Official word on air gameplay?

Hi there could a dev respond or someone put a link to any dev's text/video responce to the air gameplay question?

In short:

- New players can't survive long enough to learn and progress.

- Elitist players farm for the sake of farm and their actions don't support the combined arms gameplay PS2 is supposed to shine at.

- 'Easy mode' weapons (i.e. tomcats, coyotes) allow A2A farmers farm new players even easier now (especially that they are behind a cert/sc pay-wall thus new pilots can't afford it)


So, what's the official word on the airgame? Is SOE happy about it? Can we expect to see some dramatic changes in the mechanics or there is no hope?

Personally, I would advise dropping lock-ons and balance the air game for dogfights not hoverfights by making afterburner aways push you forward, rather than allow for reverse manouver, and remove airbreak. However, I would be happy with any strong change that shifts the airgame into more team-oriented combined-arms approach.

I still have no idea why are a2a lockons such a big deal. I am a bad pilot. I tried them and I was just as effective with them as with noseguns, meaning I couldnt kill jacksh*t with them. To me it makes no difference when an "ace pilot" kills me with an a2a, because I know he/she could've killed me with any of the noseguns too. The end result is the same (on a sidenote: I can count on one hand the number of times Ive been killed with a lockon a2a or coyotes). Ill just stick with a2g layouts with flares and enjoy ground combat as long as a2a esfs dont show up.

Sure, A2A missiles allow farmers to farm new players. But these pilots would do just as well with Noseguns against the scrubs.

The A2A missiles however gives the newbies a fighting chance.

The onllyy ones who complain about lockons are the "1v1 me!" skyknights, and nobody takes their opinions seriously either.

There is no problem. It's just angry "Pro"" players who are mad because they can't farm everyone anymore.

None of those changes would fix any of the problems you've mentioned.

F2P players will always be disadvantaged to some degree by not buying into the game, there are very few successful F2P games that offer paid for components that don't advantage the paying player in some form or another. In PS2 the balance isn't bad, it's not perfect but there are many examples of games that skew the balance off for paying members by a much larger margin.

I get wrecked by good pilots routinely and the mossy is my most used vehicle(193 hours), but that's not the game's fault..

As I said many times, we need a common virtual reality designed to practice dogfighting.

There's just two airgames available at the moment: Hover fighting and reverse maneuvering. Both are based on bugs and rather strange game mechanics.
If you try to do chases across terrain, shake enemies by flying through confined spaces, or generally try to give them the slip by suddenly braking and banking you will simply be shot down. There is too little advantage to gain, in many of these situations you even gain a disadvantage allowing your enemy either free shots or to gain on you.

This makes the air-game inaccessible to anyone who never got taught the weird physics of the game, and makes the air game... less exciting. At least for me

FYI, there are ESF players who fly together in "Gank Squads" and farm other ESF players. They focus on using superior numbers and surprise to defeat usually singleton ESF opponents. They tend to stay away from enemy zergs or heavy AA. Some of these Gank Squads have good players, but many have medium or low skilled players (the lower the skill, the more players they'll want to offset this). The medium and low skilled players often use A2A Tomcats, because when Tomcats are used in mass it's an effective way to handle ESF Pilots who turn out to be Aces: while the Ace engages one, the others hang back and use A2AM on the Ace. A2AM are also very good for Scythe (which are slow) to deal with faster Reavers or Mosquitos that run.

I am personally fine with A2AM and Coyotes. But I wanted to point out that Tomcats tend to be more effective for lower skilled pilots when they fly in groups and use them together with surprise on singleton targets.

couldn't have said it better

i wish i could name my A2A lockons "Anti-Skyknight Crossbow" like with nametags in TF2

the real reason why skyknights hate air lockons is because they would have to equip flares instead of Fire Supression, stealth coupled with Fire Supression and an A2A nosegun is juts as cheesy as A2A Lockons, and you even have a free secondary weapon slot to use for rocketpodding or whatever

Air-to-air is the only field where devs have made literally no statement, ever. I think they only mentioned it once, when they said they wanted to make it more accessible, and promptly released Coyote missiles which have way too high of a price tag to be a "newbie weapon" (although they do help remove the "lolpods+nosegun = anti-everything if you are good" meta, which I appreciate).

Seriously. Right now A2A is a whackamole of weapons with no real role, skygod rule, lack of cohesion and thus gank squad predominance. It really needs to be thought out better, just saying "yeah we'll make newbie weapons for 1000 certs lol" is not enough.

Okay....? What does that have to do with anything? Its like saying that a squad of 5 fully certed HAs will defeat a single very skilled infiltrator, or 5 very skilled infiltrator will defeat a low-skilled HA.

These "Gank squads" could be armed with spitballs and still defeat a single ESF due to the superior numbers, so again, I dont see how is that a pro or contra against a2a lockons.

You're right. Lockons scale perfectly even in groups of 20-30 ESF gank squads. Play on Connery sometime.

You don't need to buy a damn thing with money though.

Cert requirement for the weapon itself is a fraction of the total cert requirement that you CAN'T buy to have a fully fleshed ESF...

So no, ESF's are NOT P2W.

You can Pay to save 1k of 5-8k certs of investment.

Additionally, with proper skill, fully certed AB pods are actually a great option.


Finally, n00bs biggest problem in the air is attempting to learn it on their own.

Form air swarms. There's POWER in numbers. Go figure

Get 8-10 guys together with Hornets and I DGAF how good ACE's are, they're going to get smoked unless they come at your 10 man swarm with at least 5 Aces and even then it's a tossup. Air is actually harder for Ace's to face overwhelming numbers than infantry for example where a REALLY tight and coordinated squad can hold a point against 48

If you're a true "Newbie" you don't belong in the air.

Period.

The cert investment REQUIRED to have a capable ESF is simply too high.

Same goes for tanks!

Sure, you can pull your ESF or Tank and get some practice learning the ropes... but you're going to get stomped. That's just a fact.

You HAVE to put in your time with boots on the ground. And guess what? EVERY SINGLE PLAYER GOES THROUGH THIS.

When you start out in PS2, you start out boots on the ground, flesh out an infantry class since they have the lowest cert requirements to turn into effective cert generating roles before you can invest the far greater costing vehicles.

I'd be MORE concerned with the state of balance in the game if any random BR1 could hop in an ESF and expect to win.

Did you actually mean to say Hornets? Because... I'm not sure about that.

derp, I meant Tomcats

air-game is just fine.

Terrible physics working as intended?

Actually.... yes. They are.

the main issues with the air game is the games own inability to convey any of its required combat maneuvers in any meaningful manner if at all to new players, leaving many of them scratching their heads and walking away from the air game because they dont know or care to learn the "secret handshakes".

game needed a built in flight tutorial ages ago to give new players the basics, new players should not be resorting to YouTube to learn the most unintuitive and required of the air games combat maneuvers such as the RM.

To be clear, what I mean is that THey know it's not realistic at all...

and when the RM was discovered (it was unintentional) they decided it was a good mechanic and intentionally left the game to keep it.