Please, friends of sky and ground, understand this: (sorry about the rather long post!) AAing barely has any sort of reward AT ALL. This is the problem. You see, the idea that AA is to be a deterent more than the killer, and that the "true killer" of the sky should be the ESF's, this is not a bad thing! It makes air units a viable option, while maintaining ground-based AA's usefulness in providing their friends with cover, driving off fighters and liberators that get too close, and destroying those foolish enough to remain for any real amount of time. To make this work though, there needs to be some sort of reward in performing this task. It can be very enjoyable to go AA, and it's often highly beneficial to the rest of the team, but when you look at your friends cert gain at the end of the day and recognize just how extremely much more even the least skilled of the other players have gained compared to you, it's easy to get demotivated and not really feel like going AA the next time, because heck you want some of those tasty upgrades too! I want to say, and I'm sorry, but I don't have the perfect solution for this problem. I can say a few things for certain, things cannot stay the way they are, and SOE cannot simply buff AA in such a way that they can gain a reasonable amount of certs from kills, because that'll leave the air units where we saw them in the BETA, practically useless and barely fielded at all. They say that the ESF is to be the main anti-air unit of any empire. Fair enough, if this was so we wouldn't need AA so problem solved really. It doesn't seem very common for your average ESF pilot to go with A2A missiles or anything like that, oh no. Why? Because we can put the rocketpods on, and they are effective fighting infantry, tanks, liberators and galaxies. For some reason this unit has an "eats all" weapon, and it does so very effectively. With only a little skill, you can put those things to use on pretty much anything the enemy can bring to the table, enemy ESF's being the exception. There is a heck of a lot of certs in using the pods, and its not even that hard to take out a Skyguard or AA MAX with them. Considering 90% of all pilots have flares the only real threat to your health is another ESF's main gun, as A2A and G2A rockets are practically useless against most targets and you still need 2 or even 3 rockets to kill anyway; even the least skilled of ESF pilots are capable of dodging those and getting back to a safe area for repairs! If the ESF is to be the main AA unit, the game needs to encourage this. If the ground-based AA is to still remain in the game in it's current form, it MUST become a lot more rewarding. These weapons are so specialized that they ONLY perform a single task in a way that can be considered even remotely useful, yet they are barely capable of scraping together a meager reward under the best of conditions. Please, tell me why I'm wrong, or alternatively why I'm right and what can be done to fix this issue!
No reward eh? I could swear all of my ESF kills as a burster MAX were enough of a reward itself - completely ignoring the concept of teamwork and roles. Try playing Galaxy pilot - Now there's some lack of certs right there.
Just because having your leg crushed by rocks is more painful than having your finger cut off, doesn't mean the finger thing doesn't hurt! That AA cert-gain is fine because Galaxy pilots get less is a silly argument to make. At no point do I claim that Galaxy pilots are fairly rewarded for their task, because I don't know! I don't fly a Galaxy. I DO fly ESF's however, and I do use AA MAXes and the HA's G2A rockets. I wouldn't speak of something where I didn't have some personal experience to go on. If you consider Galaxy pilots to be unfairly treated, you may want to bring this up in a thread of your own...
I love how you completely failed to form a rebuttal, but instead went entirely off topic. Bad pony, bad.
I would like you to see this thread before commenting on Galaxy pilots getting no certs. As things stand the Galaxy is the most effective anti-air platform in the game. http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...how-to-clear-the-skies-single-handedly.73972/
Except that ESF's take damage from ALL guns and are easy to damage enough even with carbines if people just shoot at them...You don't even need to have AA MAX or skyguard for those. Make your squad spawns as say HA and use those LMG's to all fire at the esf's under cover. Just try and i bet you see that rocket podding ESF flying away fast or dying.
