Air vs. Ground Balance. You can't make it fair by making nobody happy.

[Rothnang]

The debate on air vs. ground as it is being held right now is really annoying to me, because it seems like a lot of people just want pilots to have as hard and unenjoyable of a time as possible. The hate against the Liberator is downright irrational at this point, with every single suggestion aimed at "balancing" it really just being aimed at making it die so much that people will give up on using it.

I think we need to have a real dialogue about what needs to change for air vs. ground gameplay to actually be fun for both sides instead of just this stupid tit for tat we've had going since beta, where the devs are just moving the damage numbers on AA and Air weapons around to try and keep a balance of discontent where both sides are equally annoyed at the result.

I would like to see changes that actually fix what's broken with air vs. ground in the first place, and try to actually get rid of the reasons why people hate fighting against aircraft so much. Particularly the Liberator is a big offender for reasons I will explain in a bit, and I think needs the most fixing on its actual functionality, rather than just trying to balance one fun-ruining unit by giving it an equally obnoxious counter. If there is a turd on your scale don't shit in the other pan, get the freaking turd off your scale!!!

The thing that is really causing so much trouble with air vs. ground gameplay as far as I'm concerned is simply the fact that people hate being powerless against an attacker, and air is currently in a unique position of being able to absolutely curbstomp any enemy force that doesn't have adequate air cover, while at the same time getting completely locked out of fights where the enemy does have good air defense or air superiority. Ultimately it's frustrating to both sides, neither side gets what they want out of the game, which is a good action packed fight.

The Liberator is currently the one aircraft that's causing the most hate, and understandably so, because honestly, it's just a misguided unit design. When you really think about it, what the Liberator really is is a Killstreak Reward from Call of Duty, but turned into a standard deployable unit. The bombadier in the Liberator is basically playing as the Chopper Gunner, Gunship, AC130 equivalent of Planetside 2.

The problem is that those killstreak rewards are designed to be unfair in Call of Duty, because they are supposed to be hard to get, and give you a huge advantage when you do get them. They are completely designed around the idea of just mercilessly dominating people for a minute or so. The problem is that the concept still is impossibly powerful in PS2, but Liberators don't just operate for one minute over the target, but can do their thing non-stop.
The problem you run into when you try to balance a Liberator by saying "Well, obviously Liberators do what they do too much, so we need a system that makes them do it less" is that that's also not an acceptable solution to the people who are flying around in the Liberators. Anything designed to kill them easily, limit their ability to pull the unit, make them spend more time on logistics than fighting etc. just takes away their ability to have any fun with the unit as well.

In the end nobody is happy with the result, and that's why we need to think about changes that actually alter the gameplay of those units to give us a fight that everyone can enjoy. I personally think the Liberator should be redesigned so that the big gun that the second gunner controls is forward facing, but can only shoot down maybe 15°, so that the Liberator has to fly low or really far away in order to actually use its firepower.

I recently made a video of me flying a Liberator with just the tankbuster, and I had a feeling the whole time that the people I was fighting were having a considerably better time dealing with an enemy they could shoot at without dedicating themselves to air defense than they have fighting a Liberator that just hovers overhead and really does nothing but sticking you with a stupid choice: Have half a dozen guys sacrifice their enjoyment of the game to stand watch or have bombs drop on your head all day.

It's a change like that that would make a real difference in getting everyone to being happy with the result. What we all ultimately want out of the game is a good fight. We don't want to get killed by things we couldn't defend ourselves against, and we don't want to have our gameplay limited in ridiculous ways by how deadly certain units are. Telling a Liberator Pilot that he simply shouldn't fly near a base that has 10 bursters in it is just as stupid as telling Infantry players that they simply shouldn't go outside if three Liberators are overhead. Sure, doing those things will ensure your survival, but they aren't any fun.