Lockons make for boring gameplay

Think whatever you'd like. You're wrong anyway.

link to the patch notes? I guess i must've missed them...

Moin

I guess everybody has a different approach on the game. I think that you SHOULD get farmed as infantry if you don't have armor/aircrafts to support you. This should be the role of vehicles in my opinion: crush the enemy armor line and suppress infantry so friendly infantry can advance and take the objectives. That's also my understanding of "combined arms".

Grüße,
regards,
the Toast

I appreciate your honesty, and I don't completely disagree with you. That type of battle is great fun, I just can't always find it.

Agreed. The amount of players here wanting the 1-click, everything should die before me is appalling. Teamwork is key to everything, as is using your equipment to maximum effect. ALL FACTIONS HAVE ACCESS TO LOCK-ONS. Use them as a team, wonders can happen. The majority of the whining about lock-ons is ridiculous. If someone doesn't think TR pilots and tankers don't have to worry about getting locked onto constantly either, you're horribly naïve.

What makes the combat boring is the extremely overpowered AIR units in PS2 - that's why they have things like Strikers, to attempt to even the playing field.

Air should be a fast hit and run option, not a sit there and spam fest.

You PS2 pilots just don't get it - you ruin the gameplay for the majority of the players, and then complain when you can't farm like you want to.

I would be happy if they simply removed all air except gals, then we would see much more fun ground battles. In PS1 air pilots had to have extreme skill just to stay alive, they never once complained about their weakness to ground forces.

Simple solution to all the pilots complaining is to remove all offensive air - that will do more to make the battles less barren than any changes to anti-air.

With this post you have forced me to re-evaluate what I have been pin-pointing as the problem. The problem is not necessarily lock-ons, more the disproportionate scaling of certain weapons and vehicles in combat.

I'm sure many of us have had a small scale skirmish ruined by some fly boy coming over and lol podding everything in sight. Here the ESF scales disproportionately to the size of the conflict and is full on beast mode while infantry and nothing but fodder. Lockons become a necessity just for survival. Killing the pilot may not even be possible but just to get some enjoyment out of infantry combat on a small scale you need to drive of that pilot so you can get back to having fun.

And then we get to the large scale battles where everyone comes together and there are planes zipping around the air and tanks all over the place with swarms of infantry taking vantage points where they can and the scaling of the lockon usage is disproportional and all empowering. The scales tip heavily in the balance of the infantry players.

I am beginning to see why the whole relationship between air, armour and infantry is so infuriatingly difficult to find a nice balance with. A small scale battle will be ruined by one pilot and a large scale battle will lose a lot of its flavour and nuances when the lockon users come together en masse.

Planetside 2 is hard to balance! Now I'm out of ideas

Right, I said it's effective, not fun. We would be stupid not to use our most effective weapon, whether or not it is fun. Just like everyone would have been stupid not to have used the pre nerf annihilator when it was released.

The reason lock-ons aren't fun is the same reason why they are so effective: they require very little control from the player once the lock-on is obtained. People just fire and forget, knowing that once a lock-on rocket is away, it will hit the target most of the time irrespective of what the rocketeer is doing afterwards. While an automatically homing missile is exponentially more accurate than a fly-by-wire or dumbfire one, making it more effective, it also removes all player agency from the shot, making them not fun to use.

I'll have to disagree with you on that one. Combined arms and epic scale are what makes the game what it is. Reduce the vehicles to a sideshow and all you have is Tribes on a big map without the skiing, skill, speed or flags.

I wasn't actually serious, I was just making a ridiculous statement to emphasize your original ridiculous statement. With all the tank and aircraft spam lock-ons are really the ONLY way infantry have to stand their ground against the zerg. Oh, and speaking of the zerg, if we got rid of all tanks and aircraft except for sundies and gals it would stop the zerging.

The whole idea of a weapon which locks on in fps game is mind boggling for me. To me it's all about being better than your opponent and making the hard shots, that is what makes shooters fun to play.

