1. This is a beta release. It's not done. Your judgments are entirely too harsh especially considering how awesome most of the mod is.
The fact that it's a beta is a perfectly good excuse for things being the way they are, but it isn't a reason not to talk about them. We have long threads about various other aspects of the mod not being as fun as they could be, or broken or unbalanced or whatever, why can't we have one about this? It's constructive criticism and I don't think it's a bad thing at all.
And before anyone says anything, he's talking about AA not being fun, which is a completely seperate issue from balance and one that hasn't been discussed nearly as much.
Anyway, I tend to agree a bit. AA can be fun sometimes and there's certainly plenty of satisfaction to be had downing the odd aero pilot, but as often as not it can be dead boring and I think a lot of the time it's a role that people play because they have to, rather than because they want to.
Being able to pop BA and plink away at mechs are nice perks and help to keep things interesting when there aren't any aerospace around to be sure, but the problem with this is that a lot of good ASF pilots will run passive either all the time or as much as they can possibly get away with, so if you're focussing on the ground and just relying on the odd glance at your radar to warn you of incoming ASF you're running the risk of missing that passive sulla or shiva swooping down on you before you even know he's there. Since your best opportunity to kill ASF is when they're doing their run, this isn't something you can afford to let happen very often, if at all. The obvious solution is to not rely on radar very much and simply to spend most of your time looking at the sky trying to eyeball aerospace as they get close, but a lot of the time this basically amounts to cloudwatching; you spend five minutes staring at an empty sky on the offchance that an aerospace will decide to start a run on you or a teammate that will last maybe 30 seconds, probably less. This is kind of a lot to ask of a player that quite possibly joined the server so he could run around in a mech.
Another problem is that often your job isn't so much to kill ASF as just to keep them away. Bad pilots might be content to do suicide runs into your guns but the good ones will realise pretty quickly that if they can't get close to you without dying, then they're better of not getting close to you at all. The funny thing is that the better an AA gunner you are, the more likely this is to be the case, and the less likely any ASF is to come within range. In this situation your role is basically "be in one area of the map so the ASF pilots can't be" which amounts to doing absolutely nothing... at all. Of course you could shoot at some BA or mechs but if you do this too much you risk running into the above problem with passive ASF.
If you keep this up for long enough you might be rewarded with the ASF pilots getting bored and switching to mechs, in which case you're free to play something more interesting yourself, but if you do that for too long said pilots might realise you're not in AA anymore and switch right back to aerospace, in which case the whole business starts over.
So yeah, it's not exactly the most rewarding or thrilling thing you can do in MWLL, to say the least. The problem is how to make AA more interesting in a way that doesn't amount to huge buffs.
