http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/counter-play I just watched this on Extra Credits and thought it put into words wonderfully most of the things that I really dislike in this game. There are just too many instances where people can do something to you without you being able to meaningfully react to it. Whether it's getting shot from behind and killed so fast you can't even shoot back or getting chased down by ESFs with no way of fighting back or outrunning them, every time a situation pops up where you don't have any meaningful counterplay it takes away from my enjoyment of the game. Of course this also gets reinforced by the numbers game problem, where the counter to something is a no-skill weapon that you need lots of to win, but you can't be so good with that you can do anything by yourself - like G2A rockets. Anyways, I thought this video made a lot of really good points as to why certain units and strategies get a lot of complaints from the community. They simply aren't fun to play against because you can't really react to them.
but you can take cover and pull AA to counter it.... or your own aircraft. its not that there are no choices, its that people don't use the choices given to them. I rarely get killed by rocket pods when I am playing with my outfit because I have air cover, as well as AA cover and most of the time I am by a base that has buildings or trees that can be used as cover, hell, if all else fails and someone is trying to hoverspam, get 5 guys to magdump into the aircraft and it will be at half HP in no time. I do admit that AA is a bit lacking, but nerfing G2A will make it fun for no one, Let the aircraft keep their bite, but give ground biased AA (IE skygaurd, max is ok) a bit more to bite back. It really is a fine line however since you can give AA to much bite and cancel out air completely, like we had in beta, where AA becomes fun for no one but the people using AA and we have the same situation just reversed with no way to counter AA spam. to be honest, most people that complain about G2A rockets are either people who don't use teamwork or the tools given to them or Lib / gal players. Both of these groups complain that they get chewed up by A2G, but when my outfit pulls more than 2 AA units, there is no air and when my outfit decides to pull libs or gals, we have fighter escorts. this game can not be balanced 1 on 1 or else you will run into a lot of very bad situations in the macro scale, the only problem is that most people don't look at the big picture and just the small one. If AA could kill air reliably 1v1, then Air would not be able to get even close to a base and thus be worthless. This is a combined arms game, get your air to counter other air, get your AA to help counter their are, and they will get there AA to counter your air, wile the infantry and tanks are duking it out. sure the A2G will get a few tanks / troops in the process, but that is because your team is not doing a good enough job to drive them out. TL;DR, if your getting hoverspammed, you deserve to lose that fight since you can very, very easily kill any ESF with the tools provided. sadly I expect people to discount my opinion due to my sig / avatar, but do know that I do have both the skygaurd and AA max unlocked and I do use them both (skygaurd to a lesser extent) to fight off air.
Oh hey, some ESF jockey defending his pwnmobile by giving a lengthy lecture about how everyone else is just too stupid to counter him. This is so fresh and new.
So now we have people claiming it takes "multiple people to down one, as it should", but now we can easily kill any ESF? Which way is it flyboys?
What they don't get is that there is no satisfaction in it being easy when you need multiple people using a weapon that provides no challenge to do it. It'd be much more fun to have a hard to use weapon that can actually get a kill on its own if you're really awesome with it.
Very interesting concept! I do think that PS2 needs a bit more counter play, as I find the whole 'random death' experience a bit frustrating at the moment.
First thing, a big chunk of the Extra-Credit material is a shameless re-phasing of articles from gamedesign books, and belive me, there are hardly any good book on multiplayer gamedesign. While what they say sounds smart and kind of make sence, if you don't think about it , material they provide is targeted more towards mainstream single player games and game conceptualization. If loosing makes your whole experince frustating and you don't get enought enjoyment from time when you not loosing, than you probably better off playing modern single player games, such as mass effect, assasing creed, new hitman, medal of honor warfighter and so on. Games, in which it's so hard to loose that there is no feeling of a challange or achiving anything.
