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The weapon changes are a component of what we're doing, not all of it. Most feature designs are a lot longer than 140 characters we get to use on twitter.
The general idea is to give ESFs more clearly defined roles, smooth out their skill curve a bit, and less ability to be one-size-fits-all. Right now a great pilot can be a complete terrorist to ground troops, but new or not-so-great pilots have an insanely frustrating time due to the power of ground-to-air to totally zone out whole areas from air. This skill spread sucks for almost everyone, because the really high skill pilots can avoid it, the newer and bad pilots can't be pilots because the skill floor is so high, and the ground troops have to dedicate a ton of guys to anti-air which is ineffective at taking out the most skilled pilots anyways!
With some dedicated air-to-air weapons, as well as buffs to fuel pods, changes to the A2A missiles, we'll create some diversity in the ESF specs we see today, which are extremely homogenous - Rotaries and Rocketpods is the defacto ESF build because it has no weakness. By having more players playing dedicated air-to-air roles, fewer will be playing dedicated air-to-ground, and those fewer air-to-ground players will have a lot of new threats from the air to worry about. If we see a reduction in the number or effectiveness of air-to-ground specced ESFs, along with other changes we're making to help separate ground troops engaged in facility fights, it should allow ground troops to spend less time locked into dedicated ground-to-air defense roles. Ideally, this means that aircraft spend more time being part of fights, instead of zoned out of combat areas entirely, but they're doing so in a more balanced way than currently where it's 80% air-to-ground farming.
There will be more to this than just the weapon changes/additions, of course. Galaxies and Liberators will need some updates to contend with the new air-to-air threats.
edit: wanted to emphasize, these are things we are thinking about and planning out at this time, not something being actively worked on. We've got a lot of questions to answer ourselves about what to do about _____. This isn't something you should expect to see for at least 3-4 game updates.
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We'll probably be making them easier to dodge / avoid for ESFs and more useful against Gals and Libs, with the new wing-mounted dogfight oriented weapons being the better choice for vs. ESF combat.
There will be a clear delineation between the high-speed, fast-firing dogfighter weapon and the slower firing, slower speed lock-on missiles which you can think of as more of an "anti-heavy-aircraft" weapon.
The current air-to-air lock-on will still work on ESFs, but good pilots will be able to avoid them. Hovering rocket-podders will still be very vulnerable to them, though.
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We have improved joystick support on the wishlist for the update, as a joystick user myself (Not in PS2, obviously) I definitely want to try to get it in.
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We won't be changing anything specifically with those weapons, except for maybe adjusting COF on rotaries to make it a bit harder to snipe infantry at longish range with it. The major difference is you'll be at a disadvantage vs an aircraft with a new dedicated air-to-air spec if you have a hybrid spec like rotaries+pods.
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2013-06-29, 01:07 PM
Linear Mode
