Reverse maneuver nerf will ruin air combat!

you say it as if its actually hard to perform a reverse maneuver without cover. this is what i'm talking about. you pilots are so far in the mindset that piloting is the most skillful thing in the game ever. it's not that hard, and the reverse maneuver makes it even easier.

Those Mossies were somewhat terrible, they easily could have aimed at the Scythe in the moments he was vulnerable. The Reverse Maneuver is not really stupid, but it allows you to turn and face your opponent instead of being face-stomped because there is no other way to face the opponent quickly. Also, I think a lot of us know that Reverse Manuevers are not being removed but they are being made extremely foolish to use. There was no reason to warrant the nerf anyway, it is just one of those things that SOE decided to *fix* when it was not broken. Btw, name-calling just shows how biased you are. Think of one valid reason the Reverse Maneuver should be nerfed, then come talk on Forumside.

No, I didn't imply it was hard. I said if you jumped someone flying forwards and he turned to face you without taking cover you should've been collecting your free victory.

You're right that it will be at least some amount easier to collect your free win if the nerfs go live, but it is already a free win so what is the point. You deal a blow to what makes ps2's air combat unique, which is nothing but a good thing. Without the hover fighting this game's air combat would be trash, there is no energy, no flight model, nothing. It'd take a lot of work to change this games air into something standard, and then you would be left with just that. Another standard arcadey air system. The game shouldn't even try to step in that direction.

SOE should be embracing what they have, which is a unique and enjoyable air combat system. People like you who would see it ruined in the (false) hope it that would somehow improve your lot are like.. vandals.

the moments that the scythe was vulnerable were few and far between. when you use the terrain like he did its incredibly difficult to get a clear shot off on something like that. think of one valid reason why reverse maneuvers should be nerfed? have you even read any of my past posts? ESF pilots are harder to talk to than christians.

I wonder how many pilots have actually gone on to the test server and seen how bad the change really is.

Naaaa... I love hover spam.










And my Stryker does as well

This is what the video looks like to me, having embarrasing amounts of experience flying esf:

0:05 flying low over tr zurvan while focusing attention on a skeeter.. flying low over an unfriendly zurvan is always dangerous because there is no quick exit / no covered exit from the immediate area, and the enemy esf all get a nice view down onto you. The place makes me uneasy.

0:11 2nd mosquito only landed a few shots in his first burst, probably no need to be worried

0:14 scythe pilot exposes his fat side to the mosquito who shot him at 0:11.. takes no damage at all. The mosquito might still know how to fly, maybe he just has really bad aim.

0:17 full view of the area the 2nd mosquito would be in if he had adopted a proper hovering position to fight head on as he saw the scythe pilot turning instead of running. He's not there of course. There's now no doubt this 2nd mosquito is probably so bad he doesn't even know about the decelerate button.

0:30 scythe pilot has finished a loop through the amp station inner ring cover, this is usually quite effective against new pilots who are too busy trying not to hit the ground and wrestling with their controls to be thinking about how to intercept someone who's gone behind cover, or looking at their minimaps.

0:36 scythe has made it out of the zurvan pit northwards thanks to the deception, over the familiar cliffs which I don't actually have a name for, without taking damage. 2nd skeeter is still audible and on minimap. If he breaks los by sharply pitching down to go behind the cliff in the 2nd mosquito's view he can use that time to get safely behind the next jutting part of the cliff, under the bridge, and have plenty of time to get into hover mode, pop up, then probably effortlessly rocket the clueless 2nd mosquito in the face as he flies directly towards him providing a perfect target. BUT

0:38 scythe has flown directly into the open and turned to expose his fat side to the 2nd mosquito.. again. This is terrible for if he wants to get away, and if he wants to kill the mosquito. Takes almost no hits because the 2nd mosquito sucks at aiming.. again.

0:41 scythe is in an absolutely perfect position to transition to hover while putting the bridge between him and the 2nd mosquito. Doesn't do it, I'm now thinking he doesn't even want to kill the mosquito.

0:51 flies way out into the open with the 2nd mosquito in shooting range of him. It's fine because the guy cannot aim at all and he can continue all the way to the warpgate with minor dodging. Scythe turns around instead because he wants to play with the mosquito some more or something.

It just goes on and on.

So im going to break this down on why this is a mid level example of flying and the opponents you were facing are far below par as pilots.

at 20 seconds you made yourself a stationary target to turn around after receiving fire that fact that half your health wasn't taken out is because of the poor aim of the mossy pilot.

at 47 seconds the mossy that was tailing you flew past you as if you didn't exist showing his lack of skill and awareness

53 second you were open air flying all it would have taken was a mossy to brake hard hover and pivot to kill you. Instead they think their jets or something so they flew right past in endless circles.

