Upcoming adjustments to Air vs Ground balance

I act

I actually feel very strongly about this issue.
I think it deserves its own thread, but I'll mention it here:

Kills should still be given to the player that last hit an aircraft before the pilot jumps out to his death.
Pilots that suicide last minute before getting taken out are really a nuisance. I had a really good run with my roommate using A2A missiles and when they get that second lock-on they often just dive bomb their plane into the ground or jump to their doom. It's so frustrating, it must happen about 50% of the time, if not more.

I've tried to make an emergency crash landing to repair and killed myself due to moving too fast. I feel that the person responsible for me needing to crash land should get the xp for my death. I'm also guilty of jumping out last minute, but with light assault, so that I can do that very thing. If you roll LA in an aircraft then you are sacrificing the ability to land and repair quickly after an encounter and shouldn't be penalized.

Okay, so now you have the AA launcher that got a "buff" so that now the damage to air is the same and the damage to everything else is reduced by infinity. Oh yeah, and lock-on time.

Oh look, the decimator, what a surprise.

Okay, so I guess the AA launcher is now a deterrent only to high flying ESF. So, miserable xp aside, if you want to be at all effective against ESF from the ground as HA then you have to do the following: have the AA launcher and the decimator.

Basically, you need the AA launcher for high flying ESF and the decimator for low flying ESF... problem is, the difference between a high flying ESF and a low flying ESF is about 3 seconds. Thats faster than you can resupply into a different loadout even if you are standing right in front of a terminal.

As AA HA you see high flying ESF and start to acquire lock- ESF drops flare, swoops in low and kills you and everyone near your.

So you respawn with your decimator to get revenge on the lowing flying ESF who then flies away laughing at you.

To me the main issue is still that they made terrible basic changes to the expressed functionality of an item that many people already spent REAL money to unlock. What makes this worse is that many people unlocked this item in an attempt to correct an air-to-ground imbalance within the existing game mechanics. Of course, even this was not enough to correct the balance but how do they reward those who were responding correctly to the imbalance? They screw them out of their money with no response.

What is the point of opening a forum thread on proposed changes if you do not plan on responding to anything that clients post? Honestly, it just makes for a harder slap in the face. Lets count the slaps.

Slap 1- SOE: "AA is getting a buff"
Slap 2- SOE: "The product you purchased because we described it as doing BOTH X and Y now only does X"
Slap 3- SOE: "We want your feedback on these changes but we will not respond to that feedback"
Slap 4- SOE: "Buy our NEW rocket launcher, we promise it will make up for the ones we have made worthless"
Slap TBA- SOE: "Oh, there is no way this NEW rocket launcher will not also be worthless next week when we release our NEW NEW launcher"

Terrible business practices = never again a paying customer.

Planetside 2 broken and cheating it's paying customers in under a month- is that a new record?

You do realize they pulled the lock-on requirement out of the patch, right?

Either give Vanu a MASSIVE damage reduction to their weapons or give them bullet drop. Not doing one or the other proves developer bias towards the faction and makes the entire game, in the mind of any decent person, trash.

TR CARV and TRAC-5 are sniper rifle accurate with no recoil and high damage. Nerf them, they ruin the game.

NC weapons need either a 25% increase in damage per shot or a 25% reduction ACROSS THE BOARD in recoil. It is absolutely ridiculous. Out of this world, "WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND THOUGHT THIS WAS OK" ridiculous. What, did Buzzcut pay you guys off or something to keep NC nerfed? This is a sham beyond anything I have ever experienced in a game before. Beyond any imbalance in any game EVER RELEASED.

People who have done what I have done (start characters on every faction) all say the same thing: playing on NC right now is like accepting a MASSIVE handicap to your game play experience.


I know this post falls on deaf/incompetent ears, but just thought someone with some actual FPS experience outside of this gameworld should offer an opinion.

We have damage loss over distance instead of bullet drop. It's probably a little more annoying to deal with.

Fighter rocket pods shouldn't have reloads at all. How do you reload those things while flying at 100 + KPH? If you do this, you don't even have to nerf damage or other features in the first place. Fighters are then used for hit and run or supporting gunships and dropships, as fighters are meant to do.

SG FLAK deals no damage sometimes. I even managed to get a full clip into a hovering lib infront of me and only every few shots i got a hit confirmation. This is not fun. When you actully do damage it still seems a little low but at least with the new speed it is workable.

