The current state of ESF dogfights

Haha, that was funny. I don't use coyotes or tomcats to have 1v1 fun or whatever the "exclusive" air players wanna call it. I use them to destroy the enemy air unities and help my faction. I don't give a **** for PVP here, I wanna see my army advance, protecting my tanks and soldiers. See you guys fight for ego is really tiring, and watch you "exclusives" insist with the exclusive game is pathetic.

I would love to use tomcats AND coyotes instead of a nosegun, just to see the river of tears from the ego-players and the fun of teamplayers.

Sure, like I said some people value kills over fun. Right now you have to choose which you value more, but that's not very good game design.

Of course there's also the troll aspect. "I would love to use tomcats AND coyotes instead of a nosegun, just to see the river of tears from the ego-players and the fun of teamplayers." You see things like this pretty frequently. "All I want to do is ruin the game for others." Well we all have different motivations.

I admire how relaxed you answered to his post. True that, amen.

Fight isn't exactly beat, though it's not far off. Mostly what I'm referring to there is the idea that an ace can consistently destroy 3+ new pilots and fly away. Aces like that idea because it becomes a measuring stick for improved skill. But it kills any hope new players have of getting into the air game, quite literally.

For 4 to exist, noobs would need to have enough of a chance that Aces actually have to be playing well to win, and sometimes the noob wins anyway. What your thresholds are for 'consistently', 'reliably' and 'sometimes' are up to how angry you are, but the overall idea is that even the new players are going to get kills occasionally.

1) The Aces who are complaining about it make up nearly 0% of the playerbase.
2) The Aces who are complaining are very clear on their stance of "Default Nosegun + AB", which you'll notice results in $0 worth of weapon purchases. It's not pretty, but Higby needs to eat.
3) The Aces who are complaining are destructive to their own cause. As I noted above, and earlier in the thread, there are more than enough pilots who are willing to simply shut off the air game to newcomers either through actions in game or their forum/reddit feedback.

That being said, they might not be ignoring it. The most recent examples would probably be Tomcats and Harassers. Both were nerfed without a lot of Dev feedback on what was about to happen to them until changes started showing up on test.

As an ace (arguably anyway) who runs around with the nosegun + fuel pods I don't really think an ace should be able to beat 3+ pilots. After all getting into a 3v1 fight is poor situational awareness, and a good PS2 player should know how to pick his fights. So a pair of noobs with coyotes beating an ace, that's ok. Or maybe the pair has a 50/50 shot and it takes 3 reliable. Whatever, but one noob is not ok.

The aces complaining make up 0% of the playerbase. Well I doubt that. Plus maybe if it was more fun to get up to that ace level more players would stick with it.

And finally, aces spend no money. Here I call complete BS. I'm sure they're out there, but I've never seen an ace pilot without cosmetics. And once upon a time they all had rotaries and rocketpods. Although you can earn those with certs instead of money. Cosmetics, not so much.

Pilots make up a very small portion of the playerbase, and the Aces (as opposed to pilots like Teshrrar above who just want to see the world get locked-on) make up a small portion of those. But I agree it would be great if getting the practice in was doable for a greater portion of the players (both by being more enjoyable, and taking less than 6 months to get to 'ok, you aren't automatically dead' skill levels)

Kitting out your ESF is cert intensive to be sure, but I don't expect many of those Rocketpods were paid for with Smedbucks. Admittedly I'm just guessing that most pilots will have found their style and leave it at that, instead of slowly accumulating the full breadth of cosmetic options. I could be wrong, but either way it's compounded by the fact there are so very few of them.

OR HARDCORE WARPGATE CAMPING!!!
*I'm guilty of it too... but it's so fun! **for me...not them** *