Has Battlefield Died?

[omega 616]

Problem is you're looking for hardcore. A lot of BF players don't play Hardcore, they play vanilla.

Battlefield 3 is mainly played for the default maps, like Norshahr Canals and Damavand Peak. It's got a moderately dedicated community, especially since they have had it for discounted or free a few times in the past.

Battlefield 4 has a fairly large community playerbase, especially since DICE LA just announced they're releasing a ton of free content (including maps and weapons) in apology for DICE Stockholm's frankly terrible handling of the game on launch and up until Naval Strike's release. I still think it's one of the best modern FPSs you can play, regardless of the unforgivably unreliable Frostbite engine and the game's lower tickrate. Tons of people still are all over that game, even though it has practically no future in competitive due to its unreliable engine.

Battlefield Hardline is failing hard on PC but is staying alive on next gen consoles solely because there's not many other games that next gen consoles have. I have around 400 hours in BF4 and I absolutely, absolutely despise Hardline, uninstalled it within a week of playing the release, because of how Visceral is handling the game's egregious weapon balancing and gameplay killers. The multiplayer modes are fun and unique, but Operator is horrifyingly overpowered and there is close to no reason why you would play anything else, and it really makes the game suffer, and it really sucks that Visceral has done very little over the past three months to address this. I would entirely suggest buying BF3 or BF4 multiple times and gifting them to strangers rather than picking up Hardline, it's simply a lesser game with balance that really boggles all logic.

Back phone up ... operator is over powered? By what measure?

I think the mechanic is op. It has the k10, which is to balance as a crowbar is to a knee cap! The other guns are also pretty powerful. It's the only class that stands a chance against vehicles.

I'd say the weakest is operator, it just doesn't specialise in anything.

Though the enforcer is a little map situational, it's machine guns can't compete and shotguns as always are short range ... so unless you're sandy, shotguns are mostly out.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Problem is you're looking for hardcore. A lot of BF players don't play Hardcore, they play vanilla.

Battlefield 3 is mainly played for the default maps, like Norshahr Canals and Damavand Peak. It's got a moderately dedicated community, especially since they have had it for discounted or free a few times in the past.

Battlefield 4 has a fairly large community playerbase, especially since DICE LA just announced they're releasing a ton of free content (including maps and weapons) in apology for DICE Stockholm's frankly terrible handling of the game on launch and up until Naval Strike's release. I still think it's one of the best modern FPSs you can play, regardless of the unforgivably unreliable Frostbite engine and the game's lower tickrate. Tons of people still are all over that game, even though it has practically no future in competitive due to its unreliable engine.

Battlefield Hardline is failing hard on PC but is staying alive on next gen consoles solely because there's not many other games that next gen consoles have. I have around 400 hours in BF4 and I absolutely, absolutely despise Hardline, uninstalled it within a week of playing the release, because of how Visceral is handling the game's egregious weapon balancing and gameplay killers. The multiplayer modes are fun and unique, but Operator is horrifyingly overpowered and there is close to no reason why you would play anything else, and it really makes the game suffer, and it really sucks that Visceral has done very little over the past three months to address this. I would entirely suggest buying BF3 or BF4 multiple times and gifting them to strangers rather than picking up Hardline, it's simply a lesser game with balance that really boggles all logic.

Back phone up ... operator is over powered? By what measure?

I think the mechanic is op. It has the k10, which is to balance as a crowbar is to a knee cap! The other guns are also pretty powerful. It's the only class that stands a chance against vehicles.

I'd say the weakest is operator, it just doesn't specialise in anything.

Though the enforcer is a little map situational, it's machine guns can't compete and shotguns as always are short range ... so unless you're sandy, shotguns are mostly out.

You are probably the only person in the entire Battlefield community who thinks this. The Operator/Assault class is the "noob" class, reviled by everyone yet used by everyone. The K10 is already getting nerfed, while the unopposed best guns in the game, the ARs, were left untouched. I think Visceral and DICE are too afraid of pissing off the Operator/Assault class users, as they are the majority of the player base.

And literally anyone can take out the vehicles in the game. As cool as the ability to damage vehicles is, it's also incredibly stupid in some cases. Not to mention the RPGs are everywhere in the game.

 

[laggyteabag]

Might want to widen your search parameters. I play EU Domination/TDM (because Battlefield Call of Dutys better than Call of Duty), and there are 11 servers on BF4 right now at almost full/full population. If I switch over to 64 player Conquest, there are around 30 servers that are almost full/full.

I feel like Hardcore might just be your problem, here. Try turning it off, and there should be quite a lot, especially in NA.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

Problem is you're looking for hardcore. A lot of BF players don't play Hardcore, they play vanilla.

Battlefield 3 is mainly played for the default maps, like Norshahr Canals and Damavand Peak. It's got a moderately dedicated community, especially since they have had it for discounted or free a few times in the past.

