Yeah, the Lib is overpowered....

Ask the pilots to kill the libs, most pilots Live to kill libs because for them its easy. The lib is slow as a wet week an twice as big a target.

lol I hope so but I can only imagine how long it would take. 90% of the bases are designed horribly and it would probably take 6+ months to redesign them all. I have faith SOE could do it if they started working with the players instead of being an antagonizing force. The players are here to help you SOE, not hurt you.

Then again if SOE actually listened to the army of beta testers that said base design was horrible we might not be here having this conversation.

As a personal comment to SOE. Look, PS1 wasn't a smash hit but that doesn't mean everything about it was horrible. If that was the case there would be no PS2. It is OK to use some ideas from PS1 that worked. Just don't go overboard or half-a** it. Indoor fighting is OK. Right now you're too preoccupied with making sure no one has to do anything they don't want too. You're designing the game around the concept that if people don't ever want to leave their vehicle they should still be super effective. Thats the wrong attitude to have. Different situations call for different measures. The answer to every situation should be "MOAR TANKS! MOAR ESF/LIB SPAM!".

What it comes down to is simply this: If a Liberator can park its giant behind over your base and start raining shells on the spawn room unopposed your defense of that place has failed.
The fact that the Liberator was able to get comfortable there isn't due to it being overpowered, it's due to your faction not having enough fighters and AA guns to drive it off or kill it. (Hint: One fighter is enough to kill it)

I preferred planet side 1 libs. had to do a bombing run.

Yeah. Why?

Yeah twice.... yeah more p*ssing and moaning from a half-bitter vet.... and it required skill to lay that string of bombs across a target, even in the cramped confines of an old-school courtyard. Come in too low and everybody's shooting at you. Play it nice and safe and come in high, and you have to *guess* where all those juicy targets will be in several seconds. And if you're on the receiving end, you get the ominous whistling noise by way of warning. It worked okay, all told.

Now you have airborne direct-fire area-effect instaslaying. See everything, point and click, watch it die. And they can't take this away because it'll pry the lollipop out of too many mouths. Rotten base design merely exacerbates all of this.

Once already in the brief history of this game I've gotten to the point where I log in, look at what's going on, make a half-hearted try, see there's no point, and log out again. Now I'm there again. Pox on it. Only a zerg stands a chance against a Liberator-swarm, and the zergs are chasing their own tails through mostly empty bases. Try small-unit stuff, and you get Liberated all over again. The sifting through hours of grinding and boredom yield fewer and fewer moments of fun.

I'll see you in February, guys. Rivenshield out.

Video illustrates the problems of balancing a game where everyone can be anything.
I kinda wish you had to specialize, like in PS1; that would allow Sony to actually buff the various weapons, so they were more viable when specialized.

Currently weapons HAVE to be useless when playing solo, and are downright OP when used by 10+ people.
I see no way of fixing this problem.

Ps. What happens in, say, a year or so, when everyone has the Grounder or the Skep (or some other weapon). Will they have to be nerfed even more into the ground to not be OP when used at critical mass?

That's the problem which is going to plague PS2 for all of it's life because the devs decided to get rid of specialization because "they knew better and had a better idea"

The answer to every situation should not be "MOAR TANKS! MOAR ESF/LIB SPAM!".*

God thats what I get for typing something as I'm running out the door to work -_-

Anyways I agree. The PS1 Lib was much better and would actually fit better in PS2 than a flying tank turret.

OK holy crap people! lets get this straight so you whiners can finally figure this out. AA takes a crap on ESF right? RIGHT! AA should FOCUS ESF's and THATS IT. ONLY target Libs if you have to. If you eliminate enemy ESF's, guess what? friendly ESF's will proceed to take a crap on all of those mean little libbys! THATS the balance. It is beyond stupid to hope that a SINGLE max should be able to ward off a 3 man bomber that requires teamwork and GOOD coordination.

Besides, OP is either fabricating or outright horrible with AA. I dual burster max ESF;s and Libbys ALL THE TIME with success by myself. You just have to have a little bit of common sense and dont spawn your max IF YOU KNOW YOU ARE ALREADY CAMPED! today 5 burster maxes help off over a dozen vanu liberators and a few dozen ESF's. within 5 minutes the skys were completely clear and not a single max was lost. interesting what a little freakin teamwork can do huh?

Take notes OP (^^) the problem is your play style, not the game. know when your beat.

That problem affects AA guns primarly for a couple of reasons:

1. There is no terrain in the sky, so Aircraft have to pretty much fly right on the deck to have any way of taking cover or getting out of someones LOS.
2. AA has insane range. It's the only unit in the game that can hit someone the second they start rendering with a high degree of accuracy.
3. AA is really easy to hit with. Whether its lockon missiles or flak, it's not hard to hit an aircraft with them, so their effect range is pretty narrow. That means more people doesn't just up the chance for hits, it genuinely moves the guns towards a lethality threshold where no target can survive.

