Air mobs/AA Weaponry
There is something wrong with the Yalmaha. Shouldn't be too hard to find out what. Look in the shops. The lowest ql Yalmaha has a price range from 5 to 12 million credits.
"Reading this means that you are in presence of someone very rich"... etc, etc.
I'm pretty certain, that when Funcom created the Yalmaha, they made it a luxury item. But what good is that, when every 2. or 3. person finds one or three as loot in a mission?
If not that is fixed, we would end up with a Yal for each of our chars.
In other words, the air traffic on Rubi-Ka is far too heavy. If not for the fact that players have no real material existence, we would have some serious accidents here. Economy is unbalanced when players make lots of money in short time, flying to distant mission locations. There's no risk any more, when you don't have to be afraid for that wide fauna of monsters down there.
And the Yalmaha is quite ugly too. I say make it more like the nice-looking Kodaik, but that's not relevant.
What is relevant is that Yalmahas creates a very easy solution to a lot of the problems realted to making huge loads of money in short time. So it's time for Funcom to do something about that. Maybe not yet, but it shouldn't be too far away.
1: Remove Yalmahas from game.
Yeah, that would be the single most stupid thing FC could do, as it would make very many people (including myself) very angry. Forget that.
2: Airborne Monsters.
From my lvl 70 point of view, I've only seen 1 kind of flying monster: the Vulture. Yeah, I know about Reets, Chirops, Anuns, etc, but they're in my opinion not really flying, just hovering some feet above ground. They could as well have walked (would have made the Anun less buggy).
The Vulture, on the contrary, can really fly. The cost of that is that it looks and acts pretty far-fetched, having abilities that a normal hummingbird can just dream of.
What we need is mobs keeping a higher ceiling, really posing a threat to Yalmaha pilots. They should of course be a bit faster than the Yal, and the Yalmaha should have a altitude cap.
When the creature overtakes the plane, it will attack, doing a nice chunk of damage.
It should be possible to kill the flying mobs by luring them down to the ground, in front of the muzzles of a group.
3. AntiAir Cannons/Flak
How about having AntiAir cannons placed around cities and outposts, and maybe here and there in clusters at strategic points in the desert. The Flak could have a %-chance of hitting an aircraft flying above, which would either:
A: Kill the pilot
B: Damage the plane, so that it falls out of air, taking fall damage. The plane will of course be reuseable, maybe after the user pays a little cost of repairs.
The Cannons would of course be stationary NPCs incapable of attacking ground targets. They would, though, be guarded, so that players would have to take down the guards in order to destroy the cannons. When the cannons go down, they would not respawn for a couple of hours/days. They should have a large attack perifery and long range, so that it shouldn't be too easy to sneak outside their coverage areas.
Think of the potential this would have: A forward group takes out the AA cannons, before the main attack forces move in with Yalmahas in the main assault.
Of course there are a lot of other things that should have higher priority in AO, but I think Airborne Mobs and AA Cannons could add a new dimension
