[Suggestion] Limit the ability of skyknights to dominate air.

well, lets face it, KD is never going to be removed, so rather than have it be used against people as some kind of weird insult, it could be used for something positive.

the people already good with vehicle wont care because nothing changes, and people bad at the vehicle get a chance to be able to fail dozens of times without it impacting their overall retry count

Locking the esf in an open mmofps in their own territory is kind of crap. As it is already right now, that beginners pick some lock ons a2a realize that they will lose and start heading to the warpgate.
That leads to two possibilities a) you chase them over the entire map and try to get them down. B) u let them flee only that they will interrupt your next air fight again and make you piss off. So no locking is not great as they would have a shorter distance to flee. I mean I head from harassars in front of a hostile warpgate.
I am not sure about the only air paper fighter. On the one hand I like it on the other they will really stink when a real esf pass by with a2a load out. It's not that comparable to the harassar and mbt, as many choose the harassar over the tank. Increased nanite gen. Well I can imagine there are some guys swapping to that certain base just for the high nanite gen. 300% increased nanite would be for a member 2min waiting for an esf, that's chain pulling of harassars as they are 150 each min. Those guys wouldn't help that base neither the stats, as the base seem even.
Price based on kd? Well then pay your sniper rifle with nanite as well. How pricy do you want to to make them? 750 max? That would lead to a sky knight squad ruling the air for the whole time as every other dude has no nanite to buy an esf.
Based on time? Can't you still suck when you sit all time in an esf? And God says what is about those smurf accounts?

I'd like the paper esf the most, as I'd like to see more variance in the air but not to sure if it would go the way of a harassar getting way to strong.

What would the communist/socialists do?

They would take away what people have worked for, and then they would give it to people who did nothing.

Give noob pilots coyotes so they dont have to aim and by doing so you take away all of the skill the so called "skyknight" has developed through practice in evading incoming fire.

For some reason you want to punish people who work hard and are skilled due to practice.

You want to reward people who did nothing and make flying easier for them.

Fundamentally what you are doing is lowering the skill ceiling to the point where there is no replay value.

What is the point of practicing evading incoming fire if there are unevadable weapons which most people use? What is the point of practicing your aim if someone can hit you with weapons which require no aiming?

Instead of having something special and unique, something which is difficult instead of easy, but rewarding instead of boring, you want to dumb flying down to the point that it is no different than driving tanks.

And you arent increasing the pilots in the air, you are just replacing one group of players who care passionately about flying with another group who is ambivalent. They hate 'skyknights' but on the other hand they wish they could be them.

Ultimately, just like socialism, this kind of attitude must be stamped out if free men are to lay claim to auraxis.

Besides, allowing people to pull ESF and duel on koltyr would fix all of the new pilot problems. A few hours of dueling is more practice than you will likely get in several days flying in live action.

I think this can all be fixed by reducing the cost of fighter planes by 100 nanites

Im in the same boat as most i think. Tried A2A but kept getting destroyed. The controls just threw me off and its something i havent bothered with since.
Would love to rule the air but i just cant get the hang of it lol

I know its gonna sound cheesy and old, but this is one case where practice makes.... close to perfect. You can't give up if you have a desire to be good at it, I suggest gettng into VR and setting a goal, and by that I suggest looping around a mountain or flying in tree line. Something to force you to learn movement, aim will come with more practice but gotta have that movement down first.

Just change draw to fly, this applies to a lot of you on this forum.

AHAHAHA
I CANT DRAW EITHER LOL
Serioulsy though, its not fun practising something you suck at
Also, if i started practising soccer at the same time as Ronaldo ( i dont know which one, pick one ) do you think id be as good as he is?
Probably not.....

Do you think you would be better at soccer then you are currently? I would hope so...

Basically this translates to, **** noobs that want to learn, if they die within 2 minutes of pulling ESFs, they might as well stick to ground ******** because ESFs offer less than 1/3rd infantry can make.