1:15-1:20 all you were doing was flying in circles causing them to do the same by then you had attracted two more tails rather than the original 1. The fact they didn't brake pivot hover and kill you on the spot for doing so is attributed for their lack of skill.

2:15 - 2:40 you began open air flying in straight line also might I add show how little skill your opponents had at aiming in the first place. Also the trio was distracted by the parked reaver you flew over and stopped to kill it before chasing you again... Which is seen in multiple flashes of your video. The fact they did that is your cue that they probably aren't that good so they have to scrounge for those kinds of points.

Finally you made it back to warpgate after 3 painful minutes of doing nothing constructive... FYI after your turn around the amp station at 20 seconds you had already shaken the guy on your tail and could have made it back to warpgate by the time 50 seconds hit.

There was nothing special in this video apart from people that cant seem to hit what their aiming at which is a different kind of special entirely.

Furthermore if you think that the afterburner changes will cause flying to turn into jet craft it doesn't effect hovering and pivoting on the spot so an ace would still just calmly brake lead you in your circle appropriately and your lil flying circus would have been ended appropriately at 20 seconds where it should have been.

Sure thing. Using topography, ACTUAL aerial manuevers, and positioning yourself on an enemies 6 is EXACTLY what a noob move is. This is why every single air force since the invention of airplanes used this. Why can't those silly morons realize they can just manipulate VOTAL engines on AV8's and use an exploit to gain over 10000 lbs of thrust in less than one second and pull of some ******** noob move to spam over and over again in combat to compensate for a very large lack in actual skill in aerial warfare.

/entirely sarcasm

It's not a manuever, it's an exploit. Laws of physics themselves would not allow it. If you want to play like this, go play some bubble bubble kids flying game where there are no rules and you can do whatever you want. Exploits should be fixed. ****** pilots should have their loopholes taken away and shoved back into a raw cockpit each time they try to cheat.

Well considering irl reverse thrust in even the most nimble of helicopters is 100% unstable and useless, and impossible to do in VTOL aircraft. I literally never have nor ever will use reverse thrust for anything other than pinpoint turnarounds. In noob terms, you are pulling up on the stick pulling your nose skyward, while applying "ascend", or thrust, to exploit ludicrous speeds while ruddering (side to side) your craft around. Since "air" doesn't exist in this game, nothing stops you from doing this. When in real life...picture doing it in a boat. You have to push water out of the way. Same thing in real life with air. You just don't see it happen. IRL the air stops this exploit from happening without making you crash.

I hate saying this over and over, but the reason you guys are doing it is because to turn your plane around when you just kept holding S and spinning mouse. None of you have joysticks to do quick turns, and none of you know things like the split-s or the negative g turn around I just mentioned. This is why the reverse thrust exploit is used so much. Before this in BETA you morons just did flat turns in the sky over and over. When you guys decided to try the turn around's

For future reference, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_S this is the fastest way to turn your aircraft 180 while leaving the least amount of surface area available to incoming fire. You can do bonus points in this game and spin your wing facing the enemy for even less also. (Also an exploit, irl you wold go into a flat spin. Albeit a much smaller one that hardly anyone knows enough about maneuvers to figure out)

I'm interested to see how you feel about the nerf. You are close to one of the very rare few who seems to have been into flight sims. It's just a tad ridiculous is it not? I don't care about how "important" people are saying it is. I never used it, because in real life you would just immediately go into a flat spin and crash. It's an exploit, not a "maneuver".

We need spins/stalls in this game that aren't caused by mid-air collisions...

Another problem is the ESFs can slow down and stop mid-air too effectively, many real-life air combat tactics are useless because they rely on enemy planes to overshoot, whereas in this game there's a near-total lack of inertia which lets you just stop with your opponent and leads to hoverfights

I think the game is so far from realistic that it is best for it to not even try to be realistic, because it would suck really hard at pretending to be a flight sim. The ridiculous esf wrestling is something you can't get in a game with 'normal flight', so I think nerfing the reverse is a blow to the only thing the air in this game has going for it.

Just off the top of my head, when you are flying forwards in this game the flight model consists of some arbitrary numbers for pitch roll and yaw rates which stay the same at every speed, and another set of numbers for top speeds. The top speeds are adjusted slightly if you dive or climb. You accelerate to the top speed in a few seconds then just get stuck there because that is the top speed.. There's literally nothing to the flight model at all, it would be a disaster if it weren't for the interesting things which happen in hover mode. There's no gravity while flying forwards, no potential energy, none of the million effects arising from air existing (the ESF don't even look flight worthy), just nothing at all.

Weirdly that's what I liked. If I wanted some "Special interesting abliity" I would play one of the countless magic games out there with magical mounts. I want a cut and dry airplane with cut and dry mechanics. Having to do dodgy manuevers that superceed reality by 10x is just silly to me. If we are going to do that, why not just have planes that have infinite speed and can do immediate turn arounds? It's the same concept?