Battlefield 4 has a fairly large community playerbase, especially since DICE LA just announced they're releasing a ton of free content (including maps and weapons) in apology for DICE Stockholm's frankly terrible handling of the game on launch and up until Naval Strike's release. I still think it's one of the best modern FPSs you can play, regardless of the unforgivably unreliable Frostbite engine and the game's lower tickrate. Tons of people still are all over that game, even though it has practically no future in competitive due to its unreliable engine.

Battlefield Hardline is failing hard on PC but is staying alive on next gen consoles solely because there's not many other games that next gen consoles have. I have around 400 hours in BF4 and I absolutely, absolutely despise Hardline, uninstalled it within a week of playing the release, because of how Visceral is handling the game's egregious weapon balancing and gameplay killers. The multiplayer modes are fun and unique, but Operator is horrifyingly overpowered and there is close to no reason why you would play anything else, and it really makes the game suffer, and it really sucks that Visceral has done very little over the past three months to address this. I would entirely suggest buying BF3 or BF4 multiple times and gifting them to strangers rather than picking up Hardline, it's simply a lesser game with balance that really boggles all logic.

Back phone up ... operator is over powered? By what measure?

I think the mechanic is op. It has the k10, which is to balance as a crowbar is to a knee cap! The other guns are also pretty powerful. It's the only class that stands a chance against vehicles.

I'd say the weakest is operator, it just doesn't specialise in anything.

Though the enforcer is a little map situational, it's machine guns can't compete and shotguns as always are short range ... so unless you're sandy, shotguns are mostly out.

Because Operator has the M416, AKM, and M16A3, on top of the normal Assault power of super high mobility due to first aid kits and revives. Three super powerful weapons across both factions. The K10 is the most powerful weapon at close range (see my comment of "egregious weapon balancing"), but that's only for one faction and at a range of about 10 meters.

And even so, if you say Mechanic has the strongest guns and Operator is a close second, you still have both Enforcer and Professional with absolutely no reason to be played. Enforcer has battle rifles and ammo, yes, but Operator's assault rifles are easier to use and most people die before ammo becomes a problem. Professional has those bitching machine pistols, but all sniper rifles were overshadowed by the bodyshot master that is the Scout Elite, and Professional has none of its sweet gadgets from BF4 like T-UGS and Motion Sensors (don't even mention those cameras, they are beyond useless compared to the T-UGS and Motion Sensors).

And, even if you say all four classes have some legitimate reason to play them, you still can't explain the game's ass-odd balancing. Why is it that a few months before Hardline released, BF4 released an update that raised the time-to-kill for most weapons, yet Hardline with its K10 had the record lowest time-to-kill in the series: the K10, able to kill with three close-range bodyshots in one twentieth of a second. Why is it that the L85A2 exists at all, when the M16A3 has superior stats in literally every other regard? Better range, faster reload, more damage, faster fire rate, easier handling, tighter spread, and faster bullet velocity. Why do DMRs still have such a bad damage model, even though they're no longer all class and restricted to the already weak Professional?

It just infuriates me that one of the biggest nails in the coffin for Hardline that you'll find is its nonsensical balancing, and what have they done since February about it? I know they nerfed the max damage of the K10 and AKM, but anything short of a massive weapon rebalance will get me to return to Hardline.

I just recount one game of Blood Money where of my fifteen deaths, literally fourteen were to the M416.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

IIRC, COD4 Hardcore on the PS3 did remove killstreaks except for the UAV (I tried looking it up but couldn't find a solid answer).

Yeah, this wasn't the case on PC. If you didn't want killstreaks, you needed to search for them, but I think most servers used all of them, or at least up through the Airstrike. Then again, on PC, the higher player count sort of changed the nature of killstreaks. Rather than being a thing that added on to how good good players did (though it did do that but less exclusively), it was simply something anyone, regardless of skill level, could potentially get. The result was that UAVs were almost always up, and once the first few players managed to get an Airstrike, air support could be a constant for the rest of the match. Yeah, it wasn't particularly great from a competitive standpoint, but the sheer chaos of it was a lot of fun.

And yes, there were servers designed more for competitive play. I played those less and less though as time moved on, so I don't know what they ended up like.

I mainly hate killstreaks because rewarding people for not dying is a horrible mechanic that only causes more camping and more players to play wrong (not play the objective). Lots of shooters have stupid restricted spawn zones nowadays so people can run sniper and not leave the safety of their own spawn as you can't get to them. Players camping their own spawn only causes games to be even more lopsided than they would normally be (I even TK players that camp in my team's spawn). I don't have a problem with rewards based on hitting certain point levels or CounterStrike's money system.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I mainly hate killstreaks because rewarding people for not dying is a horrible mechanic that only causes more camping and more players to play wrong (not play the objective). Lots of shooters have stupid restricted spawn zones nowadays so people can run sniper and not leave the safety of their own spawn as you can't get to them. Players camping their own spawn only causes games to be even more lopsided than they would normally be (I even TK players that camp in my team's spawn). I don't have a problem with rewards based on hitting certain point levels or CounterStrike's money system.

