Why haven't coyotes been adjusted yet?

I guess people must still be buying them. They'll be nerfed once sales dry up.

Wrong.

They raise the skill floor.

If you're skill capped with a nosegun, you'll dominate enemies no matter what they use.

AB Fuel max certed with Rotary certed out is still the top dog.

Coyotes are just easier... but have a lower skill ceiling themselves.

Can a coyote pilot beat a non-coyote pilot who is better than them?

Sure, that's kinda the idea actually... but only up to a certain point.

Also, Flares gives you a 6 second window of open domination against coyotes.

Wat?

Flying is really, REALLY easy in this game.

Seriously, I was up and flying in no time.

The difficulty isn't flying, it's staying alive with so many threats and everyone wanting you DEAD.

Particularly Ace pilots who will kill you 5 seconds out of your warpgate.

I think it does both - lower the skill ceiling and raise the floor. Since Coyotes alone can compete on par with rotary, you basically reach the same deadliness potential as an expert rotary user. Since both of those are almost equally effective, the emphasis on skill with rotary is greatly reduced. So while a player could train harder to be better with rotary, the benefits are less

The biggest impact of lock-ons and Coyotes is not in 1 on 1 fights, but in team fights. In a team fight, that 6 second flares window is almost completely insignificant. At best, it buys you enough time to kill 1 guy before your certain death. In team fights, missiles greatly reduce the importance of evasive manuevering - you can dodge a rotary, you can't dodge a guided missile. That's almost half the skill of being a pilot - gone, made insignificant.

In team fights, as number of participating players increases, power of missile user increases exponentially, while power of machine gun user increases linearly. So it makes sense that to help balance this game for large multiplayer combat, the strength and availability of guided missiles has to be kept low

I'm a terrible pilot, so I love Coyotes. And Ejection Seats.

I love the argument that X weapon reduces the skill needed in ESFs. Yet these same people clamor on about all you need to get good in a ESF is fly around the VR for a few hours and have a tutor.

No other vehicle requires hours of practice in the VR, not even the Lib or Galaxy. No other vehicle requires a tutor to learn.

So I would love for someone to explain to me why they think the ESF should be the only vehicle that needs hours of practice in the VR and a tutor to be competitive. Otherwise the skill ceiling should be the same as any other vehicle in the game.

You don't. You let them learn the same way the rest of us did.

OR you make a VR type zone where people can duel to get better without going to pts which is a big hassle.

OR you add an instanced mission system where new players can fight against NPCs to practice their aim and things of that nature.

What you dont do is add a weapon that doesnt have to be aimed. Does too much damage for how little aiming (zero) is required.

Imagine the outcry if Infantry players were given lock-on sniper rifles and coyote machine guns for cqc, but somehow its ok in ESFs.

HAHAHA you think you don't need many many hours flying a lib to be competitive?

Yay for ignorance! Yay!

You have to practice to be good at everything in this game.

Do you think br1 noob players go out with their machine guns and kill BR 100 pros?

Guess what? They don't.

I was a complete FPS noob when i started playing this game. I never even played doom back in the day. The only shooting experience i had was playing duck hunt on 1st generation nintendo.

I got my *** handed to me over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Same thing when i started flying ESFs.

Same thing as when i started flying libs.

Same thing when i started driving tanks.

If things are just handed to you, and anyone can beat anyone, well thats very 'Murican, but it doesnt make for a very fun or engaging game.

WRONG. I get killed by pilots that i absolutely dominated before coyotes. Pilots who dont even use their noseguns in between coyote volleys.

The problem is once you learn how to use the coyotes you can never lose.

Yep, ive used them so i know.

I'm not going to sit here and say something is OP when i haven't used it. So i put them on. I had just come back from a 2 month break and i was getting beaten pretty regularly due to my rustiness, but once i put the coyotes on i was able to beat the best pilots quite easily.

You don't even have to have your enemy on the screen.

Nope, just be within 10 meters when you fire them off.

Thats it.

So what you do is you just keep rushing and flying crazy at the same time, cause you dont have to aim at all. ZERO aiming get it?

Then when you are close, you just hold the button down and bam insta 25% damage to enemy plane.

I don't know about you, but the reason i play a FPS as opposed to say a TAB target gaem is because i like the idea that skill is the deciding factor. It's not about what gear i have, or whether I have some lame I win button.

Thats what coyotes are like though. You dont even have to have your enemy on the screen with you to hit them. How is that ok?

Seriously.

Give us the coyote machine gun for infantry. Just pull the trigger within 10 meters of an enemy and every bullet will hit.

I know everyone would buy one.

And you said it yourself, a lesser pilot can beat a better pilot with coyotes. That is re tar dead and goes against everything a FPS is supposed to be.

This is supposed to be a game where i can test my skill against other peoples skill.

If i wanted to get owend by noobs with EZ mode I win abilities i would go play WoW.

No. They already talked about ruining the flight mechanics and fortunately the decided against it.

Why must everything be easy?

I was a new player once.

I learned how to fly, as did thousands and thousands of other players.

Coyotes are garbage that should be thrown out along with A2A missiles.

Or give every aspect of the game locking capabilities.

