Battlefield 3

All good points EmX. The guns do have a lot of overlap, but I imagine that's true in real-life as well. Assault rifles are designed to kill, so they overlap regarding their purpose as well.

I also HATE the bipod function, it never comes out on the Karkland guns, like never. Having a button to deploy it is the perfect solution, I have no idea why they didn't think of that -- unless they thought it'd be OP cause it would allow people to use it on non-flat surfaces. But making it useless is even worse, so I just go with the foregrip 100% of the time.

Overall though, I think they did a pretty good job balancing the guns, but I agree, there should be more variation in their performance. One thing I do think they got right is the recoil, you can't just spray with most guns, the more realistic recoil makes you be much more controlled when shooting and I like that.

 

They didn't balance the weapons well at all. Having really similar weapons makes the one that is slightly better than the rest be the only one worth using. I won't do recon because I don't play it using a sniper rifle and the scope glint makes no sense - all rifle scopes have anti-glare coating since like world war 2 or something.

Assault -

The AK74 does nothing that the can't AEK971 or AN94 do better. The M16A3 is better than almost all the other assault rifles (the M416 is nearly identical but reloads slower) because it reloads a lot faster. The problem is that they will nerf the AEK971 (like they did with the F2000) instead of making the AK74 or the KH2002 better(nearly identical to the F2000 but worse). I rarely see the FAMAS now despite all the QQ - because it's only good at close range and I don't play those awful maps.

Engi -

The SCAR-H got nerfed and immediately the M4A1 took its place as the only carbine to use as an engi. The M4A1 has the same quick reload as the M16 and respectable accuracy and rof. The G53 seems alright, but I know the the A-91 and its reload time is too long for that type of gun. The other ones have one flaw or another. Why use any other carbine?

Support -

Subtract any LMG chambered in 7.62 because they can't hit anything compared to where they were before when they nerfed automatic fire across the board and they needed to ruin the SCAR-H.

The Type88 is finnicky, the M27 IAR is just the M416 with a beefy mag and no burst fire which makes it pretty good. The RPK has the same problems as the AK74. So you're stuck drum/magazine based LMGs and the M249. The M249 is great now and about to get nerfed, but any fire sustained after 4-5 shots just makes it go apeshit. So it will be the M27 or the MG36 left with support unless you go to the PDWs

PDWs! - The UMP and the P90 do strangely low damage and have bad accuracy outside a few yards. The P90 isn't even an SMG per se so it behaving like a caricature of one confuses me. The PP2000 has its moments but the overlap it has with other weapons turns me off. The PDW-R is supposedly good but I've yet to see it. The AS VAL is great because it's distinct, slept on a bit and some people don't like it - in that regard it's implemented better than most weapons.

I mean the stats are pretty well documented now and there is probably a case to be made for something I'm glossing over but eh.

 

The engineer class did suffer a lot with the unnecessary Scar nerf. Unfortunately the playerbase is filled with BKs and casuals who whine about stuff like that. It's much worse in CoD but still prevalent in BF.

There is the G36c for Engineers. It's pretty decent but can't compete TTK wise with the Famas/F2000/AEK. There's the M4A1 as well but that has obtrusive irons and personally I don't really like it.

I'll tell you something that's pretty irksome, having no button to lower/retract landing gear on a jet. It's really bloody annoying when your skimming the ground and the landing gear starts to come out, sometimes you can hit the afterburners and it retracts. Sometimes it inexplicably won't and you have to land in some random place just so you can take off again to get it to go up.

 

The scope glint is for balance, so that people can't disappear from view seeing as how you can now go prone in this game.

EMX I gotta say I don't agree with a lot of what you have posted so far. So I'm gunna ask you straight. How good are you at this game? Perhaps you could link to your battlelog.

 

I understand why the scope glint exists. I also understand why the P90 is underpowered but the 5.7mm bullet makes swiss cheese out of kevlar irl, or why the rifles can't hit anything too well outside 400m in BF3 etc.

With Recon it's an excessive nerf on a ranged class that's already a bit boring to play because the gadgets require the Recon's full attention to use well. DICE also did an end run around making Recon have a role because the ranges in the game would favor assault rifles, carbines and PDWs across the board if it were realistic. edit: I generally don't like play games where the weapons simulated are weaker than they are irl. I could play ARMA and deal with sprint/standing accuracy penalties and actually be able to hit something but I don't care to.