This really wasn't an issue during the CoD4/WaW days on the PC. There were just too many people to make camping worthwhile. Even if you killed one person, chances are there were other guys right behind him who now knew where an easy kill was, so taking the camper out before they hit the higher killstreaks wasn't a challenge. Yeah, holding down chokepoints was still very common, but I consider that more just smart play. The only real difference was that holding down those chokepoints was much harder considering there were more people to defend it against.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

This really wasn't an issue during the CoD4/WaW days on the PC. There were just too many people to make camping worthwhile. Even if you killed one person, chances are there were other guys right behind him who now knew where an easy kill was, so taking the camper out before they hit the higher killstreaks wasn't a challenge. Yeah, holding down chokepoints was still very common, but I consider that more just smart play. The only real difference was that holding down those chokepoints was much harder considering there were more people to defend it against.

The killstreak mechanic mainly infected other games like say snipers getting a switchblade as their first scorestreak in Warfighter thus many snipers sat in their spawn to crash a plane for easy kills. My main issue with COD4 was the killstreaks just made the game extremely repetitive; get 3 kills for a UAV, then an easy 2 more for an airstrike, then the airstrike should net you the chopper. It was just all too easy and simplistic. You really didn't even need to get 1 legitimate kill and still score awesomely. I'm sure the higher player count quelled that a bit but it was probably just more chaotic and random as well. Maps can only support so many players before it gets to be too much.

I got nothing against legitimate camping, every shooter is about camping. The whole point of a shooter is to get yourself in a superior position over your enemy and then exploit it as much as you can. As long as you are playing to win and get/defend objectives, that's the only thing that matters. The bad camping is when players just camp for kills while hurting their own team because they aren't playing the objective thus their team is playing down a man (or more), which is the main cause of the ever so present curb-stompings that are the majority of matches in shooters.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I'm sure the higher player count quelled that a bit but it was probably just more chaotic and random as well. Maps can only support so many players before it gets to be too much.

More chaotic? Yes. More random? It was actually probably a little more manageable. Yeah, you had a greater chance of someone randomly throwing a grenade (including a grenade launcher) in your general direction (wall spamming was often illegal on servers I played), but it often meant that the "battle lines" were more definitive. Overall, though, it was still about fighting over the most coveted areas of the map. The only real difference was that 24, 32 (my personal favorite), and 50 player matches just had much larger fights over those areas than servers with 12 or 18 players.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

More chaotic? Yes. More random? It was actually probably a little more manageable. Yeah, you had a greater chance of someone randomly throwing a grenade (including a grenade launcher) in your general direction (wall spamming was often illegal on servers I played), but it often meant that the "battle lines" were more definitive. Overall, though, it was still about fighting over the most coveted areas of the map. The only real difference was that 24, 32 (my personal favorite), and 50 player matches just had much larger fights over those areas than servers with 12 or 18 players.

That 3x grenade perk was ridiculous. I remember playing a S&D match where this one guy used his grenade launcher at the very start, shot it across the map, and killed this 10th prestige guy 3 times straight. What's wall spamming? I couldn't imagine playing COD4 with 32 players on those maps that would be way too cluttered for me. I can twitch shoot pretty damn well but I wouldn't want a game being nothing but that (some of those maps are pretty small). 6v6 to 8v8 is my sweet spot as you still feel like you can almost single-handedly win a match at times and it is kinda hard to get 12 people all together at the same time for a clan/squad match already let alone 32+.

 

[MysticSlayer]

What's wall spamming?

Wall spamming was a (very annoying) tactic where someone would take an LMG (or use a mounted gun) and just randomly shoot at walls until they were forced to stop. Because of how many people there would be, it was easy to rack up a lot of kills, particularly on maps like Vacant, where an entire team could be a small, enclosed area with easy-to-shoot-through walls. Downpour also had a problem because of how good the wall penetration was on the mounted guns on either side of the map.

Personally, I didn't mind most of the cheap tactics in the CoD games, and I thought shooting through walls was a decent idea. But wall spamming was the one thing (in CoD4 particularly) that drove me insane. I'm not sure about Warfighter, but I know that Medal of Honor (2010) allowed it to an extent, but I don't think the community ever tried embracing it. I think even Battlefield 3 had something similar, but I can't remember.

I couldn't imagine playing COD4 with 32 players on those maps that would be way too cluttered for me. I can twitch shoot pretty damn well but I wouldn't want a game being nothing but that (some of those maps are pretty small). 6v6 to 8v8 is my sweet spot as you still feel like you can almost single-handedly win a match at times and it is kinda hard to get 12 people all together at the same time for a clan/squad match already let alone 32+.

Now, I'm probably speaking entirely from my experience from near the end of the game's lifespan, but I never found it to be more twitchy than other shooters. Sure, it had its moments, particularly since I often enjoyed running right into the other team's "territory". However, outside of attempts to be the lone hero, I found that smart positioning and movement could get rid of situations where excessive twitch shooting was required.