews doing better in fights - instead of engaging with an ace seeing him pull and impressive manouver and then killing you, you will simply never see that ace. He (or she) will be loitering at max altitude or behind a rock and only attack when you have your back turned - and he WILL kill you 100% of the time withou any chance of retaliation because he can actually aim from dozens (or hundreds) of hours actually dogfighting. Hitting a 1/4'th speed target is trivial....

So you tell me, what would frustrate a newbie more? Engagement turning against you because the other pilot demonstrates that he is obviously more skilled and experienced - or just dying again and again and again in a single clip to opponents you never even see?


As for the potential for AB pod cert upgrades basically being the "un-nerf" to this change... well aside from it being COMPLTE AND UTTER SPECULATION - I still think that would not be a good change.

The AB pods could use a little love sure, but even AB pods as they currently stand are THE best thing to use if you are going to dogfight as (or against) a actually experienced pilot. They are arguably mandatory already for a high-level duel. If this sort of change went through and only AB pods undid them it would make AB pods not only mandatory for high-end duel but indeed mandatory for all air-to-air combat. Trust me when i say that not a single half-competent pilot would ever run anything else than the AB pods (with whatever cert upgrades that undid the nerf). No weapon, no matter how powerful, is worth that sort of sacrifice of mobility (the only actual defense you have as an ESF).

So, in the end the result of that would only be to limit the weapon-arsenal to 2 guns - the rotary and the stock guns (of which arguably the rotaries are still best 90% of the time). That's exactly what we don't want to have happen. We want multiple good skill-based options to be viable.

-Stigma

I used to HATE defending the death of gaming in my teens. I never came to forums. I did for this though years later, and am so happy people like you are here. Nobody seems to ever care about actual "skill" anymore. What's even more weird nowadays, is mouse flying nooblets are telling me this 100% exploit is an absolute necessity for a "skilled pilot"...I just feel like 5 years ago what was an obvious patch to a broken mechanic, is now something people are arguing over as a definitive needed skill to play the game.

3. In real life "air" is important. It's not "aerodynamic" on accident. When you pull a nose towards horizon and apply thrust, you go into a flat spin and crash into a fiery wreck. When you do this in PS2, the game physics actually hit exploit levels, apply 10000lbs of thrust and easily force an aircraft into a 180spin.

It's not a manuever, it's not a skill. It's an exploit. Learn how to fly a plane. Here is how you turn around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_S

While i tried to do this awhile back and succeeded no less, it felt silly and really anally retentive.

However if they are going this way, they should fix up the Debris infinite damage, increase speed by ~50% across the board and make the physics less dodgy, allowing a more controlled manoeuvring for special tactics, which right now is as i say dodgy.

A well thought out reply.
I'm saying. The game already uses flying like other games. With the exception of this odd reverse flying maneuver.
If people want to fly in reverse that's actually ok. Just make an actual mechanic for it.

If a mechanic was implemented it would, again level the playing field between high skilled pilots and relatively new pilots.
Should it be introduced then it should be balanced such that.

A good pilot should be good in all ESF's equally instead of what it is currently.

It is currently:

A good pilot will perform best in a scythe than any other ESF.

Reading between the lines you can see what this implies for new pilots.

Cool - now link the wiki article on nanites or we have to remove those from the game too.
(you total ******* derp...)

Its not like this would change the mechanics of the game to suddenly be realistic or aerodynamic. If you want to argue that ESFs should be jets then by all means - go ahead and make a thread about it - but they are not, and have not been since the beta over a year ago. They are VTOL hovercraft unlike anything that exists in real life (and so is 99% of the rest of the stuff in the game, which is painfully obvious but still needs to be pointed out to you apparently).

Oh an lastly... I see the pattern of the "yes" crowd is still holding true. What do you know YET ANOTHER total scrub who (1) has barely used an ESF at all and (2) has gotten the pitiful amount of kills in that ESF that he has by using only scrub weapons on infantry. In your case I see someone has been lolpod farming. You naughty boy... Been frustrated again and again when you came up against a pilot who was out of his diapers and literally flew circles around you? I think so. A truly PITIFUL 7% of kills from a proper nosegun (that's maybe the worst I've seen so far) - that's 11 out of 152 total (yikes!...) kills in an ESF. Tell me true - have you ever even shot down another ESF at all?... I would not be surprised if the answer was no, but I doubt you'd have the stones to tell the truth anyway.

So tell me again - why exactly should we listen to someone like you on how to change the core air-to-air gameplay when you very obviously (and provably through your stats) haven't even got the first close about the basics of flying - much less the advanced stuff? It would be like giving a 10 year old a vote in how to do a tax reform. But hey - this isn't a rhetorical question. By all means try to answer the question if you can. I bet you will either ignore it or change the topic. Let's see...

-Stigma

You are just flat out wrong - especially about the scythe. All ESF can do reverse-type of manouvers (with variantions) just fine. The reaver has a little more Vthrust to work with once in a drift manouver to keep momentum going but all three are fully capable. If we are discussing new pilots then the only significant difference for rookie pilots learning the basics is that the scythe can be a bit tricky to learn reveral type manouvers just because you don't have the visual indicator (both aside from having to do it blind it works just fine, so you just need more experience and confidence).

I fly all three by the way, and you need a lot more airtime than you have to have an informed opinion.

-Stigma