Let's just assume I suck and refer to the weapon stats data. I'm not going to enter a credibility pissing contest with you, especially if you play on Xbox because it's an entirely different game on PC and I wouldn't take your opinion seriously when it comes to weapon handling.

Refer to the data posted on smythic - http://symthic.com/?s=bf3

 

Well I didn't know you played on PC and I didn't have any intention of getting into a 'pissing match' as you so tactfully put it. I was just curious about your stats because it would give me a better idea of where you're coming from.

As far as everything else you've said........it's a videogame.

Yes I am aware of symthic's site as well. It's pretty much an offshoot of Denkirson, which is where reliable weapon stats used to come from.

It's like your baiting me into a pissing match with your aggressive demeanour lol. I'll say now I have no interest of getting into one because I only play this game casually at best.

 

You asked about battlelog presumably because you wanted to be assured I wasn't blowing smoke up your ass. The documentation is there. Console would be an entirely different thing w/r/t balance because of the control scheme and how slow players turn and react because of the analog sticks.

It is a video game, but I'd argue that it lives and dies on its believability and internal coherence because of the way DICE went about developing it. Even in terms of weapon balance it falls short because the weapons are too similar and a few stand out above the rest. That's actually a function of the attempted realism because weapons are like that in the outside world in spite of all the arbitrary nerfs on weapons in BF3 because of the roles they're suited to irl.

 

Why you so angry EmX? I am not your enemy

 

I'm being curt. If I were angry I'd be swearing more

If you look at the battlelog forums people will discount other's opinions solely based on their stats, when half the time the people with the highest stats are playing metro/bazaar/seine (seine on 32 or more is a nightmare) shitfests and stacking the teams and quitting if they aren't doing well. Turns out the stats page is a perverse incentive to be a jackass!

To wit: I do great with the M320 because I know the arc and can fire it at awkward angles into cramped spaces. I've actually gotten a few quad/quintuple kills with it. It's one of the lowest skill curve weapons on small maps (a few people with smoke and RPGs would easily be better) but few people even use it that well.

With small arms it's more about positioning and being away from the attack choppers. Team compositions are usually skewed toward recon and engi also. I find myself isolated trying to capture points and my squad mates all around the map at random spots.

There's also a lack of generic FPS skills among BF players in BC2 and BF3 because of the console crowd moving over onto it. Most of these people whine about CS pubs because they're "too hard", which baffles me.

 

Yeah I imagine you get stat bolstering in every game. In CoD ppl did it by doing demo spawn trapping, personally I found it to be boring and unfair.

What are these generic FPS skills you speak of? And why would the console crowd move to PC? From what I've heard consoles are much more popular these days.

Also, you don't see how that sentence could be inflammatory, given that you are addressing me who is primarily a console gamer? Before you lambast me with PC master race shit (I know mouse beats controller) let me me just say that I grew up with a PC playing Q2/Q3/Q3:TA, Unreal 99/03/04 and CS:S.

 

Read the article that Chanchai posted. By and large console gamers have poor situational awareness (or go to any l4d2 game on PC and see the same thing, for whatever reason) because they cannot turn quick enough on analog sticks. The games themselves (halo, CoD) are also much slower than even CS 1.6. MLG console players could play CS pubbies in 1.6 and have a hard time I'd imagine -- I could be exaggerating but I have a hunch.

The BF3 audience on PC are people stupid enough to spend $2k-3k on alienwares/laptops and stuff and are even more vehement in their defense of PC as a platform and BF3 vs. CoD (betrays a lack of familiarity with the merits of both console and PC, imo).

A lot of the dedicated PC crowd doesn't plunk down a small fortune unless they're 15 years old or into overclocking lol. If it weren't economical I wouldn't be playing on PC for the most part. As an aside, AMD's pricing scheme with the 7900 series may drive me off the platform altogether if it turns out the console ports from the new systems run poorly (they already do sometimes, for what it's worth). Also the players are selfish and anti-competitive. They would rather steamroll other players than learn the game. A far cry from the mentality we have here at VFDC.