YES and more YES.

NEW players dont fly. They play infantry.

Lets just make the game a 2 dimensional dice roller. You fly along on a 2 dimensional map and every time you encounter an enemy you roll a virtual die and whoever rolls higher wins.

That would help new players tremendously and remove all of this much hated skill entirely.

I have to say sir that i find your name to be very apropos.

I would totaly agree with you if we are playing a game with a not persistant world. Here we are now and first we need new players second there is no lets change the server and come back when i can play with the big guys. Its a constant farm.

So to close the gap between new players and skilled players is tough but only if the "old" players understand its GOOD when new players enter the field the game will grow and survive. The Coyotes are a prefect example of this. Raises the level of the new players and give the old players something to think about.

Yesterday I was playing on Miller for 4 hours and someone shot me with these things ONCE. Kick in the afterburner and turn around blast him out of the sky. But when you only can do the hover fight then you do have a problem sir. Adjust you playstyle of new threats and you shall survive.

Nice theorycrafting, but there are two major flaws.

1. You're assuming that ~30% nosegun accuracy is being maintained while holding down the fire button. Most pilots will shoot in bursts between readjusting thier aim (assuming their opponent is not hovering still in the air). These statistics are also taking into account shots against liberators or galaxies, that you can easily have +70% accuracy against due to their slow speed and large hitbox (which ends up skewing your statistics).

2. Competent pilots will move eratically when hoverfighting, further reducing your overall accuracy. According to those numbers any fight between two ESFs would be over in 4-6 seconds. In reality they can last +20 seconds (I've been in fights where I ended up using fire supression more then once).

What breaks coyotes for me is not how they allow you to get into the air without learning to aim, but rather how they hard-counter people who have learned how to dodge.

Using coyotes removes aiming.
Facing coyotes removes dodging.

Without either of those elements, what's left of the air-game?

an AB+nosegun ESF is a dedicated AA weapon. so is a coyote/nosegun esf, but is more difficult to use. Therefore, assuming equal skill, the AB ESF should win most of the time, because the AB esf is challenging themselves to a more difficult platform. Its that simple. Plus, I see a lot of Coyote/AI nosegun ESFs, and coyotes are so good they'll beat even a nosegun/AB tanks ESF. Coyotes are unbalanced, unfun, and uncounterable.

Turns out, A2A-specialized loadouts are strong against air and weak against ground! Who knew!?

To me, it's the first step along the path to a much better-designed system for aircraft, where you no longer have the god-against-everything singular loadout of nosegun+rockets, but instead specialized A2A or A2G loadouts with a generalist loadout in between.

If someone comes at you with Coyotes, if you can get your nosegun on them then you'll out-DPS them pretty solidly. I'm not a great pilot and even I know that. If you have an A2A weapon on your secondary and alternate while reloading, you'll out-DPS Coyotes definitively.

Of course, the guy who comes at you with Coyotes might be doing that already. In which case, a guy with an A2A loadout gets the jump on you (at close range no less) and has a head-start on his DPS. That's what's supposed to happen.

You can't use accuracy stats that way. If you gave the same player an accurate and an inaccurate weapon, they'll start out fighting at 40m and the accurate weapon will perform better. Then they'll have learned that the accurate weapon works great at 40m, and hey why not start trying it at 50m, then 75m, then 100m? They will naturally self-select into the range where the weapon remains effective. The same thing happens on the other end.

The result? Well I assure you the Hailstorm (34.5% personal accuracy) is not a more accurate weapon than the T5 AMC (28.5%). And yet if the raw DPS was the same with those two weapons by your calculation the Hailstorm would be the better weapon, when in reality the AMC would be brokenly good and its lower accuracy would simply be the result of making more attempts at longer-ranged targets.

So multiplying raw DPS by aggregate accuracy stats is almost totally meaningless, because of how those accuracy stats were attained. Bucketing accuracy stats would improve things a lot, but probably not by enough to provide an accurate picture of weapon effectiveness (basically you'd compare Weapon A and Weapon B accuracy at 40m-50m, so you remove the factor I describe above) however tracking stats for whether the player is trying to aim at a certain thing is basically not possible (your reticle was near that 40m guy and that 100m guy behind him, and which one were you really shooting at?)

Which means all you can do is provide raw DPS for each weapon, and compare it by its raw accuracy traits. You can't actually "do the math" by multiplying them together.

AB-pod ESF also has a better time surviving against ground based AA than a Coyote user and choosing engagements in general. It's the reason why people are running AB-pods over rocket pods for AI work. Then there is also a counter, they are called Flares, for 5 seconds they become as useful against ESFs as the PPA. An ESF that is running nosegun and Coyotes is going to have an advantage is a straight up fight.

If they are using gun+Coys and you are not, they have the advantage.

If they are only using Coys and you are only using nosegun, you have the dps advantage by far if you can aim.

If they are both using the same loadout then things are equal.

A tank that runs Front Armor and AP/AV is going to have an advantage in a straight up slug match over a tank running NAR and/or HE/AI. Even though AP rounds are far easier to hit than HE due to their faster velocity and lower drop they still do less damage as they are not intended for AV.