Planetside 2 is even worse. There's a whole AA tank turret you can unlock, and it hardly does damage to anything besides the smallest fighter, and has a spread like a blunderbus.

Infantry have an AA lock-on option that basically works only at point blank and takes a ridiculous amount of time to actually lock. Even the smallest aircraft take 3 or 4 hits to actually die, and that's only if they don't have fire-suppression which heals back a third of your craft's health.

Complain about it and all the flyboys come out the woodworks crying that AA should only be a deterrence, rather than a serious threat. Oh, and skill issues (while fly boys are the ones who farm infantry by hovering above lock-on range abd spam rocket pods).

Yeah, agreed. The vehicle whores in BF are awful. You either get a clown driving the vehicle into the convergence of 7 AT/AA weapons and just sitting there getting everyone in the vehicle killed in 2 seconds or you get the unkillable whore who takes hit after hit after hit and won’t die. Not much in between. Really most vehicles are way over-armored in BF, one or two good AA missiles or AT hits should disable or destroy anything, but it’s a game so the vehicle campers get to do what they do.

Part of the issue is the Battlefield flight model, at least in the past, was really shitty. It was an incredibly arcady system where you really can't travel quickly or be agile. Helicopters in real life can avoid being shot. Helicopters in Battlefield can't, so they need to survive being shot instead.

There are better games out there that don't have this issue. Squad helicopters can still take more shots than they should, but they can all be taken down with enough small arms fire (if you hit the right spots). The light helicopters can only take something like 3 5.56 rounds, but they're really agile and a good pilot doesn't get shot.