I'm not lambasting you (you might be getting a vibe from my other posts that isn't present here) but I'm also not going to get drawn into a discussion of the relative merits of PC vs. console because there's nothing to dispute. I'm glad DICE sped BF3 up but it makes console's opinions really only matter when it comes to map design, general strategy and aesthetics - not weapon handling or balance. People do legitimately enjoy console FPS (I loved PD and Goldeneye for sure) -- more power to them -- yet there's not much of a comparison to be made in terms of skill or reaction time required.

 

Right, I'm actually going to take the time to reply to an entire post of yours although god knows it isn't worth my time.

An unfounded blanket statement like this is inflammatory and from my experience simply untrue. More to this fact, I would offer that situational awareness is not down to the platform but the player. You could perhaps say that certain people are drawn to consoles that have poor situational awareness in FPS's. But there is no proof of this that I am aware of.

I played on 8 sensitivity in CoD and prided myself on accuracy. This again, is not true. I will concede that there was some sort of experiment that placed console gamers against PC gamers with mice and console people got slaughtered. But this has nothing to do with the level of tactics (a category that I would place SA under) on either platform.

High level CoD is very fast. Halo is much slower. I remember seeing people play 1.4/1.6 and I would say that CoD is the same if not faster. Although this is personal opinion and in order to reach a satisfactory conclusion, proof would have to be offered.

Pretty much the reason I don't play PC anymore.

How so? They are both FPS's.

I most certainly did.

Why?

I would disagree with this because with different platforms there are obviously differnt types of skill. PD and Goldeneye are archaic by todays standards. Although ironically, I'm sure you will remember, when they were released they were revolutionary not just for the fact that you now longer had to shell out for an expensive PC to play quality FPS's. But also for the fact that many believed they were BETTER than the then current crop of PC games. If memory serves me correctly it (Goldeneye) would have been competing against iterations Doom,Hexen and Quake. And while nowadays PC games easily eclipse consoles graphically, consoles should not be sneered at due to what they offer as compensation. Not in the least, accessibility.
Also as far as 'reaction time required' goes, I could argue that to deal the more awkward controller people might actually need greater reaction times than that of a PC gamer. Although this is something that I've put not thought into.

So concludes my post which took half an hour of my time. Half and hour that I would have much rather spent doing something else.

 

I'll back away from your assertion that console players aren't on average worse at FPS games. Mostly out of horror but also because I find that discussion tedious as hell.

The inputs in PC have a higher skill ceiling allow for greater precision. It's just the nature of the mouse's superior ability to translate movement on the screen from your hand. Goldeneye was a neat game at the time, but it wasn't competitive as Quakeworld or TF or whatever. It did have better production values although given the extensibility of the Quake engine and what got made on it later on kinda puts Rare's FPS games in a specific time and place for gaming (a good one).

The amount of information a player can take in determines situational awareness' baseline. Since you can gather information quicker using a more precise and fast input from a mouse (i'd say intuitive but it's kind of a fudgey, intangible term here), PC players have a gigantic leg-up by default. This also almost necessitates a subtler outlook on weapon balance since the inputs on PC to control the recoil (or just turning and shooting at a target) are of an entirely different speed and precision than what occurs on console. It also doesn't help that DICE hasn't fixed the negative acceleration assist in BF3 to make it easier to handle the game on an analog stick on PC. Just being able to turn 180 is next to impossible without correcting myself in BF3 only.

If you see videos of people with M&K dongles playing MW2 on XBL the players get steamrolled and accuse the guy of cheating. I'll side with the anecdotes here.

 

"The BF3 audience on PC are people stupid enough to spend $2k-3k on alienwares/laptops"

You get what you pay for...

 

So apparently, this is what the upcoming (March, no longer February) patch is looking like in terms of weapon tweaks. Of course a lot can change, but again, it's an interesting starting point for conversation.

Symthic Forums: Upcoming patch changes (Official Data from DICE)

What I find interesting is the trend seems to be a general minor increase in damage across the board on weapons. They might be listening to the criticism that they should be trying to scale more weapons upwards instead of just reacting with nerfs on the most yelled about weapons.

We will see what actually comes up and what gets translated. I'm looking forward to it, though I'm still having a blast playing this game on consoles ^_^

Oh and one more thing, here are a couple battlelog reports from a BF3 friend who loves his Rush. He's more of the guy clearing paths for a teammate to arm/defend an MCOMM and he generally loves Rush the most. I really enjoy playing with him!