In ground warfare combat scaling isn't so bad, but if organized infantry relied more on HAs it would very quickly become aparant that HAs are easily the most powerful unit in the game when mass deployed. There is simply nothing in the game that has a better price/firepower ratio...

You mean unless there is a mountain, hill, tower, or other protrusion in the sky, which there always is.

No AA reaches render distance. Its something like 500 meters, about 2/3rds render distance. A Zephyr or Dalton on the other hand...

This is untrue. AA is difficult to hit with for good pilots, easy to hit with for bad pilots. Any pilot who comes right at you or moves in a straight, predictable path is bait, and he'll likely escape with half his HP as long as he doesn't try and hover to pod you. Lockon missiles are obviously easy to lock on with. They are almost impossible to hit with because they fail to do damage, get outrun by ESF, simply miss ESF, or otherwise act in a stupid manner. With enough flak you can make areas denied to aircraft, but you need a lot and you need it facing in all directions, (3 per side of the tower seems to be the minimum for deterrence against an actual air assault.) To kill targets with regularity, you need far more than 3, especially when they start hiding at long range. Most aircraft simply choose to go elsewhere rather than fight with AA if its sufficient to stop them.

HA are good in mass quantities, really its mostly against tanks simply because the anti-air launcher doesn't actually work properly. Its full of bugs and is terribly slow.

And the first level 100 BR player got it by lib gunning:

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/world-first-br100.72767/

This is why the places that always have fights going on are biolabs and techlabs and such where farming is LESS, yet still there.

Someone somewhere else in the forum suggested a continent that was like a futuristic city/capitol area with buildings and such to make flying an obstacle course.

If you fly about 100 meters up, sure, but the Sky extends all the way to 1000, and the top 900 are the most boring place in the game to fight because there is nothing there. Vast empty expanses of nothing just don't make for good gameplay.

Libs are fine, it's the senseless "ground is only a deterrent to air hurpadurpa" nonsense that's killing balance and allowing left mouse button clickers to smurf themselves into BR heaven.

they should've gone with the good old & trusted paradigm that everything should be able to be killed equally fast, right tools in hand.



not that that wasn't predicted, game can't have enough AoE after all

You're lying.

I just spent half an hour with a dual-burster MAX going up against a Scythe player. He would hover up one side of the mountain and start spamming rocket pods at me, while I emptied both Bursters into him. It ended up with him soaking up the damage I dished out and me soaking up the damage he dished out, before he dropped down the cliff and went off to repair. Then he came back and we did it all over again.

The only way you're taking out an ESF by yourself is if the pilot of that ESF got dropped on his head as an infant.

And spawning ESFs to kill the enemy air only works when everything is balanced, which it never is. You always have one faction with a vastly superior population on any given continent. There's no countering enemy air spam with your own air spam if you simply lack the numbers to do so.

I play on Miller, and every time I log on the Vanu have the highest world population and they also have the highest continent population on two continents. Then they spam Magriders and Scythes and Liberators like it's going out of style and just steam roll everything.

This game needs a population cap on continents, it needs a cap on the number of vehicles a faction can spawn, and it needs new bases that are actually defensible and not just kill farms for the attacking vehicle zergs.

At this point, I seriously regret investing 40€ into this game.

They need a big nerf to their armour tbh. It takes way more rockets to kill a liberator than it does a MBT and they don't even take more damage from the rear etc like tanks, which is silly (ignoring the fact that the AA rocket launcher has been broken since last patch).

Liberators on their own are easily countered.
One decent ESF pilot can trash a lib with a very low chance of failure. Yeah, they turn their bellies to us and fire that Zephyr, but a bit of erratic movement makes the gunner sweat blood and tears. Some can still hit you, but not reliably; especially when you use your agility to gain height on them.

Liberators with an ESF escort, that is a problem. I can take out a liberator fairly reliably, but when I have 2 ESFs chasing me for my trouble, that changes. Suddenly I need to do hit & run and largely discourage/deter, instead of killing.

Liberators + ESF support + ground AA = I'm essentially denied from bothering the libs.
So it takes a combination of 3 different enemy unit types to stop me entirely, when I'm in a single person aircraft... I am far from a great pilot as well, imagine what someone truly skilled could do.

I do agree, that a lib camping a spawn room is impossible to get rid of with ground alone. Here's a tip: Spawn somewhere else. Really should have been the first thing you try...

Countering liberators without air support is difficult, but it's your own fault if you keep respawning in the same place and trying to fight one off. We used to deal with this by rolling a pair of Skyguard buggies but we can't exactly do that anymore.