Why is this discussion limited to aircraft? Taking down a tank or moving sunderer is also usually a team effort. And it's even easier for drivers and gunners to bail out of those vehicles. I'd say when I lose a magrider I die with it about 10% of the time. So either we need to come up with a complicated and fair xp distribution for all vehicle kills, or just assume the kills and assists will even out for everyone over time.

Then I thankfully retract all my previous bickering and will gratefully continue supporting the game and it's developers.

As I said before, I only had issue with purchasing an item that would soon become a very different item.

I know it is difficult to accept when an idea you have put forward is not good and make a retraction. As a show of good faith I will gladly pitch in another $10 as a thanks for listening to customers and not going forward with bad business.

Also, thank you Flarestar for pointing this out- I have not had an opporunity to play today and did not see any previous posts pointing out they had abandoned this terrible idea.

For the PR of PS2- you may want to think about publicizing your change of heart a little better.

As of now the lock on range for g2a rockets is 500 meters and stays locked on up to 600 meters.

As someone who plays AA to support my team, I would like to point out that your reward system for deterrents isn't equivocal to other elements of the game. IMO it needs some kind of a boost. I roughly enjoy 1/3 of the XP running AA than running as infantry.

did they just stealth nerf the vanu nemesis launcher?

the drop rate is much more than before. i only bought it because i recall reading somewhere that it had the fastest rocket speed = most accuracy. and i don't see anything about this drop rate change in the patch notes.

GG NC.

this game is borderline two faction now.

AA is still terrible.

Right now infantry is only viable inside of a biolab. Every where else it is useless and only serves to give pilots Certs and XP.


Liberators need some QOL downgrades.

1) The Zepher should do almost no AV damage.
2) The Dalton should do almost no AI damage.

I don't have a problem with the Zepher doing great against infantry, but it is much too good against armored vehicles for its infantry farming ability
Similarly the Dalton does great AV damage and can still one shot infantry, on an indirect hit even.

That and a solid 25% HP nerf would but the liberator in a much less overpowered state.


ESF QOL Downgrades:
No more firing while secondary weapon is reloading

Never see a scythe? Doubt it. We see NC vehicles all the time. I think it's just the NC, since they have the largest number of idiots. No offense.

The **** I hear frm NC soldiers... it's like, "how can you be so stupid and know how to install the game?"

I think people have still lost sight of the larger issue surrounding vehicles in the game, aquisition. I think its too easy and casual to just grab any vehicle you want and aslong as you last more than a minute with it you can easily rotate to the next one without worrying about resource cost. The real issue at hand isnt the counter to mass armor/air but the frequency of mass armor/air. Having a mass of vehicles in PS1 was a coordinated effort most of the time now in PS2 it just happens without any thought.

Because that's a realistic weakness of tanks and turrets: their lack of mobility. They make up for it with more firepower. Rocket pods do not compare to tank and turret shells for armor killing anymore.

I'm pretty sure the TTK for tank v tank is higher than that for ESF v tank.

I think it depends on secondary turret, AP primary turret and range of the fight. Obviously, close range fights where one of the sides has high damage potential and the other doesn't have shields are going to be faster than a ESF can unload the volleys necessary to take out a tank by the back.

The reality of air power against ground based air defense is simple. The only way for air to succeed is to remove the ground AA ability of the enemy without being detected.

If a person lived in the REAL world with any of the G2A/A2G discussions, people would realize that these aircraft are beyond the capabilities of any respectable arms manufacturer to counter (since we're playing with seemingly pre WWII flack rounds that have a 2 meter radius of effect).

IMO, the designs of the PS1 MAX and Skyguard weapons did not stop aircraft battles at any point, but were 20 times the deterrent to any moron sitting still. Fast hit-and-run attacks are the world of aircraft, and air camping could be fended off by many weapons.

I would like to see the large clip lock-on variants come back from the Starfire and Sparrow weapons, and the lock-down to double the fire rate of the TR max (that hail of fire was impossible to fly through). These were good designs, and I still think the Devs are changing things JUST to make them different. It's still Planetside no matter what you think you've changed, and there were aspects of the original that I think should have been reused.

I don't know why they didn't think these were useful. The funniest thing to watch was someone run from those missiles by climbing to max altitude. It doesn't work in the real world, why should it here?