Hey OP get that many vanu heavies using lancers if you want to see hilarious. Flares won't even save you.

Unfortunately, it's the cards we (TR specifically) were dealt by the Devs.

I can tell you that I would have preferred we had been giving something more unique than 'Aim, wait, fire'. But that's not what happened. We're just using what we were given.

Also change the striker into a guide by wire missile launcher imo. SOE get really lazy when designing ES weapons. TR getting screwed by "MOAR BULLETS" design really sucks.

When VS get an AV sniper rifle and NC get TV missiles TR get an annihilator on steroids.

But don't feel too bad once they sufficiently nerf lockons into uselessness most NC and VS will only have wasted 1000 certs, and most TR will have wasted 2000 since the annihilator was bought by most anyways.

Whats funny is that if the striker didn't exist, lockons probably wouldn't even be getting nerfed. Thats the only lockon I see people really raging about.

Maybe TR infiltrators should be able to cert in a SOFLAM for strikers.

That's BS and you know it.

I'll be engaged against an enemy ESF, only to have enemy infantry use their lock-on AA rpgs against me. To claim that we pilots would be left alone if we only fought enemy pilots is a blatant lie and you know it.

I've been on the receiving end of it. The noise is phenomenal. The effects are devastating. There are organised Lancer hit squads on Cobalt. They don't appear too often but when they do it's game over man, game over. Pretty much every single ESRL en masse is brutal to fight against.

It's a problem that is hard to fix, don't give infantry good AA and Air will farm them as suddenly an entire group of squishy targets have become defenseless, more people will start flying to just purely farm kills and the cycle will start again as AA for infantry is buffed again, Air pilots complain that their honorable 1v1 air duels get interupted etc etc.

A bad side of this is BF3 were Infantry AA got stuck in the worthless mode and due to the lack of AA vehicles or emplacements on many maps air has a relativly easy time farming the infantry as long as there is no equally skilled or better player on the opposing team (and this happens often)

The big problem being in BF3 is that air combat is very skill based, don't know how to fly then expect to lose, repeatedly, for a long time.
This wouldn't be bad if you could guarantee equally skilled pilots on both sides most of the time, but you can't, resulting in a great many horribly balanced matches because the game is balanced around skill that doesn't even exist (instert people being inspired to get better, inset counter that it will get people to just leave the game)

The only way everyone can get their way (infantry not being farmed by people in solo vehicles and Air not constantly being shot down by lock ons) is if we removed the Air to Ground capabilities of ESF, ESF can do their air-support by taking out enemy Liberators and galaxies and infantry won't need cheap and easy to use AA against fast strike craft anymore.
This way Infantry won't need to learn to fly (often against their wishes) just so they can counter the A2G menace and the lack of skill in flying on one or the other side won't be the sole deciding factor if you'd remove G2A lock-ons.

Will this ever happen? Of course not, because it would be dreadfully flat as game play for the ESF pilots.


Lock on launchers are the necessary evil needed to justify giving ESF A2G capabilities, when the A2A and A2G roles get better separated (see the coming changes to ESFs) and the Lock on launchers finally get their mechanics reworked we can see were we can go, but I know that Lock on Launchers will never be removed as long as ESF have any option to shoot infantry because as long as ESF can interact with infantry there should be nothing to force people to learn how to fly against their will.

Because if people have to play X way because it's the only way to win you will quickly notice the ammount of people playing dropping, and at that point why not just make a 1v1 or a 12v12 skill based game instead?

I still think that if ESFs lost their ability to hover, then the balance would make it easier for infantry to surrender their lock-ons, but that idea wasn't very popular here in the forums among the dog fighting pilots.


You're right though when you say that finding balance is infuriatingly difficult. I always laugh when players make statements here in the forums that make it sound like the devs have some kind of "balance" switch that they're just refusing to throw.