People don't want to stay for 8 hours learning how to fly for a mediocre source of income, people want to fly to counter things that you can only counter by flying. You are basically saying if you want to have fun flying you have to stick your nose in the **** until the smell is tolerable enough to swim in the septic tank that is the toxic air game. No one enjoys dying for 8 hours to skyknights that completely dominate an area of 10 hexes in return to kind of kill players below your level and in that regard basically the air equivalent of toddlers that can barely hold a flight stick in the direction away from a tree or mountain.

It's not like the devs haven't already gutted everything else, what's left on the list? Headshots and flying with specifically an ESF. That's it. I came back about 4 weeks ago hoping to see more depth with vehicle gameplay and infantry gameplay, I was sorely disappointed. Tomcats are only worth using against gals since your nosegun does more overall DPS to libs, even if you cycled them in, hornets do practically nothing to large aircraft and everything to sunderers and tanks, which leaves me confused: Why the **** would I ever use lockons to hit something I can already hit with my nosegun with ease? Coyotes are garbage, even if you cycled them in, noseguns are not good against infantry anymore besides the supposed AI ones (Hey guess I can start using the AH now, everything else is terrible!). It's like everything has this double standard of polarization when it comes to mixing the ground and air and man game, if it kills air well, it means it's a bullet based weapon or lockon from infantry, if it kills infantry, then it's either terrible or is actually just better against vehicles, if it kills vehicles it does it with extreme effectiveness in which if someone is using this you should not take a tank anywhere near it or never pull one at all. It's this kind of ******** that brings the game down, no one ever wants to get to learn vehicles unless they wanna counter other vehicles and even then most people simply learn how to ignore vehicles except in a handful of poorly designed bases like Aura farmcity.

EDIT:
Ok it seems they nerfed the walker for some reason and buffed the flak cannons, so they nerfed skill and buffed easy flak ********. So with this on the table that they very clearly nerfed skill and buffed something easy to do, what exactly is the difference between giving everyone an easy way to fight A2A and this?

If there is a squad using specialized A2A missiles, you SHOULD lose, this game shouldn't be "I outskill you so therefor you cannot stop me" it should be "I can do X, X and X to turn the tide in my favor even if you have more experience, I can win". The game is simply not inviting if people keep saying "play this for several hours and then you can start actually playing", it's no wonder the playerbase is rather discontent with the game when a majority of new players simply can't play.

This is essentially my problem with your next statement.

Similar to the above, you're got a high-skill weapon, and a low-skill weapon. It's fine having low-skill weapons, but they need results similar to the difficulty it takes to use them. I don't like the Lasher mechanic in this game, but depending on the fight you can often flak and wreck the guy with movement and precise aim. The problem with lock-ons is the unavoidable damage you take from them in the air. That unavoidable damage from flak is similar, but flak is more punishing because it's much more damaging and mostly from invincible units within spawn rooms. This notion that "the gun only does one thing, so it has to excel at that thing" is completely wrong because it doesn't consider ease of use. I do agree that air is much too punishing for new players, but these noob weapons made the situation worse for everyone. We need a medium-skill nosegun option, and A2A missiles need to be able to be dodged. Not Swarm easy, but boosting while in a reverse maneuver should do the trick.

You misunderstand, the sole purpose of me pointing out that they blatantly nerfed a far more skillful weapon and buffed a non-skill based one, is to draw the comparison of why they could and should do the same to ESFs.

The difference between flak and lockons is generally that lockons can be countered, with the nerfage of composite armor (which is also ******** I might add) flak is still very much a deterrence field.

Making something harder to do, just to make it effective does not constitute fun gameplay. If everything has to be hard in order to be effective then lockons would take ages to kill an aircraft, strikers would simply be fast rockets with no passive radar locking and maxes would simply be infantry HP bars with two guns aimed from the hip. The game in it's current iteration does not value strategic gameplay and almost holds in godlike respect of the twitch shooter playstyle, continuation of this abhorrent way of buffing and nerfing simply makes PS2 an bad MMO CoD. I wouldn't even say battlefield because it actually has balanced vehicle gameplay.