Tom Clancy did it in HAWKS. How popular is that game? Why? Because it was not an exploit. People aren't defending the fact they want to do a 10000 lb thrust backwards flipping manuever. They are pissed because they are losing one of the only few moves they know to avoid fire. It's an exploit.

I bet you are the guy i'm looking for in terms of understanding. For the lack of inertia: Exactly, that is another problem I noticed. It's real hard to remember the fact at any moment someone can just come to a dead halt and hover (You can use this to your advantage. I do wide circles until I see the plane stop moving on radar than dive while afterburning away to get too far away for them to catch due to their null airspeed) However, this does not bother me because it's a mechanic in the game that I feel can be equated to lore and the "futuristic" aspect of flight post space travel. Similar to having to accept afterburners are a recharging power supply, not a draining one like fuel. I feel this reverse thrust exploit though is not one of those concepts. It's not an intended power boost for these "super l33t" mouse flyers to find.

I get why they feel that way though. In almost all games there is a brink you can push, and when you hit it it's normally equated to "skill". Such as how you die repeadtedly on Red Orchestra until you master the ability to cover and run at the same time. But this exploit was an accident in balancing when combining thrust along a horizontal plane rather than a vertical. It was not intended by the devs. Which is the main reason they are patching it and my main argument here. The only reason it got so large is because this particular exploit was easy to spot an enemy doing to you, so others picked up on it fairly quickly.

The fact that so many people think that the reverse maneuver nerf will kill air combat shows that it is too powerful right now. No one tactic should be so effective at determining success.

lets just pretend, for the sake of your bad argument, that the scythe pilot is actually bad at flying, and that the mossies following him are inbred mongrels that can't even put on their shirts correctly in the morning (as you want to make them out to be). had it been a "good" pilot following the scythe, the good pilot would have shot him down, no? then if they scythe pilot was in fact being a bad pilot then that just indicated that the pilot who shot him down outplayed him.

but that is not what happened. the scythe, while making himself "A COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY OPEN TARGET THAT ANY SCRUB WITH A ROCK COULD HAVE HIT" was able to make it back to his warpgate, almost dying a few times in the process. this whole process is in fact based on player skill, and it rewards the player who is able to get on the tail of the the other esf. and guess what, if you get somebody on your tail, IT'S YOUR FAULT, and you either should have done one of two things. 1. had a wingman, or 2. not let the esf get behind you in the first place, and work on getting back into friendly territory, or trying to get behind the other esf using terrain to your advantage. seriously, when will pilots learn that an ESF getting behind them is their fault and THEY are the one who should suffer the consequences.

I've sucessfully won 3v1s many times before (heck, once a 4v1) - and that includes destroying the enemies not flailing about like a spastic like the guy in the video is. Sure, its a nice demonstration of basic flying control - but it is an even better example of terrrrible combat decision-making. The only reason he got out of that with his skin intact (and not even close to killing any of them mind you) is because the mossies in the area were obviously complete newbies. Any half-competent pilot would cut his speed and watch the spectacle while wondering "what in the world is this **** doing?" before proceeding to shoot him down from a hover position. The fairly obvious key here is - you don't need to play "follow the leader" like a jetfighter because your craft is a VTOL hovercraft. Ignore that fact to your own demise.

If you think you know how the air-to-air mechanics should work in this game then prove you aren't just full of hot air and provide your player stats to show that you have actual experience with the topic to have an informed opinion in the first place. I tried searching for your name but I didn't find anyone above BR14, and surely that can't be you, so why don't you provide a link so we can first establish that there is a base of experience about the airgame to draw upon here. My stats are on this forumname - I have no reason to hide.

EDIT: Your supporter AtomWashington at least is easy to find. And heey - whatdoyouknow - a total scrub. What a surprise. A pitiful amount of airtime not even enough to know the basics of flying much less the advanced stuff, all but 7% of his kills are from lolpodding infantry. Has he ever even shot down an enemy fighter? With a whopping 11 kills on his nosegun I wouldn't bet on it. Why don't you show that noob what the stats of an actual experienced pilot with an informed opinion looks like - and post your own...

-Stigma

and what did my OP say? it said that "this is what dogfighting should look like". of course a hover spam idiot could easily take out an actual pilot trying to use evasive maneuvers, it's just so easy do do anything in hover mode. i wouldnt call this a VTOL, i would call it a helicopter at this point.

another one of you elitists who thinks that people with a lower BR then them has no say in any matter whatsoever. get over yourself. and for the record, you are barely a higher BR than me.

once again, you don't have to have an exuberant amount of air time in order to have an opinion on the changes. whether or not he has done incredible amounts of killing, he still gets the concept, and understands the changes. who knows, maybe he could get more kills if it wasn't for aircraft flying BACKWARDS at full speed.