Wolf_Autopsy (PS3) on Operation Metro (Attackers). The only thing that really bugs me about this report is it makes me wonder if his teammates even tried to arm the MCOMMs. Playing with him, I will vouch that he'll clear the area around an MCOMM for you and continue to defend that position while you do you try to blow that thing up. But it's super rare to see something like this on console BF3, but having played with him, it's clear he's playing seriously and I enjoy it!

Wolf_Autopsy goes nuts again on Operation Metro Defense a day later.

 

That weapon balance info looks a bit counter-intuitive. I'm not sure why they want to nerf attachments at all. Problem chasing a solution.

 

Here's a more updated (and official) list of changes for the March Patch.

Changes seem interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing how they affect the game and how it's played ^_^

That said... On a BF3 community note that isn't as important...

I'm personally not all that crazy about Battlefieldo's Call to Arms.

It's not so much the frustration with DICE that they have that bugs me, I think that's valid. I just feel like they got pretentious and took themselves too seriously by posting that on their main page out of the blue when I don't recall seeing earlier posts making the case for the frustration with EA's PR and Community Management for Battlefield 3.

It probably was something boiling up in the forums, and the lack of information certainly bugged a lot of fans (especially after we got excited thinking huge DLC news was going to spread 2 weeks ago).

But I feel like out of the blue they flat out assumed all Battlefield Fans shared this sentiment, was aware of the issue, and so a call to arms just came out of seemingly nowhere for people who probably don't read the forums so closely or are as active in the community as their staff.

That said, totally their right to do it, I don't think the "blackout" would have been a very big effect. But I guess in the end they got EA to authorize DICE to release a general list of patch notes so I guess they succeeded.

Anyways... To sum up my feelings, I think it's cool for communities to be passionate and voice their praise and frustrations about their passion--we do that here on VFDC. But this sudden call to arms out of the blue bugged me because I felt like I was drafted into a war I had no idea was going on and they just assumed that I was on their side because they must be right.

Weird that I think community managers need more PR.

Update: Declaration of Victory on Reddit

 

Haven't had time yet to really think much of the patch changes but here are some quick impressions:

* Changes to C4 is fine by me, but I will miss detonating a C4 if it's still on a tank after I respawn. That said, I was usually a suicide bomber anyways because I felt the sooner that tank was down, the better... this change (planted C4 will disappear 5 seconds after the owner dies)will force a bit more commitment or confidence in the support player when attacking tanks and force the player to play solidly or carefully after setting up a C4 trap. The tough part with C4 (or more skill required part) is the cap at 2 deployed C4 at a time. This means you better plant that thing near the back of the tank and this should reduce the area of C4 Traps greatly.

* AEK change sounds good to me. It is so weird how the description of this gun talks about how hard it is to control, but I swear it's super easy to use on short and medium bursts. Heck, it still feels easy on fully automatic fire. Time to kill should still be very fast but the gun might need a bit more controlling and quick adjustments when aiming and firing. I like this change.

* I haven't had time to dwell but my quick impressions are positive on changes to explosives and armored vehicles overall. I have no idea how these will affect the PC version, I remember people thinking the Stinger/IGLA used to be overpowered, we will see if they draw that same conclusion after this. But it's better than being near useless on console

* Very interested in seeing how the changes to flares will affect the game. I hope it's the right solution to air vehicles... skill to take down AND skill to not get killed by explosives. At least that's what I hope this translates into.

* I hope I can still do Super Worm ^_^

 

The patch notes today are a huge step in the right direction in almost every case. They aren't even comprehensive so it has room to improve further.

The indistinct/nerfed-feeling nature of a lot of weapons was what made them imbalanced -- it reminded me of what happened with SF4 for some reason.

I still think the glint should go, but that might be more out of pity for recons who aren't good at the game.

Being able to crouch directly from sprint will change the game completely on PC.

DICE has full creative control over the Battlefield series. I'm not sure what the Battlefieldo guy is trying to say.

 

Battlefield 3 has still been treating me very well ^_^

However, a big announcement is coming tomorrow (Wednesday March 7th) at GDC, so I am very excited for that!

The rumors lately is that the new Expansion pack will be called, "Close Quarters" (doesn't sound like something traditional BF fans want to hear but we will see). Another rumor is that some cool vehicles like the Blackhawk will be coming.

Announcement Confirmed

Rumors about the Expansion