I mean it should be obvious at this point, not enough of the playerbase is being represented in any of these changes, it's basically the majority saying "I don't want to play this or play against it so nerf it". We need to deviate away from the twitch only shooter and make it more about the combination of different parts of the game and how they interact. Putting in a way to counter skyknights in the air should be part of the mending, personally I think the air game needs more hardcounters over numbers.

At this point, you need to accept that we have what we have, at least in a general sense. I absolutely love Arma, and love the OHK missile potential in that game, but it just doesn't mesh with Planetside 2. When you say "strategic", it reminds me of Wargame, or Arma, which I love, but PS2 was taken in an entirely different direction. In Wargame and Arma, area denial AA was balanced because it was resource intensive and was often down for quite a while once it was taken out. PS2 has an entirely different system, one where infantry and AA is readily replaced, at a much more rapid pace than air, and it stands to reason that air needs to be able to mingle and trade blows. So yes, this leads to a CoD type of gameplay. I'm not happy about that, but it's the game we have and that's the system we have to build upon. I completely agree that air is too hard, and it absolutely has to be more approachable for the average player, but in the end it still needs to promote competitive play, and that's something that Daybreak has failed to deliver on.

Disable Backward Flying = problem sovled - real dogfights at full speed tail to nose.

That's what makes PS2 so unique and fun. Other games have hover and flight at the same time, so those mechanics aren't the problem. The problem is the difficulty in picking one or the other in PS2. Let "throttle analog" be that button to switch. Then add easier to use nose guns for beginners, and give a cheaper and less powerful air option to practice with and populate the skys (1/2 off nosegun-only ESF).You don't have to ruin what so many people love in order to fix the situation.

I lol'd so hard at this.... it's not an "option", it's not a push button and fly backwards. It's a form of manipulating in game physics. If you drive down the road in your car at a high speed, pull the e-brake and swing the steering wheel what do you think will happen.... crash yes, but I bet you spin your car while keeping that forward inertia going till other factors overcome it. But.... if we just disabled the abli- nevermind I'm being facetious now.

What I think would help without ruining the game for Veterans (aka skyknights...).

Make afterburners not recharge if the nose gun is firing.

Sounds weird but hear me out. The biggest obstacle to noobs getting good is that they are shot down the *moment* they get into a dogfight. Sure they get shot down from G2A, but they have control over how exposed they are to that risk. With Dogfighting, once a noob sees a vet, he knows his time is up.

The mechanic literally let's people disengage and get away. Not in all circumstances, but if a noob is playing cautious in A2A the way they are with G2A this should allow them to stay alive longer and "get gud". Noobs have an increased chance to fly back to the warpgate safely. Someone chasing them down will eventually fall behind if they fire. For veterans that WANT to dogfight, the mechanic applies to both. It doesn't interfere with a good hoverfight.

Very subtle change in mechanics, but I think it could make a world of difference as it favors the defender rather than the aggressor.

I don't think this will help, I get so many kills from ppl running, even boosting away, Giving them a chance to fight back.... a gun seems as a better option imo. You suggestion wouldn't even change the ganking from rotary... but nor would a gun. I do know that them running from a fight will not help them improve their aim, leading, and mobility as most fly in a straight line (which as most have already admitted to, mobility is a big opportunity for them). Again no ace here.

Maybe the solution is simply to make it easier for players to get into aircraft, especially AvA, and slow down the advantage that AvA veterans have against AvA noobs as time spent in the pot seat increases. Thus, it takes longer to get enough skill with AvA to have the same current advantage in AvA.

Im curious... how would you suggest making it easier for noobs and not for vets? Keep in mind these are the same guys that don't have time to load up VR training just to work on mastering or much less understanding mobility.